The Ling Space
Phonological Illusions
updated
This is Topic #95!
This week's tag language: Kyrgyz!
Related videos:
How Logical is Language? youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3Q
How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory: youtu.be/CWE9ycOxCEQ
Can we define "must"? Modality: youtu.be/vtYdrzdU2dY
Last episode:
How do we understand missing words? The syntax of Ellipsis: youtu.be/WXhn1tdZ_os
Other of our semantics videos:
Thinking vs. Knowing: Presuppositions and Anti-presuppositions: youtu.be/-iQ7XrehKdw
How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? Information Structure: youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
How Can One Greek Letter Help Us Understand Things? Lambda Calculus: youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwg
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on other kinds of conditional sentences, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-95
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
The theory of conditionals here dates back to Kratzer's 1986 paper "Conditionals," which is where that quote at the end comes from: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/ThkMjYxN/Conditionals.pdf
The idea of if-clauses as restrictors actually goes back to David Lewis' 1975 paper "Adverbs of Quantification," which you can find here: http://www.andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Adverbs_of_Quantification.pdf.
The presentation was based mostly on some of the usual semantic suspects:
http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf,
Seth Cable's course notes: http://people.umass.edu/scable/LING620-SP18/Handouts/12.Conditionals.pdf
http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf.
Crucial inspiration also from here http://books.google.ca/books?id=1NwWDgAAQBAJ&dq=frana+modality+in+the+nominal+domain&source=gbs_navlinks_s , in a chapter by Ilaria Frana titled "Modality in the Nominal Domain: The Case of Adnominal Conditionals."
There's also a series of videos on YouTube that explores the topic from a more philosophical point-of-view, and arrives at a different conclusion, but might still be of interest, starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zxp2-_pLCE
#linguistics #semantics #TheLingSpace
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #94!
This week's tag language: Scots Gaelic!
Related videos:
How Can Sentences Look Like Adjectives? Relative Clauses: youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbY
What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses: youtu.be/980meOhBGR8
How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory: youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-w
Last episode:
Who Is She? The Syntax of Pronouns: youtu.be/fvohHpylRkY
Other of our morphosyntax videos:
What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? The DP Hypothesis: youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9E
What Kinds of Pieces Do We Use to Build Words? Derivation and Inflection: youtu.be/BTZCozhneKA
What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising vs. Control: youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on why objects tend to stay put in English, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-94
Find us on all the social media worlds:
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Much of the discussion here is based on Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 3rd edition, as well as his dissertation, which can be found at: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/Thesishome.html
We also used Jason Merchant's survey of different approaches to ellipsis: http://home.uchicago.edu/merchant/pubs/ellipsis.revised.pdf
We also consulted Brendan Gillon's upcoming book, Natural Language Semantics: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/natural-language-semantics
And the Wikipedia page on ellipsis is a pretty helpful place to start! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics)
Looking forward to next time!
This is a shorter format video that we'd been toying with making for a while! Do you like this length? We'll be making more of our regular length videos coming up soon!
Last episode:
Who Is She? The Syntax and Semantics of Pronouns: youtu.be/fvohHpylRkY
Other of our psycholinguistics videos:
Why Are There So Many Meanings? Ambiguities: youtu.be/E5Pp_wE14HU
Do Sounds Carry Their Own Meaning? Arbitrariness of the Sign: youtu.be/CcSCq8XDTaY
What Can Our Eyes Tell Us about Language? Eye-Tracking: youtu.be/uXx73W0uyCg
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at: http://www.thelingspace.com/bonus-episode-1
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
The material for this video came most from:
http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/wellwood/downloadables/wphp2017revised.pdf
and
http://ling.umd.edu/~wellwood/downloadables/whpp2009cuny.pdf
But also from:
Articles:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000860.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000862.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000866.html#more
http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.ca/2013/02/acceptability-and-grammaticality.html
http://thelousylinguist.blogspot.ca/2010/01/more-russion-illusions-than-i.html
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3928
Papers:
http://ling.umd.edu/~wellwood/downloadables/wphp2012ms.pdf
http://semanticsarchive.net/sub2012/OConnorPanchevaKaiser.pdf
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/98919/pnkell.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
http://www.colinphillips.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/phillips2013_bevervolume.pdf
http://ling.umd.edu/~colin/research/papers/phillipswagerslau2011.pdf
http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~jkbock/bockpubs/Bock%20Miller%201991.pdf
Ferreira & Patson (2007)
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/montalbetti84.pdf
Abstracts:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc40/abstracts/DillonPLC40Keynote.pdf
Notes:
http://people.umass.edu/scable/LING753-SP12/Handouts/21.Event-Related-Readings.pdf
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #93!
This week's tag language: Macedonian!
Related videos:
Referential Treatment: The Syntax of Binding - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
Up, Up and Away: The Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18
Relatively Close: The Syntax of Relative Clauses - youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbY
Last episode:
The Main Event: Event Semantics - youtu.be/lsD0j708xNw
Other of our semantics videos:
Downward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdw
Topic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776c
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on different kinds of events, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-93
Find us on all the social media worlds:
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You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information for this episode was taken from Heim and Kratzer's 1998 book, Semantics in Generative Grammar, and from Yasutaka Sudo's dissertation, available here: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/77805
Here's something else that is available online and is pretty accessible, Elizabeth Coppock's Semantics Boot Camp: http://eecoppock.info/semantics-boot-camp.pdf
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #92!
This week's tag language: Tswana!
Related videos:
Meaning Predicated on Logic: Predicate Logic - youtu.be/al5SJSbIyvM
Split Personality: The Syntax of VP Shells - youtu.be/lY1X2BnjmNI
Relatively Close: The Syntax of Relative Clauses - youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbY
Last episode:
Bending the Truth: The Linguistics of Propaganda and Censorship - youtu.be/X82SFZ_eXOU
Other of our semantics videos:
Downward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdw
Topic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776c
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on different kinds of events, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-92
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
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You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Davidson's original paper on event semantics: http://verbs.colorado.edu/~mpalmer/Ling7800/Davidson.pdf
A useful handout that gets into the entailment patterns: http://people.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_2005/RGGU05Lec12.pdf
A handy and short summary of the topic: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jFhNWM2M/eventbasedsemantics.pdf
Looking forward to next time!
In our interview, we discussed the following topics:
- his recent research on whether it's anatomy or neurology holding back monkeys from speech
- his thoughts on Darwin's hypotheses about how language may have evolved
- how to come up with good hypotheses about how language evolved, given that it doesn't leave fossils
- what he believes is different about humans that led to the development of language
... and more! Thanks again to Dr. Fitch for speaking with us.
