Monthly Archives: December 2007

We need Simpler Syntax, but we can do without a Grammar of the Gaps

Posted on by
5

Recently I picked up Simpler Syntax in the library. It is a good read on a very complex topic, and I’m afraid that in this posting I am not going to do justice to the full breadth of the book. These are just some doubts that crept up while reading it.

Simpler Syntax, as far as I can see, combines the goods of various constructional approaches to language with a Universal Grammar (UG). But in the light of Tomasello’s Constructing a Language (2003), Goldberg’s Constructions (1995) and Constructions at Work (2006) and a host of other constructionalist-functionalist approaches, one wonders what would be the job of such a Universal Grammar. To this, Culicover and Jackendoff answer: ‘We conceive of UG as pre-specifying the highest, most general layer of the hierarchy. (…) Thus UG guides, but does not determine the course of language acquisition.’ (2005:40).

For Culicover & Jackendoff UG is a special piece of innate cognitive machinery guiding the course of language acquisition. It is an open question whether something like this is at all necessary in the construction-grammar type theories they happily adopt. I was a bit surprised that Culicover & Jackendoff’s argument for UG crucially hinges on the following assumption:

Relatively ‘core’ phenomena such as (30) are quite direct specializations of UG, and represent degrees of abstraction and generality that probably could not be achieved without the principles of UG as ‘goals’ or ‘attractors’ for the process of generalization. (p. 30)

So UG, they say, is there mainly to provide necessary ‘attractors’ for processes of generalization/abstraction. The question then becomes: what is the evidence that these degrees of abstraction and generality could not be achieved without UG? Isn’t there a chance that we are just chasing an epiphenomenon of ‘constructed language’ (Tomasello) — in other words, is it really true that we cannot come up with convincing explanations for the degrees of abstraction and generality achieved? Rather than a priori assuming something like that, it seems more profitable to try and see how far we can get without resorting to some language-specific system of principles that is hardwired into our constitution.

Continue reading →

w00t chosen ‘word of 2007′

Posted on by
2

Languagehat’s news flash on w00t (chosen as the Merriam-Webster’s Word of ’07) piqued my interest. A quote:

There’s a lot of “l33t speak” I don’t care for, but I’ve always liked w00t; there’s something primally yawpish about it, and I’m glad to see it get this recognition.

Now, I have no idea what ‘yawpish’ is, but I guess I can more readily relate to w00t than to yawpish precisely because there is ‘something primally yawpish’ about w00t. What is that?

I think it has something to do with the iconic quality of the double 00 (which to me conveys something like wide open eyes and raised eyebrows) coupled with the vowel length and vowel quality. It seems the long rounded tense back vowel [u:] renders the word more apt for its purpose than, say, an unrounded lax vowel like [a:] would have done. This may have something to do with the peculiar configuration of the facial muscles required by the former. Try it for yourself — isn’t it true that [wu:t] just feels better —for this particular meaning— than [wa:t]?

Being sympathetic to Sapir’s ideation reigns supreme in language, I would be the last to look voor such things in every English word. But in this case, I think it is quite probable that at least part of the appeal of w00t lies in this non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning. The word seems to evoke the experience it is meant to encode (happiness, victory, in-your-face) both visually and through its sound. In that respect, it’s an interesting piece of expressive vocabulary.

(The original article from the New York Times as linked to by Languagehat is here. It quotes Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse, as saying that ”w00t” was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.)

Early sources on African ideophones, part I: Schlegel on Ewe, 1857

Posted on by
9

This is the first post in a series. Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana. But since this is the first post on ideophones here, let’s first try to answer the obvious question: what are ideophones, anyway?

Ideophones are a type of words used by speakers to convey a vivid impression of a certain sensation or sensory perception. They are found abundantly in Asian and African languages, as well as in some South American languages. It is important to note that in these languages, they form a distinct class of words, definable by a constellation of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria. As a class of words, they are rare in Indo-European languages.

Cross-linguistically, ideophones are marked words in many ways. They are phonologically marked by deviant phonotactics and all sorts of co-occurrence constraints; they have special morphology (often iconic, e.g. reduplication, lengthening); there is some syntactical ‘aloofness’ to them (can’t be negated, are often less well integrated into the sentence); and they are semantically very specific, typically evoking experiences as a whole rather than encoding some attributes of objects of events. Part of what makes them stand out is that ideophones utilize sound symbolism to map onto the ‘analogue’ sensory world. Continue reading →