Epilogue, overheard at LSC: annoyances

Filed under:So-so Social — posted by squires on 7/31/2007 @ 5:23 pm

“I’m trying to remember my Hittite here, but if I’m not mistaken…” (goes on to make some professor-correcting claim about Sumerian or something; I can’t remember) -Annoying guy, in class

“Wow, now I know why spouse abusers like pot pie so much!” -Different annoying guy, at dining hall [ed. note: WTF?]

“Well, the problem is just that we have a different style of linguistics joke.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We do, we have different styles of linguistics joke. That’s why you never get mine.”
-Annoying people at pre-session class

“You guys are so studious. You’re, like, in here studying.” -Annoying neighbor creeping around our dorm room doorway

“Just a friendly reminder that Stanford prohibits smoking within 20 ft (a little over 6m) of buildings. That includes the dorms. Thanks!” -Annoying message posted on the Institute discussion board, by someone who obviously has no compassion for smokers who might have been going crazy living on Stanford’s campus, living on which basically entails you not smoking anywhere except in the middle of the not-Lake

[Sorry, but sometimes in a sea full of smart, excited people, some of them are bound to say some annoying things. There weren't very many, really, all things considered.]

More overheard at LSC (final installment)

Filed under:Sheer Cleverness — posted by squires on 7/30/2007 @ 12:56 pm

“Slavs don’t like vowels…am I right? Is that not politically correct?” -Ida

“Language is like the masked lady at the ball…everyone loves her, but no one really knows what she looks like.” -also Ida

(talking about Howard Giles):
Ed Finegan: Is it [gaylz] or [dÊ’aylz]? I never know which way it’s pronounced.
Suzanne Romaine: It’s [dÊ’aylz].
Ed: Ok.

Greg Guy: (raises hand)
Ed: Yes, Greg, you wanted to say something..by the way is it [gay] or [dÊ’ay]?
(laughter)
Greg: It’s only [dÊ’ay] when you’re in [dÊ’ayanÉ™] (allusion to John Rickford’s research in Guyana).
(more laughter)

“The whole Institute is indexing.” -Norma (pointing out the sociolxers’ emphasis on indexicality, I think, though I can’t quite remember now…that would make sense, because I have never talked so much about indexicality in my life!)

Sunday is for language people on language

Filed under:Media — posted by squires on @ 11:45 am

As others have noted, yesterday was something of a victorious one for linguists reading the New York Times. First, you have Erin McKean (who I kind of worship, as longtime readers will know) writing this week’s On Language, about using corpus methods to get better dictionary entries - or, less specifically, to get a better idea of how words are used.

Then you have an Ideas feature on Mary Bucholtz’s (who I also kind of worship, as classmates will know) work on nerds, superstandard English, and racial markedness. Even though the piece consists largely of integrated quotes from Bucholtz’s work, it’s awesome to see her getting some buzz. [Also? I may in time find time and energy to criticize all the blogs who are talking shit about Bucholtz's work without even knowing about it beyond what the NYT says, because it's inevitably been taken up and presented as claiming that nerds are white supremacists, that all academic work is hooey, and that Bucholtz is stupid or ignorant. This is heavily reminiscent of the danah boyd race/class facebook/myspace essay fallout a few weeks ago, and it's making me really depressed. Suffice it to say that Bucholtz's work is the result of ethnography and is fairly specific to the school(s) in which she has done ethnography, but the article makes it sound like she's claiming some global definition of "nerd." I guess I'm just realizing how impossible it is to present arguments like this to mass audiences, given the lack of context and the slim probability that readers will read the whole story.]

If only this story had included quotes from any of the several linguists the reporter interviewed for it [guess how I know this ;-) ], we might have to coin yesterday a national holiday, or make a commemorative edition of yesterday’s paper to sell to linguistics-lovers world-round.

(LSC is over. I’ll need about four days of sleeping to recover.)

LSC sights

Filed under:Outliers — posted by squires on 7/27/2007 @ 5:29 pm

Our Roble Hall Hello Kitty wikiboard has gotten an edit:
assyoutoo
(thx kevin)

Overseen at CSLI:
icanhassyntax
You sure can, Stanford. You sure can has minimalism.

Look at how cool linguists are:
word
I know, I know. You’re thinking: “That can’t possibly be linguistics camp. They look like they’re on their way back to their respective homes after a long night of playing guitar and drinking beer and singing around a beachside bonfire. Shouldn’t they look more hungover? But no - they’re all ready to take on the world again, just like that, and look fabulous in the California sun while doing it. They’re so cool. Brendan, Nate, Brian, and Emma are so f’ing cool.” Well, I am here to tell you that it’s true. They’re linguists, they’re cool, and they’re standing in the sun on Stanford’s campus. Get used to it. (Actually, get over it, ’cause it’s all over in 3 hours!)