His book, The Evolution of Language, can be found here: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780521677363
You can find links and PDFs to a lot of his work in the piece here on his website:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/publications/
Fitch's article on monkey vocal tracts:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1600723
The Mark Liberman post on this topic:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29735
Fitch on Darwin's musical proto-language hypothesis:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/2010/08/05/musical-protolanguage-darwins-theory-of-language-evolution-revisited/
Our previous interviews:
Sali Tagliamonte: youtu.be/tapgQNcKuFo
Anne Charity Hudley: youtu.be/xKjrnrsiKv4
Lisa Pearl: youtu.be/EOfGgqPeeC4
Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lU
Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFU
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
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You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #91!
This week's tag language: Mongolian!
Last episode:
A Whole New World: The Semantics of Modality - youtu.be/vtYdrzdU2dY
Other of our sociolinguistics videos:
Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: Languages vs. Dialects - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02E
When Tongues Collide: Pidgins and Creoles - youtu.be/Fjd5rj9Ata8
Watch What You Say: Taboo and Euphemisms - youtu.be/Y4HW0tOCoQM
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on the language of plausible deniability, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-91
Find us on all the social media worlds:
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You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #90!
This week's tag language: Cornish!
Related videos:
Logical Connections: How Logical Is Language? youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3Q
Let's Talk About Sets: How Do We Build Meaning with Math? youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePw
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: What Does "Most" Even Mean? youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqM
Last episode:
Relatively Close: How Can Sentences Work Like Adjectives? youtu.be/Bra5gExyPbY
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Topic of Focus: How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Downward Spiral: Why Can't "Any" Go Just Anywhere? youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdw
Building Common Ground: How Do We Build Shared Worlds in Conversation? youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on the syntax of modals, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-90
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
A good portion of the presentation was based off of Kai von Fintel's Intensional Semantics notes (http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf)
We also consulted Angelika Kratzer's papers from 1977, 1981, and 1991, where all these ideas about modality originally come from:
The 1977 paper: http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s08/semantics2/kratzer77.pdf
The 1981 paper: http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s08/semantics2/kratzer81.pdf
The 1991 paper: https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/kratzer/kratzer-modality.pdf
For background -- historical and otherwise -- we consulted Basic Concepts in Modal Logic (https://mally.stanford.edu/notes.pdf) and William Starr's lecture notes: (http://williamstarr.net/teaching.html).
Finally, we drew some inspiration from Seth Cable's recent (and wonderfully lucid) Formal Semantics notes: http://people.umass.edu/scable/LING620-SP17/Handouts/
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #89!
This week's tag language: Tajik!
Related videos:
What's the Structure Behind a Sentence? X' Theory: youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
How Do We Build Meaning with Math? Set Theory and Adjectives: youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePw
What Questions Can't We Ask? Syntactic Islands: youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Last episode:
How Do Verbs Cause Things? Splitting the Verb Phrase: youtu.be/lY1X2BnjmNI
Other of our syntax videos:
How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory: youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-w
What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising and Control Verbs: youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
How Do Pronouns Even Work? Binding Theory: youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on other kinds of relative clauses, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-89
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Much of the material in this week's episode is based on Semantics in Generative Grammar, by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer.
The material's also well-covered in Elizabeth Coppock's Semantics Boot Camp (http://eecoppock.info/semantics-boot-camp.pdf), and Anders Schoubye's Formal Semantics Notes (http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf).
Looking forward to next time!
In our interview, we discussed the following topics:
- why it's so important to investigate how teens use language, and what facets of adolescent speech she finds most interesting
- what differences we can find in spoken vs. online language use
- the Toronto English Project, and the changes we see in people's language use over the course of their lives
- how language might look in the future
- how to better inform people about how language variation works
- the role of social media in telling people about linguistics, and in language change
... and more! Thanks again to Dr. Tagliamonte for speaking with us.
Her most recent book, Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents, can be found here: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781107676176
Our previous interviews:
Anne Charity Hudley: youtu.be/xKjrnrsiKv4
Lisa Pearl: youtu.be/EOfGgqPeeC4
Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lU
Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFU
A couple of videos related to this interview:
Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: Sociolinguistics, Languages, and Dialects - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02E
Word Crimes and Misdemeanors: Linguistic Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism - youtu.be/eFlBwBwL_iU
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #88!
This week's tag language: Kajin M̧ajeļ!
Related videos:
Happy Little Trees: The Syntax of X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
Referential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
Up, Up, and Away: The Verb Phrase Initial Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18
Last episode:
Worlds Between Us: The Pragmatics of Presuppositions - youtu.be/-iQ7XrehKdw
Other of our syntax videos:
Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
A Clause for Celebration: A History of Syntactic Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on how these ideas connect to the passive voice, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-88
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Much of the basic argument found in the video can be found in this set of slides: https://apps.carleton.edu/people/cussery/assets/7._Introducing_little_v.pdf
Examples were taken from Lisa Travis's 2010 book Inner Aspect (http://blogs.mcgill.ca/mcling/files/2012/01/Travis2010InnerAspect_Chpt6.pdf) and this paper by Heidi Harley:
http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/mrg.readings/harley_06_On-the-causativ.pdf
There's also good stuff in the Wikipedia article on causatives: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative#Lexical
Some of the original work proposing splitting the VP includes Angelika Kratzer's 1996 paper "Severing the external
argument from its verb" in Rooryck & Zaring, eds., "Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109-137". (https://people.ucsc.edu/~mcclosk/Teaching/severing-external-arg.pdf) and Richard Larson's 1988 paper "On the double object construction" in Linguistic Inquiry 19(3), 335-391.
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #87!
This week's tag language: Ewe!
Related videos:
How Do Conversations Work? Gricean Maxims - youtu.be/rzxyjFHh-y8
How Do We Build Meaning With Math? Set Theory and Adjectives - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePw
How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory - youtu.be/CWE9ycOxCEQ
Last episode:
How Do We Put Sentences Inside Other Sentences? Complementizer Phrases - youtu.be/q9g77Wj5wr0
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
How Do We Create a Shared World in Conversation? Common Ground - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
How Does One Greek Letter Help Us Understand Language? Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwg
How Do We Signal What's Important in Conversation? Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing why presuppositions are so resilient, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-87
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most information in this episode comes from this paper:
http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GI3YzhlM/AntipresuppositionsVersion1.pdf
For more information on scalar implicatures, we also used: https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist236/implicature/materials/ling236-handout-04-23-scalars.pdf
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #86!
