New Books in Language and Translation

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Thom Scott-Phillips, “Speaking Our Minds” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Dec 13, 2014

Show notes

I hope I’m not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as one of the “major transitions in evolution”, placing it in exalted company alongside the evolution of multicellularity, sociality, sexual reproduction, and various other preoccupations of ours. But the nature of the transition is hotly disputed: is there a sudden shift involving the emergence of complex syntax, or is the process more gradual and socially driven?

In his entertaining and approachable volume Speaking Our Minds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Thom Scott-Phillips argues for a different approach. On his view, there is a categorical difference between human language and its precursors, but the critical ingredient is ostensive-inferential communication – that is, the ability to express and recognize intentions – and this underlies the expressive power of language. His view calls for a reappraisal of the role of pragmatics in linguistics, from being a communicatively useful add-on to being much nearer the heart of the enterprise.

In this interview, we discuss the motivations and implications of this idea, for both evolutionary and more traditional approaches to linguistics, and we look at how comparative studies of other species – not only great apes, but even bacteria – might tell us something useful about the nature of human communication.

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Anne Curzan, “Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Sep 29, 2014

Show notes

Language change is like a river. When people tell you how to use language, and how not to use it, they’re attempting to build a dam that will put a stop to linguistic change. But all such efforts are bound to fail, and the river will sweep away anything that’s put in its path.

At least, that’s the standard story among linguists. But in her book Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Anne Curzan makes the case that the dam-builders, or linguistic prescriptivists, may have more of an influence on the language than usually acknowledged. The dam that gets washed away may still have an effect on the river’s flow, even if not the one that the builders intended – and prescriptivism may similarly have consequences for change in language, even if those consequences are sometimes subtle and often unpredictable.

In this interview we discuss the place of prescriptivism in telling the story of the English language, as well as the many guises that prescriptivism can take, from gender-neutral language reform to the red and green squiggly lines that Microsoft Word shows millions of users every day.

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Ruth Finnegan, “Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication” (Routledge, 2014) Sep 14, 2014

Show notes

The name of the New Books in Language channel might hint at a disciplinary bias towards “language”. So in some sense Ruth Finnegan‘s Communicating: the Multiple Modes of Human Communication (2nd edition; Routledge, 2014) is a departure: central to her approach is the idea that, within a broader view of human communication, language (in the linguistic sense of the word) is over-emphasised. The book sets out many more ingredients to communication, spanning the gamut of sensory modalities (and hinting at what might lie beyond) as well as considering the role of artifacts.

Although both the book and this interview ultimately take place in conventional language, Ruth Finnegan succeeds admirably in evoking the richness of multisensory experience, whether in the poetics of ancient Greece or in the storytelling practices of the Limba tribe of Sierra Leone. The book’s illustrations offer some cross-modal enrichment of the experience, and I hope this interview does too. For a more direct impression, the World Oral Literature Project’s homepage for Ruth Finnegan’s Limba collection is here.

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Julia Sallabank, “Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies” (Cambridge UP, 2013) Aug 10, 2014

Show notes

As linguists, we’re wont to get protective about languages, whether we see them as data points in a typological analysis or a mass of different ways of seeing the world. Given a free choice, we’d always like to see them survive. Which is fine for us, because we don’t necessarily have to speak them. But for a language to survive and thrive, someone has to be speaking it, and encouraging them to do so is no straightforward matter. In Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Julia Sallabank discusses some of the issues that arise among (actual or potential) endangered-language speech communities. She focuses on the languages of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, and discusses how speakers relate to those languages and to the revitalisation efforts that are currently underway. She argues persuasively that we cannot treat these communities as homogeneous groups: in fact, the attitudes of the established speakers to the future of their language are potentially complex and equivocal, as revitalisation preserves the language for future generations but risks alienating the current generation from it. In this interview, we discuss this situation, and look at the efficacy of language revitalisation measures. We explore the questions of what it means for a language to survive, to what extent change is inevitable, and the challenge of remaining objective when confronted with competing and sometimes entrenched linguistic interests.

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John H. McWhorter, “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” (Oxford UP, 2014) Jul 18, 2014

Show notes

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think – sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had an interesting history. It’s particularly associated with the idea that languages dismissed as primitive by 19th century thinkers, such as those of indigenous peoples in America and Australia, are not only as rich and complex as European languages (a now uncontroversial point) but also cause their speakers to conceive of reality in fundamentally different and more sophisticated ways. One problem with this idea, as John McWhorter points out in his new book The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (Oxford UP, 2014), is that, for there to be ‘winners’, there must also be ‘losers’ – people who are held back by their language. And that’s a much less palatable idea, whether we think that it’s Hopi or English or Chinese speakers that are the ‘losers’. However, McWhorter’s main objection to the Whorfian idea is not that it’s unpalatable, but rather that (as the title of his book suggests) the evidence for it is sketchy. Or, more precisely, although language has been shown to influence cognition in certain ways, none of these are very substantial, and it would be a gross exaggeration to consider that speakers of different languages automatically have different worldviews. In this interview, we talk about the political dimensions of Whorfianism, and discuss some of the evidence for effects of this kind (and how far they go). We touch upon the way in which claims about it are evaluated by linguists, and how the history of linguistics influences how the idea has developed. And we consider the implications for our own view of the world, if the consequences of language were as profound as has been argued.