Bathroom variation and uniformity

Filed under:Sheer Cleverness — posted by squires on @ 2:11 pm

Terry has created Men’s Space and Women’s Space in Stanford Toilets. I started noticing that all of the toilets here are designated with the exact same signs, and it was weirding me out, but apparently maybe it’s only like 80% of them.

Probabilistic sociosyntaxiplasm

Filed under:Words & Phrases — posted by squires on 7/26/2007 @ 1:38 pm

As designated Page Six for the Institute, I guess it’s my duty to report on some “state of the field” discussions that I’ve been privy to this week. Since it seems like this is one of the inevitable and special things that happens at these kinds of events. I’ll start with a wrapup of Joan Bresnan’s provocative (or not, depending on who you are - but she meant it to be provocative) lecture on Tuesday night, “Empirical Foundations of Syntax.”

Bresnan began the talk with about a 10-minute homage to Bill Labov, from whose 1975 article “Empirical Foundations of Linguistics” she fashioned her own title. In that piece, Labov critiques the common practice of introspection among syntacticians (”I wonder if this is grammatical…well, it sounds kind of bad…let’s just give it a star, shall we?”). In particular she takes up the criticism of Chomsky’s (from 1957’s Syntactic Structures) suggestion to “let the grammar decide” when in doubt about grammaticality: “Whose grammar?” she asked. Dealing with introspection led to a bunch of mismatches between what syntacticians had been calling grammatical and what was actually found in naturalistic data (she used examples of resumptive pronouns and relative clause extraposition and something else…). That is, people actually do produce stuff that syntax claims is “ungrammatical.”

As retold by Bresnan, Labov’s admonition to the field, to mitigate the disastrous contrast between what actually happens and what gets described, was to take on an empirical approach to data and analysis. And then she put up this slide that said:

Most sociolinguists listened to Labov. Most syntacticians did not.

–Dramatic pause while you digest that dramatic claim–

For the rest of the talk Bresnan presented lots of data from her own and others’ research, employing mainly corpus-based and experimental methods for doing syntactic research. What they’re looking at is now-totally-hot probabilistic grammar. Her results show that you can make a model of usage based on corpora, and the model can predict with good accuracy what constructional variant will occur given a set of grammatical features (for items where there’s more than option, such as dative alternation between double-NP and PP). AND that people tend to judge things as acceptable or not in line with those same probabilistic patterns as the model does. Which is to say, people seem to be judging grammaticality not just on some internalized knowledge of grammatical structure, but also on patterns of actual use.

Then she raised the question of whether speakers have implicit knowledge of statistical patterns, presenting it as something that was a “really CRAZY” suggestion. Such knowledge would give speakers the ability to predict what others are going to say, explains apparent inconsistencies in their grammaticality judgments, and varies across dialects and varieties, just as grammar does. [I can't tell from my notes whether that sentence is paraphrased or verbatim from Bresnan, so apologies if I took it verbatim without quote marks.] This doesn’t mean there’s no grammar, as she was sure to point out in the Q&A section. It just means that there’s more than one mechanism working to construct people’s linguistic knowledge - and (at least) one of those mechanisms is usage-based, i.e. frequency-based.

OK. There are a lot of interesting things about the talk, either about its content or its manner or presentation or its implications. First of all, a syntactician spent most of her talk lauding Labov, a sociolinguist, for his approach to linguistics. This is, actually, kind of crazy: the two subfields haven’t historically been on awesome terms, and sociolinguists often feel like their emphasis on empiricism, actual usage, and speaker-influenced (contra linguist-influenced) models, gets very wrongfully overlooked by the mainstream/theoretical parts of the field. So on the one hand, it’s nice to see sociolinguistics (finally) getting a claim to best practice.

On the other hand, I was sitting next to another sociolinguist at the time, and we basically just passed a “Well, duh” look at each other back and forth during the talk. Fundamentally, what Bresnan was saying is that variation exists, that it’s somewhat predictable (variable rules, anyone?), and that we should seek to account for it in our theories/models of language. YES. Yes, this is true. Anyone who’s ever dealt with dialects (”nonstandard” or whatever) deals with the fact that people produce stuff that isn’t supposed to be possible, or that isn’t supposed to be normal, for a particular language’s (= individual’s) grammar; especially if you’re trying to look at variation within Chomsky-centric generative theories (I’m thinking immediately of Alison Henry here). And that their realizations are often conditioned phonologically, socially, or grammatically. So it’s frustrating, really - like, really really frustrating - that while Bresnan, one of the most prolific and respected and brilliant syntacticians, is recognizing sociolinguistics for its contributions to theory, she doesn’t cite a single actual sociolinguistic finding or analysis in the process. AND that it’s taken this long for the recognition to happen at all.