This week's tag language: Tok Pisin!
Related videos:
A Clause for Celebration: A History of Syntactic Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8
Topic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Last episode:
Building Baby Trees: The Stages of Child Syntax - youtu.be/zmghbKNiI1k
Other of our syntax videos:
Just in Case: Case Theory and Where We Can Put Nouns - youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-w
Mark of Possession: Determiners, Nouns, and the DP Hypothesis - youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9E
Desert Island Words: Islands and Where You Can't Move - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing the nuts and bolts of how embedded clauses work, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-86
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information for this episode came from Andrew McIntyre's short online syntax textbook (https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/fundamental-engl-syntax-2014-online-einseitig.pdf), David Adger's Core Syntax (which also talks about German), and Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2nd Edition). There's also a good set of slides on the topic at http://www1.pu.edu.tw/~jason/UMS_i(DPs,%20CPs,%20NegPs%20&%20TPs).pdf .
For the German section, we used this handout by Sten Vikner: http://www.hum.au.dk/engelsk/engsv/handouts/vikner-ho-2016-V2-cP-CP-Cambridge.pdf
And there are more examples taken from the following:
http://switchll.net/papers/2013AFLAhandout.pdf
http://gagl.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/1999-43/03/GAGL-43-1999-03.pdf
degruyter.com/view/product/19650
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #85!
This week's tag language: Maltese!
Related videos:
The Youngest Experiments: Testing Language in Babies - youtu.be/3-A9TnuSVa8
Last episode:
Just in Case: The Syntax of Case - youtu.be/8Xi81H80J-w
Other of our language acquisition videos:
Conservative Babies: Why Kids Don't Speak Until They Know - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83E
Flipping Switches: Changing Your Grammar for a Second Language - youtu.be/2E839gb4OwQ
Kids Be Frontin': Child Phonological Mistakes - youtu.be/EDymvzP0uac
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how kids learn how to use negation, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-85
(Or it will by Friday afternoon.)
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
To be listed shortly!
Looking forward to next time!
In our interview, we discussed the following topics:
- the importance of attending to language variation in the classroom
- what teachers and students have to learn from linguists, and vice versa
- the role language and linguistics has played in racialization, and how to get away from that
- how to work to convince people of the importance of interacting with language variation and linguistic justice
- why we should do more to get younger people involved in linguistics and research
... and more! Thanks again to Dr. Charity Hudley for speaking with us.
Our other interviews:
Sali Tagliamonte: youtu.be/tapgQNcKuFo
Lisa Pearl: youtu.be/EOfGgqPeeC4
Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lU
Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFU
A couple of videos related to this interview:
Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: Sociolinguistics, Languages, and Dialects - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02E
Word Crimes and Misdemeanors: Linguistic Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism - youtu.be/eFlBwBwL_iU
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #84!
This week's tag language: Malayalam!
Related videos:
How Can We Tell How Sentences Are Built? Traces and Movement - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk
Why Do Verbs Differ In Their Construction? Theta Theory - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0
What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising and Control - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Last episode:
How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory - youtu.be/CWE9ycOxCEQ
Other of our syntax videos:
What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? The DP Hypothesis - youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9E
Where Do Subjects Start Out in Sentences? The VP Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18
What Questions Can't We Ask? Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how we deal with passive constructions, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-84
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information for this episode came from Beatrice Santorini and Anthony Kroch's 2007 online textbook The Syntax of Natural Language: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/
We also drew on Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2011) by Andrew Carnie. The Hungarian case # (about which there is some dispute) came from this paper: http://endeavour.essex.ac.uk/399/1/Comrie-Fest.pdf. The Irish data came from this paper: https://www.uni-due.de/~lan300/45_Modals_in_English_and_Irish_(Hickey).pdf. It's by Raymond Hickey, who is himself Irish.The inception of Case Theory can be attributed to Chomsky's Lectures on Government and Binding (1981).
Looking forward to next time!
This is Topic #83!
This week's tag language: Estonian!
Related videos:
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: The Meaning of Most and More - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqM
Sheepish Semantics: Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwg
Downward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdw
Last episode:
The Optimal Solution: Constraints on Sounds and Optimality Theory - youtu.be/rxsbPDjL9ds
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Topic of Focus: How to Structure Information - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Building Common Ground: Connecting in Conversation - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
Scoping Out the Truth: Semantic Scope Ambiguities - youtu.be/XC-MGuj75zQ
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how kids learn how to rank their constraints, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-83
(This link should be operating by Thursday evening.)
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
The three main sources for this episode:
Irene Heim & Angelica Kratzer's textbook, Semantics in Generative Grammar
Anders Schoubye's online lecture notes (http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf)
Kai von Fintel's Intensional Semantics online textbook/lecture notes (http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf).
Looking forward to next time!
If you don't know about the Project for Awesome, it's a yearly charity and awareness raising campaign on YouTube aimed at decreasing world suck. Find out more at www.projectforawesome.com!
The Language Conservancy does a lot of really interesting and amazing work for helping revitalize and raise awareness about Native American languages, and they're worthy of your time and support, even outside the P4A. Check out their website, which has a ton of info about their activities, at http://www.languageconservancy.org
Here's links to the stuff we mention in the video:
Rising Voices film: http://www.risingvoicesfilm.com
Lakota Berenstain Bears: http://www.lakotabears.com
Mandan-English dictionary: http://www.mandanlanguage.org/dictionary
Water Protectors activity: donate.lakhota.org/mni
Crow Summer Institute: http://crowlanguage.org/crow-summer-institute
Language learning apps and keyboard layouts: http://www.languageconservancy.org/programs/indigenous-language-program-support/language-materials
And we at the Ling Space make videos to help explain how language works, every Wednesday. Find out more at www.thelingspace.com, or watch the rest of our videos on this channel.
DFTBA!
This is Topic #82!
This week's tag language: Hidatsa!
Related videos:
Rhymes and Reasons: The Shapes of Syllables - youtu.be/YON1pOcEhrA
Last episode:
Words from Another World: The Linguistics of Alien Languages - youtu.be/QVqDpY-11UM
Other of our phonology and phonetics videos:
The Melody of Feet: Stress Patterns in Phonology - youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8
Phonation States: How We Vibrate to Make Sounds - youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFw
Nosing Around Phonetics: The Acoustics of Sonorants - youtu.be/g8BgfHEDbFY
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how kids learn how to rank their constraints, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-82
(This link should be operating by Thursday evening.)
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of this week's episode is based on information from Carlos Gussenhoven and Haike Jacobs's book, Understanding Phonology.