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Ian Haney Lopez, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2014) Jun 30, 2014

Show notes

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice.

Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class.

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Peter Gardenfors, “The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces” (MIT Press, 2014) Jun 09, 2014

Show notes

A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces (MIT Press, 2014), Peter Gardenfors demonstrates that this need not be the case. Indeed, his research is directed towards establishing a formal, mathematically-grounded account of semantics, an account which – as expounded here – is nevertheless accessible. In this interview we discuss the essence of this proposal, focusing in particular on its implications for linguistic analysis, but also touching upon its relation to cognitive science and other related fields. The proposal makes testable predictions about the organization of individual linguistic systems, as well as their acquisition (and potentially their evolution over time). Notably, the “single domain constraint” posits that individual lexical items refer to convex regions of single domains. We discuss the significance of this idea as a bridge between linguistics and cognitive science, what would constitute its falsification, and how it can usefully be investigated from a linguistic standpoint.

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David Adger, “A Syntax of Substance” (MIT Press, 2013) Apr 26, 2014

Show notes

Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it’s easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax of Substance (MIT Press, 2013), David Adger tackles this question, as well as others that are just as fundamental to the way we think about syntax. The book takes nouns to specify “substances”, and Adger defends the view that nouns, unlike verbs, never take arguments. Moreover, he marshals evidence to show that some of the constituents that have been traditionally taken to be arguments of nouns, such as the PP “of Mary” in “the picture of Mary”, are actually not that closely connected to the noun syntactically at all. But the book’s not just about nouns: it presents a radically innovative way of building and labelling phrase structure within Minimalism, denying the existence of functional heads and allowing unary branching trees.

In this interview we talk about the differences between nouns and verbs, and the evidence for this difference from a variety of languages, in particular Scottish Gaelic. After outlining the theoretical machinery that David deploys in order to account for these facts, we then move on to discuss the status of hierarchies of functional categories and the implications of this new syntactic system for cross-linguistic variation, grammaticalization, and the evolution of language.

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Vershawn Young et al., “Other People’s English” (Teacher’s College Press, 2013) Apr 15, 2014

Show notes

In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them. But what do we do about those prejudices? And what do we think the speakers of low-status varieties of language should do to overcome them? Take the case of African American English. An influential approach, code-switching, advises teachers to help their AAE-speaking students to identify the systematic differences between their variety and the prestige variety (“Standard English”), and eventually to be able to switch effectively between both varieties according to the circumstances. However, although code-switching seems to promote communicative effectiveness, Vershawn Young and colleagues argue that that approach is inherently problematic. By effectively labelling AAE as inappropriate for public contexts, code-switching runs the risk of promoting and reinforcing society’s prejudices against the language (and indeed its speakers). Young and colleagues offer an alternative vision for the multilingual classroom, which they refer to as “code-meshing”, a process by which multiple varieties can sit side-by-side in a speaker’s communicative repertoire. Their book, Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy (Teacher’s College Press, 2013), explores this concept in theoretical and practical detail, discussing the rationale for encouraging code-meshing, the effect of this on communicative abilities, and some of the ways in which code-switching can be and has been implemented in real-life teaching. In this interview, we discuss the effect of code-switching on the speaker’s identity, the ubiquity of code-meshing across a range of actual discourse contexts, and some of the challenges that code-meshing might present in the classroom. And we consider why Barack Obama isn’t criticised for code-meshing but Michelle Obama is.

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Aneta Pavlenko, “The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Mar 29, 2014

Show notes

Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual’s capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority of human beings are bilingual, is this kind of idealization desirable? Is it useful, or necessary? Aneta Pavlenko‘s book The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014), covers a range of issues in the relationship between language and cognition, and its core thesis is that study of the monolingual mind in isolation is simply not enough to shed light on all aspects of the human mind. Drawing on a variety of sources, from traditional psycholinguistic experimental work to literary case studies and her own experience growing up as a bilingual, Professor Pavlenko debunks myths surrounding the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and argues that even the coldly rational edifice of linguistic theory is shaped by the language backgrounds of the individual theorists involved. In this interview we discuss all of this and more, including some of the big questions that face twenty-first-century research into linguistic cognition.

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