Meanwhile, on my right foot is the question of Labov and sociolinguistics. After his lecture (Divergence) a few weeks ago, several sociolinguists were kind of shocked at a comment he made towards the end of his talk: it had something to do with there being no social meaning to the difference between North and Midland spread (or not) of the Northern Cities Shift vowels. He said that NCS was a purely structural change, not affected by social patterns. Or that’s what I got out of it - I’m still not sure I understand his claim entirely. This is not a very sociolinguisticky thing to say, at least not in this day and age. In fact, there’s kind of a whole post-Labov school (I’m thinking primarily of people like Eckert, Mendoza-Denton, Bucholtz, Alim, Moore, etc. — if anyone grossly objects to this term, speak up — perhaps you might like “third wave variation” better?) that is more interested in emergent social meaning of linguistic practice than the numerical distribution of linguistic variables. This maintains a focus on interaction and statistical patterns but situates the locus of social differentiation in practice; not the locus of variation in social categories. [I don't know if that made any sense. I'm still but a wee linguist, and if anyone with more credentials is reading this, please add some sense...my brain is mushy mushy mdajfldjaofdaoiaoieewoy....]

The buzz goes like this: Bresnan is citing Labov, which at first it’s like, “Whoohoo! Sociolinguists represent!” Except then you think about it and you’re all, “But wait, are Labov’s goals/methods nowadays still representative of ’sociolinguistics’? Didn’t he just say that social stuff sort of doesn’t matter?” [update: I didn't mean this to sound like I was conflating a bunch of different sociolinguistics into one big sociolinguistics. There are a bunch of different sociolinguisticses. I don't want to be misinterpreted, and I think that all of the discussion here at Stanford about Labov in various classes and with various people has really got me flummoxed and kind of confused and torn.] And then it’s like, “Wait, maybe they just like us for our use of numbers.” And meanwhile other people are like, “Numbers aren’t the whole picture! We need to stop focusing on numbers so much!” And then you go, “Did she really just call discourse markers disfluencies? My, we still have a long way to go.”

Anyway. It was interesting. [on the title]

What’s the Midwest?

Filed under:So-so Social — posted by squires on 7/24/2007 @ 7:14 pm

Go take Wishydig’s poll. I have been wanting to see something like this for some time and am anxious for results - go flood it!

And then there were five

Filed under:Words & Phrases — posted by squires on 7/22/2007 @ 10:55 pm

days left at LSC. Wow! Despite exhausting every bone in my body and every inch of my brain, the institute has gone by rather quickly. This week is crunch time - must get three final assignments and one third-of-three assignment done before Thursday. Hooray! I somehow missed the big party last night because I thought it better to head to San Francisco and hang out with some friends, which I think was ultimately the right choice, although I did miss a lot of drunk linguists and I am now very tired. Though honestly probably not as tired as I’d be were I to have been at the party with all the drunk linguists…

Anyhow, have you seen Safeway’s new summer ad campaign, It’s Heeere? I kind of heart this offline (= not.internet) usage of the extra vowel graphemes to signal a very specific intonation, which despite only being signaled by the information that the vowel is supposed to be longer, not pitched higher or lower, still comes through perfectly from the text.

What else has happened. Let’s see, I got into a little argument about the Register Axiom the other day, and Bill Labov and Gillian Sankoff visited one of my classes, and I had a riveting discussion about how linguists conceptualize “register” and how it’s influenced by whether their language has grammatically codified “registers” or not (e.g. Italian does, English doesn’t), and I started re-examining some old data in search of something completely different from what I was looking at before, and I’m figuring out how haha functions as a discourse marker, and I had a delightful lunch with Noncompositional and The Tensor. Oh AND I got a hilarious text from Zach which read:

Palindrome: “Scorch crocs” - burn them hippie clogs!

So true. Oh AND someone drew this on the whiteboard outside of our room:

(backstory)

Oh yeah? Well ASS U!

Filed under:Sheer Cleverness — posted by squires on 7/19/2007 @ 12:53 am

You kill me, Stanford. You really do. (and so do all of you other ASSUs! wtf! did these people never hear the joke about assuming?)

No comma

Filed under:Media — posted by squires on 7/17/2007 @ 1:10 pm

(via Mike Pope) Oh, this is pretty much a lot worse than Jaimie Epstein’s rant about potential suitors’ lack of electronic etiquette (and spelling skills).

I have always liked commas, but I seem to be in a shrinking minority. The comma is in retreat, though it is not yet extinct. In text messages and e-mails, commas appear infrequently, and then often by accident (someone hits the wrong key). Even on the printed page, commas are dwindling. Many standard uses from my childhood (after, for example, an introductory prepositional phrase) have become optional or, worse, have been ditched.

Seriously, Robert Samuelson has nothing better to write about?? Aren’t there, like, things happening in the world? Isn’t Bush fucking something up, like, as we speak? Isn’t genocide still happening in Darfur, and/or other places?

I am not usually shocked when I see pieces like this in the news, but this time - well, I’m shocked that the editors actually found it worthy of printing. In Newsweek. Also? It’s gotten a rating of 4.5 (out of 5! 4.5 out of 5!!!) by over 250 readers, as of right now. WTF.


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