There's a great archive of papers (albeit scholarly) on Optimality Theory at the Rutgers Optimality Archive: http://roa.rutgers.edu/
Angus Grieve-Smith also has a good short introduction to OT here: scribd.com/document/25583046/A-Basic-Introduction-to-Optimality-Theory
The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online is a great resource for learning more about linguistic typology! Our specific source on syllable structure is http://wals.info/chapter/12 , but it's a good place to poke around and learn things.
Looking forward to next time!
- their involvement in the movie
- their thoughts on analyzing alien speech and writing
- the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and linguistic determinism
- linguistic fieldwork
- language variation and finding it in sci-fi
And much more! There are some spoilers for the movie, but nothing major.
If you want to know more about what alien languages look like, check our previous video: youtu.be/QVqDpY-11UM
If you want to learn more about our interviewees, here are their websites:
Jessica Coon: http://jessica.lingspace.org
Morgan Sonderegger: http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morgan
Lisa Travis: http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~lisa.travis
Captions coming soon! And we'll see you next time with a regular topic video.
This is Topic #81!
This week's tag language: Na'Vi!
Last episode:
Nosing Around Phonetics: The Acoustics of Sonorant Consonants - youtu.be/g8BgfHEDbFY
Our previous Halloween videos:
Braaaaaaains: The Basics of Neurolinguistics - youtu.be/Yq7ozVixqDs
Future Tense: Predictions for the Future of Language - youtu.be/5hibYoYwGko
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how complex alien languages might be, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-81
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
On semiochemicals:
http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-science-of-music-why-do-songs-in-a-minor-key-sound-sad-760215
http://www.psycho.hes.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~lab_miura/Kansei/Workshop/proceedings/O-205.pdf
On the number of languages in the world:
http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world.
On bee dances:
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/B/BeeDances.html
On vervet monkey calls:
midnightmediamusings.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/which-species-has-a-language-most-like-human-language
books.google.ca/books?id=PQFuCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=vervet+monkey+calls+productivity
On one-word grammars and context:
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/papers/simplersyntaxwritten.pdf
On posture and alien language:
youtube.com/watch?v=j9pFA2XfVEc
On metaphor and alien language:
youtube.com/watch?v=f3N0dlL2NU8
youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI
youtube.com/watch?v=ANvlLcOTy6M
Charles Hockett and language design features:
These initially come from Hockett's books, The Origin of Speech (1960) and A Note on Design Features (1968). But for online sources, try:
http://pages.uoregon.edu/redford/Courses/LING162/Handout_1.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett%27s_design_features
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Hockett
Chomsky's digital infinity quote:
http://philpapers.org/rec/CHOLAC
Mark Liberman and his speculation on the limits of alien language:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=28159
A discussion of novel quantifiers & the problems with schmevery:
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hunter/conservativity/journal.pdf
https://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~zimmermann/teaching/ALS2009/Session%20III.pdf
Looking forward to next week!
Thanks to all the people who appeared in our video:
Paolo Bacigalupi, Writer: http://windupstories.com
Rachel Kann, Poet: http://rachelkann.com
Liz Andrews, Comic artist: frequentlyfalling.com
M.T. Anderson, Writer: http://mt-anderson.com
Blue Delliquanti, Cartoonist: http://www.bluedelliquanti.com
If you liked this con report, you might also like our interviews from VidCon 2016: youtu.be/L0u3jBd3lFU
Or last year's NerdCon: youtu.be/kgPhXI-kO7M
Or maybe you are interested in other ways we use language, like for wordplay: youtu.be/AT7Xd2tC62k
Or about actually how approach processing language: youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyo
And we'll be back next week with a regular episode! A regular Halloween episode, no less. ^_^
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, thelingspace.com !
You can also check out our store: thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #80!
This week's tag language: Malagasy!
The spectrogram for [ɴ] didn't quite turn out how we would have liked, although the science behind it still fits. For more on why, check here: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/post/152130360604/high-nasals
Related episodes:
Minding Your Manners: Places and Manners of Articulation - youtu.be/zEaPQP3pXQc
Forming Formants: Acoustic Resonance and Formants - youtu.be/jl4zGRSYqkE
Last episode:
Mark of Possession: The DP Hypothesis - youtu.be/gWy7QdZJg9E
Other of our phonetics and phonology videos:
The Melody of Feet: Stress and the Rhythm of Language - youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8
Good Vibration: Phonation States and Our Vocal Folds - youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFw
Uncommon Sounds: Making Consonants Without Your Lungs - youtu.be/JKP10ARLnzM
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-80
(Or we will by Friday morning.)
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Much of the information in this episode came from Henry Rogers's book The Sounds of Language, and Kenneth Stevens's book Acoustic Phonetics.
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #79!
This week's tag language: Danish!
Related episodes:
What's the Structure Beneath a Sentence? X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8
Last episode:
What Do You Start with in a Third Language? L3 Acquisition - youtu.be/9F5Bq_uvbcM
Other of our syntax videos:
Where Do Subjects Start Off in Sentences? The VP Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18
What Questions Can't We Ask? Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? Raising vs. Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-79
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Much of the inspiration for the episode comes from Andrew McIntyre's mini syntax textbook: https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/fundamental-engl-syntax-2014-online-einseitig.pdf
The DP hypothesis itself is usually attributed to Steven Abney's 1987 MIT thesis 'The English Noun Phrase and its Sentential Aspect' (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/theses/abney87.pdf or http://www.vinartus.net/spa/87a.pdf)
The Dutch example came from this paper here: the Dutch example, there's this chapter http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic66274.files/NPtoDP.pdf.
See you all in two weeks!
This is Topic #78!
This week's tag language: Kazakh!
Related episodes:
What Do You Start with in a Second Language? L2 Acquisition - youtu.be/UB18y2ZYBiY
Last episode:
What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8
Other of our language acquisition videos:
How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Incorrectly? Grammatical Conservatism - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83E
How Much Do We Adjust Our Second Language Grammars? Parameter Resetting - youtu.be/2E839gb4OwQ
Is Correcting Your Kid's Mistakes Helpful? Negative Evidence - youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-78
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
The Chinese/English/Norwegian study:
Jin, F. (2009). Third Language Acquisition of Norwegian Objects: Interlanguage Transfer or L1 Influence? In Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, Y.-K. I. Leung (ed), 144-161. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
The Romance/English aspect study:
Foote, R. 2009. Transfer in L3 acquisition: The role of typology. In Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, Y.-K. I. Leung (ed), 89-114. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
The English/Spanish/Brazilian Portuguese study:
Montrul, S., Dias, R. & Santos, H. 2011. Clitics and object expression in the L3 acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese: Structural similarity matters for transfer. Second Language Research 27(1): 21-58.
Other useful reading:
Really, the whole book Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, edited by Yan-Kit Ingrid Leung is worth it. Lots of good studies.
We also consulted:
Rothman, J., & Cabrelli Amaro, J. (2010). What variables condition syntactic transfer: A look at the L3 initial state. Second Language Research, 26, 189–218.
Rothman, J. (2011). L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy: The Typological Primacy Model. Second Language Research, 27, 107–127.
Rothman, J. (2015). Linguistic and cognitive motivation for the Typological Primacy Model of third language (l3) transfer: Considering the role of timing of acquisition and proficiency in the previous languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18, 2, 179–190.
Slabakova, R. (2016) The Scalpel Model of third language acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Slabakova, Roumyana and Garcia Mayo, Maria del Pilar (2015) The L3 syntax-discourse interface. Bilingualism Language and Cognition, 18, (2), 208 -226.
See you all in two weeks!
If you'd like to watch more of our outtakes videos, they're here:
Outtakes #1 (Eps 1-2): youtu.be/bLoCCBlCLBE
Outtakes #2 (Eps 3-5): youtu.be/Y3mVv-8EEE8
Outtakes #3 (Eps 6-9): youtu.be/vrhc97q91AM
Or maybe you're interested in some of our more recent episodes:
What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses - youtu.be/980meOhBGR8
How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? Topic and Focus - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Why Are There So Many Meanings? Ambiguity - youtu.be/E5Pp_wE14HU
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, thelingspace.com !
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #77!
This week's tag language: Nahuatl!
Related episodes:
Happy Little Trees: X' Theory of Syntax - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement and Traces - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk
Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKA
Last episode:
A Productive Formula: Compound Nouns - youtu.be/nQElBnBWExc
Other of our morphosyntax videos:
Up, Up, and Away: the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Organizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyo
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-77
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Pollock, J-Y. (1989) Verb Movement, Universal Grammar, and the Structure of IP. Accessed from http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/pollock.pdf
Much of the presentation's structure was inspired by Paul Hagstrom's course notes: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/course/lx523-s01/handouts/SyntaxII.1.IP.Pollock.pdf
Andrew McIntyre's condensed syntax text is also a big help: https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/fundamental-engl-syntax-2014-online-einseitig.pdf
We also consulted Denis Bouchard's The Semantics of Syntax: A Minimalist Approach to Grammar; and Lillian Haegeman's Introduction to Government and Binding Theory.
See you all in two weeks!
This is Topic #76!
This week's tag language: Polish!
Related episodes:
Goldilocks and the Three Nouns: Theta Roles - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0
Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKA
Last episode:
Topic of Focus: Information Structure - youtu.be/gZ6o8yFvJYI
Other of our morphosyntax videos:
Up, Up, and Away: the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Organizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyo
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-76
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information for this episode came from Mark Baker and Jonathan Bobaljik's textbook on morphology.
See you all in two weeks!
This is Topic #75!
This week's tag language: Lingala!
Related episodes:
The Rules of Conversation - Gricean Maxims: youtu.be/rzxyjFHh-y8
Building Common Ground - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
Last episode:
Why Can't Any Go Just Anywhere? NPIs: youtu.be/vd8cjyxHQdw
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Sheepish Semantics: The Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwg
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776c
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqM
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-75
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
A couple of papers:
Krifka (2006): http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/Publications/Krifka_InformationStructure.pdf
Féry and Krifka: http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/Publications/Fery_Krifka_InformationStructure.pdf
Some slides and notes:
From Andrew McIntyre: https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/department/staff/1685901/unterrichtsmaterialien/infostr.adv.lecture.pdf
From Richard Xiao: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/xiaoz/papers/FCUHK-lecture.ppt
From Kordula De Kuthy and Arndt Riester: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~kdk/esslli14/intro-slides.pdf
From Frank Kügler: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~kuegler/docs/2014.Koeln.IS.kuegler.pdf
Also, the Wikipedia pages for these topics are pretty good:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structure
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment
See you all in two weeks!
Here's our video on whether correcting kids' mistakes is helpful: youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0
Thanks to all the people we interviewed!
Cassie: youtube.com/c/CassieVee
Sarah Urist Green: youtube.com/user/TheArtAssignment
Joan Goodspeed: youtube.com/channel/UCOhexBb29dNc2vH4TrqrhIQ
Ali Mattu: youtube.com/thepsychshow
Sevy: youtube.com/c/sevyssecretchannel
Malinda Kathleen Reese: youtube.com/c/malindakathleenreese
Cory Arnold: youtube.com/c/12tonevideos
Kevin O’Sullivan: youtube.com/channel/UCRyN60LDdhrXYHtjw8v20GQ
Stephanie Brown: youtube.com/offbeatworlds
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #74!
This week's tag language: Khmer!
Related episodes:
Clues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions - youtu.be/N9OdeDQKnR4
Let's Talk about Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePw
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqM
Last episode:
So Many Meanings, So Little Time: Ambiguities - youtu.be/E5Pp_wE14HU
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Sheepish Semantics: The Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwg
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776c
Building Common Ground - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-74
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information for this episode comes from Anders Schoubye's lecture notes, Formal Semantics for Philosophers:
http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf
See you all in two weeks!
This is Topic #73!
This week's tag language: Tongan!
Related episodes:
Scoping Out the Truth: Scope Ambiguity - youtu.be/XC-MGuj75zQ
Walking the Garden Path: How We Parse Sentences - youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyo
Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKA
Last episode:
Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - youtu.be/BTZCozhneKA
Other of our psycholinguistics videos:
Finding Sense in Sounds: The Arbitrariness of the Sign - youtu.be/CcSCq8XDTaY
Follow My Eyes: Eye Tracking - youtu.be/uXx73W0uyCg
Prime Time: Priming Experiments - youtu.be/NGrxUp0pvVo
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-73
(Or we will by Friday evening.)
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
For a discussion of kids and semantic scope ambiguity, check out the extra materials from Episode 8: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-8
Sources:
The basis for much of this episode are various discussions of ambiguity in Eva Fernández and Helen Smith Cairns's book, Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics.
The linked meanings vs. different meanings lexical ambiguity study:
Rodd, J., G. Gaskell, and W. Marslen-Wilson. (2002). Making sense of semantic ambiguity: Semantic competition in lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language 46: 245-66. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X01928104
On kids' difficulties in recovering from erroneous or weird interpretations:
Trueswell, J.C. (2008). Using eye movements as a developmental measure within psycholinguistics. In Sekerina, Fernandez, and Clahsen (eds), Developmental Psycholinguistics: On-line Methods in Children's Language Processing, 73-96.
Kidd, E., A. Stewart, & L. Serratrice (2011). Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: The role of the referential scene in garden path recovery. Journal of Child Language, 38, 222 - 234. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000909990316
Kids and ambiguity detection:
Hirsh-Pasek, K., L.R. Gleitman, & H. Gleitman. (1978). What did the brain say to the mind? A study of the detection and report of ambiguity by young children. In Sinclair, Jervella, and Levelt (eds), The Child's Conception of Language, 97-132.
Peters, A.M. & E. Zaidel. (1980). The acquisition of homonymy. Cognition 8, 187-207. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(80)90012-8
It's worth noting that kids' ability to learn and recognize homonyms is still a matter of ongoing research, although there does seem to be something there. For more discussion, see:
Backscheider, A.G. & Susan A. Gelman. (1995). Children's understanding of homonyms. Journal of Child Language, 22, 107-127. doi:10.1017/S030500090000965X.
Doherty, M.J. (2004). Children's difficulty in learning homonyms. Journal of Child Language, 31, 203-214. doi:10.1017/S030500090300583X.
Kids' reading skills and ambiguity detection:
Wankoff, L. & H. Cairns. (2009). Why ambiguity detection is a predictor of reading skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly 30 (3), 183-92.
Cairns, H.S., D. Waltzman, & G. Schlisselberg. (2004). Detecting the ambiguity of sentences: Relationship to early reading skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly 27 (4), 213-20.
Relative clause processing:
Jun, S.-A. (2003). Prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32: 219-249.
Fernández, E. (2002). Bilingual sentence processing: relative clause attachment in English and Spanish.
See you all in two weeks!
This is Topic #72!
This week's tag language: Estonian!
Related episodes:
What's the Smallest Unit of Meaning? Morphemes - youtu.be/nduDAN9sKx4
How Do You Build a Word? Roots and Affixes - youtu.be/PN1DxuVt4hI
Last episode:
Up, Up, and Away: VPISH and Word Order - youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18
Other of our morphology and syntax videos:
Why Do Some Words Change So Much? Allomorphy - youtu.be/UyDsU_wqk5g
How Do Languages Organize Their Words? Morphological Typologies - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyo
Find us on all the social media worlds:
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Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-72
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
This work was mainly derived from Mark Baker and Jonathan Bobaljik's textbook / course notes, Introduction to Morphology.
See you all in two weeks!
This is Topic #71!
This week's tag language: Amharic!
Related episodes:
Happy Little Trees: Syntactic Trees and X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
Goldilocks and the Three Nouns: Theta Roles - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Last episode:
Sound Wave Hissy Fit: The Acoustics of Stops and Fricatives - youtu.be/iEc8nZkn258
Other of our syntax videos:
Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Referential Treatment: Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement and Traces - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-71
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
You can find a good discussion of this topic in Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction (3rd edition).
The specific examples from Irish are taken from Carnie's dissertation, which you can find here: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/Thesishome.html
The Malagasy data is from Ileana Paul's thesis (cited to work by Ed Keenan, 1976, "Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy"). You can find her thesis here: http://publish.uwo.ca/~ileana/papers/dissertation.pdf
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #70!
This week's tag language: Nepali!
Related episodes:
Minding Your Manners: Places and Manners of Articulation - youtu.be/zEaPQP3pXQc
Forming Formants: Acoustic Resonance and Formants - youtu.be/jl4zGRSYqkE
Last episode:
Sheepish Semantics: Lambda Calculus - youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwg
Other of our phonetics and phonology videos:
The Melody of Feet: Stress, Iambs, and Trochees - youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8
Good Vibrations: Phonation States, Breathy and Creaky Voice - youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFw
Uncommon Sounds: Ejectives, Implosives, and Clicks - youtu.be/JKP10ARLnzM
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-70
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Much of the information in this episode comes from Henry Rogers's book The Sounds of Language, and Peter Ladefoged's book A Course in Phonetics.
Here are some webpages that are helpful for getting more info:
Robert Mannell and Felicity Cox:
http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/acoustics/speech_spectra/fricatives.html
http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/acoustics/speech_spectra/oral_stops.html
Rob Hagiwara's page is also helpful:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/howto.html#figstops
And some from Kevin Russell, as well:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/acoustic/spectrogram-sounds.html
Finally, we really encourage you to download Praat, and just talk into it so you can look at your own spectrograms! Praat's free and powerful, and it's always more fun when it's your own voice:
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/download_win.html
We're taking a couple of weeks off, but we'll be back posting videos on June 1. Looking forward to seeing you then!
This is Topic #69!
This week's tag language: Lakota!
Related episodes:
Meaning Predicated on Logic: What Makes a Sentence True or False? - youtu.be/al5SJSbIyvM
Let's Talk About Sets: How Do We Build Meaning with Math? - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePw
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: What Does "Most" Even Mean? -
youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqM
Last episode:
Watch What You Say: What Makes Bad Words Bad? - youtu.be/Y4HW0tOCoQM
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Operation Relevance: How Do We Decide What's Relevant in Conversations? - youtu.be/yRv1agt776c
Building Common Ground: How Do We Create a Shared World in Conversation? - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
Logical Connections: How Logical is Language? - youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3Q
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-69
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information for this episode came from Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer's 1998 book, Semantics in Generative Grammar. Also, the Wikipedia page on Lambda Calculus is pretty good:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus
We also recommend Anders Schoubye's lecture notes, Formal Semantics for Philosophers:
http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Semantics/FormalSemanticsNotes2014.pdf
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #68!
This week's tag language: Romansh!
If you want the information, but you don't want the swearing, please check the companion post on our Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/post/143132629704/taboo-language-and-euphemisms-companion-post
Last episode:
Finding Sense in Sounds: Do Sounds Carry Their Own Meanings? - youtu.be/CcSCq8XDTaY
Other of our socio- and historical linguistics videos:
Recovering History: How Can We Know What Language Used to Look Like? - youtu.be/p7ppktfdNCk
Gender on the Brain: How Do We Process Language and Gender? - youtu.be/jtMUE-RLeII
Linguistic Pride and Prejudice: What's the Difference between a Dialect and a Language? - youtu.be/uEabSWeO02E
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-68
(Or we will by Thursday afternoon.)
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
More detailed sources to come tonight, but much of the information contained in this video comes from Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, and Ronald Wardhaugh's An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Fifth Edition.
Looking forward to next week!
We got to ask her about a lot of great topics, including:
- what statistical models can tell us about how kids acquire language
- what's under our control in our writing, and what we unconsciously show as our write-print
- why computers are so bad at detecting tone and picking out the right meanings of words
- how statistical models and Universal Grammar interact
- a question from one of our viewers about how to approach modeling for second language acquisition
And more! Hope you all enjoy it, and thanks to Dr. Lisa Travis and the Department of Linguistics at McGill University for letting us film there.
Our previous interviews:
Daniel Dennett: youtu.be/30eOI6pL-lU
Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFU
Some related videos:
How do computers understand our speech?: youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5Yda
What principles and parameters lie at the core of our language?: youtu.be/GbK0ls7YVN4
Why are babies so good at language learning?: youtu.be/MLNFGWJOXjA
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #67!
This week's tag language: Māori!
Related videos:
Following the Signs: How Do We Learn Words? - youtu.be/Ci-5dVVvf0U
Last episode:
Desert Island Words: What Questions Can't You Ask? - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Other of our psycholinguistics videos:
Follow My Eyes: What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Language? - youtu.be/uXx73W0uyCg
Walking the Garden Path: How Do We Interpret Sentences? - youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyo
Prime Time: How Are Words Connected in Our Minds? - youtu.be/NGrxUp0pvVo
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-67
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Spanish subtitles by Federico Falletti
Sources:
The initial discussion of the arbitrariness of the sign is from:
de Saussure, F. (1916). Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris, 1983.
There's a good discussion of the concepts on the Wikipedia page regarding the book:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics
If you are interested in cross-linguistic onomatopoeia and also very cute pictures, try:
http://soundimals.tumblr.com
http://chapmangamo.tumblr.com
The Dutch/Japanese ideophone study:
Lockwood, G., M. Dingemanse, & P. Hagoort (2016). Sound-symbolism boosts novel word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
(Full paper available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000235)
The initial studies for the sound symbolism / phonesthetics with molmo and ikitik:
Köhler, W (1929). Gestalt Psychology. (We consulted the 1947 second edition.)
These shapes are often known as "kiki" and "bouba", from the following study:
Ramachandran, V. S., and E. M. Hubbard. (2001). Synaesthesia—a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, 3–34.
There's a good and accessible overview of the state of this research in:
Lockwood, G. & M. Dingemanse. (2015). Iconicity in the Lab: A Review of Behavioral, Developmental, and Neuroimaging Research into Sound-Symbolism. Language Sciences, 1246. (full paper to be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01246)
An interesting article about product names and how they happen: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/famous-names
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #66!
This week's tag language: Sinhala!
Related videos:
Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk
A Principled Approach: Principles and Parameters in Universal Grammar - youtu.be/GbK0ls7YVN4
Last episode:
The Magic of Words: Performative Language - youtu.be/uCR3_7-lun4
Other of our morphology and syntax videos:
Raising the Bar: What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Organizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyo
Referential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
If you're taking part in our little April 1st quiz, try to tell us where Kanji has gone - the first person who tells us in the comments will get a free mug of their choice!
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-66
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information in this episode comes from Andrew Radford's Minimalist Syntax -- Exploring the Structure of English (2004) & Andrew Carnie's Syntax -- A Generative Introduction (2007). We also refer to John R. Ross's dissertation from 1967, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, as well as Noam Chomsky's Conditions on Transformations (1973) and The Minimalist Program (1995).
Looking forward to next week!
If you'd like to watch more of our outtakes videos, they're here:
Outtakes #1 (Eps 1-2): youtu.be/bLoCCBlCLBE
Outtakes #2 (Eps 3-5): youtu.be/Y3mVv-8EEE8
Or maybe you're interested in some of our more recent episodes:
The Magic of Words: Performative Language - youtu.be/uCR3_7-lun4
Conservative Babies: Why Do Kids Make So Few Mistakes? - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83E
A Finite State of Affairs: How Complex is Natural Language? - youtu.be/5-uOijZ5mRo
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, thelingspace.com !
We also have our store at http://thelingspace.storenvy.com, with 20% off using the code 7500SUBS until March 26.
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #65!
This week's tag language: Hausa!
Last episode:
Conservative Babies: How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Wrong? - youtu.be/IbyO2D1A83E
Other of our general linguistics videos:
Future Tense: How Will Language Change in the Future? - youtu.be/5hibYoYwGko
Why So Sirious: How Do Computers Understand Our Speech? - youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5Y
Plays on Words: Is Wordplay Universal? - youtu.be/AT7Xd2tC62k
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-65
(Or we will by Thursday morning.)
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words.
Hall, S. (2000). "Who Needs Identity?" In du Gay, P., Evans, J., and Redman, P. (eds), Identity: A Reader.
Holten, L. (2013). Mothers, Medicine, and Morality in Rural Mali. books.google.ca/books?id=5MTA9-ru-4oC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35
Sommerstein, A. H., and Torrance, I.C. (2014). Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece. de Gruyter.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-power-of-names
http://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity
http://www.thebuddhacenter.org/buddhism/mantras
ualberta.ca/~francisp/NewPhil448/SearleOnAustinonLocutionaryIllocutionActs.pdf
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #64!
This week's tag language: Mongolian!
Related topics:
Negative Space: Is Correcting Your Kid's Language Helpful? - youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0
Last episode:
A Finite State of Affairs: The Chomsky Hierarchy and the Complexity of Language - youtu.be/5-uOijZ5mRo
Other of our language acquisition videos:
Flipping Switches: Parameter Resetting and Second Language Acquisition - youtu.be/2E839gb4OwQ
Kids Be Frontin': Children's Phonological Mistakes - youtu.be/EDymvzP0uac
Child Actors and Child Judges: How To Test Young Kids' Language - youtu.be/NJ5lLNBabGc
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-64
(Or we will by Thursday morning.)
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
If you're curious about the analysis of the Compounding Parameter and what underlies it that lets it capture both verb-particle constructions and creative compounding, take a look at section 5 of William Snyder's 2011 paper here: http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/BUCLD35_Plenary.pdf
Sources:
Much of the discussion of grammatical conservatism comes from William Snyder's work, on his own and with various colleagues. We used the following sources:
- Maratsos, Michael (1998). The acquisition of grammar. In Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 2, 421–466.
- Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, Miguel (2008). The acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Spanish. Probus 20:111–145.
- Snyder, William (2001). On the nature of syntactic variation: Evidence from complex predicates and complex word-formation. Language 77: 324-342.
- Snyder, William (2007). Child Language: The Parametric Approach. OUP.
- Snyder, William (2008). Children’s Grammatical Conservatism: Implications for linguistic theory. In T. Sano et al. (eds.), An Enterprise in the Cognitive Science of Language: A Festschrift for Yukio Otsu. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobu.
- Snyder, William. (2011). Children's Grammatical Conservatism: Implications for syntactic theory [Plenary Address]. In Nick Danis, Kate Mesh & Hyunsuk Sung (eds.) BUCLD 35: Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Volume I, 1-20. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
- Sugisaki, Koji and Miwa Isobe (2000). Resultatives result from the compounding parameter: On the acquisitional correlation between resultatives and N-N compounds in Japanese. In Proceedings of the 19th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 493-506. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
- Sugisaki, Koji & William Snyder. (2003) Do parameters have default values? Evidence from the acquisition of English and Spanish. In Yukio Otsu (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, 215-237. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #63!
This week's tag language: Croatian!
Related topics:
Happy Little Trees: X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk
Last episode:
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - youtu.be/U1l3C_hmjqM
Other of our syntax and morphology videos:
Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Organizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyo
Referential Treatment: Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
Also, if you'd like to know more about the Chomsky Hierarchy and its impact on computer science, Computerphile's had a few videos about them:
- Their episode on the hierarchy: youtube.com/watch?v=224plb3bCog.
- Their episode about finite-state machines: youtube.com/watch?v=vhiiia1_hC4.
- And their episode about how finite-state machines relate to grammar: youtube.com/watch?v=RjOCRYdg8BY.
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-63
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
(1) I-Language (1st Edition, Daniela isac & Charles Reiss)
(2) Introduction to the Theory of Computation (3rd Edition, Michael Sipser)
(3) Mathematical Logic for Computer Science (3rd Edition, Mordechai Ben-Ari)
(4) Evidence Against the Context-Freeness of Natural Language (Stuart Shieber - http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf)
(5) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
(6) Syntactic Structures (Noam Chomsky)
(7) Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (Barbara Partee, Alice G. ter Meulen, Robert Wall)
Proof regarding crossing dependencies (adapted from the first edition of Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman. Note where carets appear that the following character should be taken as superscript):
We first capture the general pattern of embedded clauses in Swiss German with the language a^nb^mc^nd^m . We then treat this as the result of intersecting Swiss German with the regular language a*b*c*d*.
Now, let L = {a^nb^mc^nd^m | n ≥ 1 and m ≥ 1}. Suppose L is a context-free language, and let p be the pumping length referred to in the pumping lemma for context-free languages (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping_lemma_for_context-free_languages). Consider the string z = a^pb^pc^pd^p. Let z = uvwxy satisfy the conditions of the pumping lemma. Then as |vwx| ≤ p, vx can contain at most two different symbols. Furthermore, if vx contains two different symbols, they must be consecutive, for example, a and b. If vx has only a’s, then uwy has fewer a’s than c’s and is not in L, a contradiction. We proceed similarly if vx consists of only b’s, only c’s, or only d’s. Now suppose that vx has a’s and b’s. Then uwy still has fewer a’s than c’s. A similar contradiction occurs if vx consist of b’s and c’s or c’s and d’s. Since these are the only possibilities, we conclude that L is not context-free.
Since context-free languages are closed under intersection with regular languages, and the above intersection is not context-free, Swiss German must be non-context-free.
Q.E.D.
A proof of the pumping lemma itself can be found in Introduction to the Theory of Computation (among other places). For a discussion of the closure properties of context-free languages, see Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (among other places).
Looking forward to next week!
This is Topic #62!
This week's tag language: Tshiluba!
Related topics:
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Let's Talk About Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives - youtu.be/M96aiDk2ePw
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Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - youtu.be/yRv1agt776c
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Building Common Ground: Shared Worlds in Conversation - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
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Sources:
Barwise, J. and R. Cooper. (1981). Generalized quantifiers and natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy, 4:159–219.
von Fintel, K. (1994). Restrictions on Quantifier Domains. PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Hunter, T. and A. Conroy. (2009). Children's restrictions on the meanings of novel determiners. Proceedings of BUCLD 2008; file found here: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~timh/conservativity/bu2008-paper.pdf
Westerståhl, Dag, "Generalized Quantifiers", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/generalized-quantifiers/
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This is Topic #61!
This week's tag language: Quechua!
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Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Building Common Ground: Shared Worlds in Conversation - youtu.be/gQqXmhqM13U
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Clues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions - youtu.be/N9OdeDQKnR4
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Sources:
The information for this video was largely taken from Ira Noveck and Daniel Sperber's 2006 book entitled Experimental Pragmatics, primarily chapters 1 and 7, and Paul Grice's 1975 paper, Logic and Conversation.
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We're really excited to have gotten to interview Dr. Dennett recently! He holds the title of University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University, as well as the co-director of their Center for Cognitive Studies. He's also the author of a number of books on evolution, consciousness, memes, language, and more, including Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.
We got to ask him about a lot of great topics, including:
- the role of language in spreading culture
- what linguists and philosophers can learn from each other
- whether the gap between linguists and the general public is closing
- computers and whether they'll be able to use language in a human-like way
- a question from one of our followers about whether we have a dedicated mental language
And more! Hope you all enjoy it.
Some related videos:
Our previous interview with Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFU
How do computers understand our speech?: youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5Yda
How logical is language?: youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3Q
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This is Topic #60!
This week's tag language: Icelandic!
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This is Topic #59!
This week's tag language: Malay!
Related topics:
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Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-59
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!
We're really excited to have gotten to interview Daniel Dennett recently! Dr. Dennett is a University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University, as well as the co-director of their Center for Cognitive Studies. He's also the author of a number of books on evolution, consciousness, memes, language, and more, including Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.
We got to ask him about a lot of great topics, including:
- the role of language in spreading culture
- what linguists and philosophers can learn from each other
- whether the gap between linguists and the general public is closing
- computers and whether they'll be able to use language in a human-like way
- a question from one of our followers about whether we have a dedicated mental language
And more! Hope you all enjoy it.
Some related videos:
Our previous interview with Steven Pinker: youtu.be/piJBmPh5jFU
How do computers understand our speech?: youtu.be/FI9IJteS-5Yda
How logical is language?: youtu.be/lw4ykgRtv3Q
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, http://thelingspace.storenvy.com
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!