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Perry Link, “An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics” (Harvard UP, 2013) May 13, 2013

Show notes

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), Perry Link mobilizes more than three decades of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in the service of a profoundly transdisciplinary exploration of the particular anatomy of the Chinese language within the larger species of human language more generally. It is a bold and ambitious project, but one that never strays far beyond the specific archive of carefully chosen examples, cases, and utterances from the history of and in Chinese speech and writing. Link integrates a wide range of sophisticated methodological instruments from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, prosody, music theory, politics, linguistics, and other fields into a narrative argument that avoids getting mired in the professional jargon that often plagues attempts at synthetic and highly original theoretical work. He is notably careful to avoid creating a generalizing and essential “Chinese language” in these pages, emphasizing the importance of a perspective that recognizes the historical and contemporary existence of different registers of language use, from different forms and idiolects of informal Chinese to political language game-playing: sometimes by very different users, and sometimes by the same individual in the course of performing the different roles demanded by daily life. It is clear, it is imaginative, it is at turns funny and inspiring (often at the same time), and it made me read, speak, and hear Chinese in a new way. It was an absolute pleasure to talk with Perry about it, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

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Jonathan Bobaljik, “Universals of Comparative Morphology” (MIT Press, 2012) May 06, 2013

Show notes

Morphology is sometimes painted as the ‘here be dragons’ of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath Robinson contraptions abound and anything goes. In his new book, Universals of Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words (MIT Press, 2012), Jonathan Bobaljik reassesses the terrain, and argues that there are hard limits on the extent to which languages can vary in the morphological domain.

The book is a comparative study of comparatives and superlatives with a broad typological base. Bobaljik’s contention is that, at an abstract cognitive level, the representation of the comparative is contained within that of the superlative. From this hypothesis, couched within the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology, a number of generalizations immediately follow: for instance, in a language which, like English, has forms of the type “good” and “better”, the superlative cannot be of the type “goodest”. As he shows, these generalizations are solid candidates for the status of exceptionless linguistic universals.

In this interview, Jonathan outlines the generalizations and their evidential basis, and we go on to discuss apparent counterexamples (including the mysterious Karelian quantifiers), why the comparative should be contained within the superlative, how the generalizations extend to change-of-state verbs, and how similar generalizations can be found in domains as diverse as verbal person marking and pronominal case.

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Stephen E. Nadeau, “The Neural Architecture of Grammar” (MIT Press, 2012) Apr 13, 2013

Show notes

Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience. Network models of various aspects of language have often been criticised as theoretically simplistic, custom-made to solve a single problem (such as past tense marking), and/or abandoning their neurally-inspired roots.

In The Neural Architecture of Grammar (MIT Press, 2012), Stephen Nadeau proposes an account of language in the brain that goes some way towards answering these objections. He argues that the sometimes-maligned Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) approach can genuinely be seen as a way of modelling the brain. Combining theoretical, experimental and biological perspectives, he proposes a model of language function that is based upon these principles, proceeding concisely all the way from concept meaning to high-level syntactic organisation. He proposes that this model offers a plausible account of a wealth of data from studies of normal language functioning and, at the same time, a convincing perspective on how language breaks down as a consequence of brain injury.

Within an hour, it’s hard to do justice to the full complexity of the model. However, we do get to discuss much of the background and motivation for this approach. In particular, we talk about the emergence of PDP models of concept meaning and of phonological linear order. We consider the relations between this concept of meaning and the increasingly well-studied notion of ’embodied cognition’. And we look at the aphasia literature, which, Nadeau argues, provides compelling support for a view of language that is fundamentally stochastic and susceptible to graceful degradation – two automatic consequences of adopting a PDP perspective. We conclude by touching on the potential relevance of this type of account for treatments for aphasia.

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Stanley Dubinsky and Chris Holcomb, “Understanding Language Through Humor” (Cambridge UP, 2011) Mar 15, 2013

Show notes

A problem with doing linguistics is that once you start, it’s kind of inescapable – you see it everywhere. At some point a few months back, I was watching a DVD of a comedy series and came to the conclusion that its distinctiveness was all about the way in which expectations about dialogue act type were generated and violated. Then I came to the conclusion that I was watching comedy too hard and had to give up for the day and go and do some work instead.

However, despite the dangers, comedy is a very useful tool in explaining linguistics, as this engaging book makes clear. In Understanding Language Through Humor (Cambridge UP, 2011), Stanley Dubinsky and Chris Holcomb draw upon a rich set of examples, acquired over many years’ diligent study, that illuminate every level of organisation from phonetics up to discourse structure, as well as covering some topics that cut across these boundaries (acquisition, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and the nature of communication in general). But as well as being systematic, it’s also very relatable – it tends to underscore the idea that, for all the complicated terminology, linguistics is essentially the study of something we all do and of capabilities that we all have.

In this interview, we talk about how the book came to be written, and how it can be and is being used. We see how the nature of humour changes as we go through the levels of linguistic organisation; and we explore how personal experience informs our language awareness.

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Elly van Gelderen, “The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty” (Oxford UP, 2011) Mar 01, 2013

Show notes

In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press, 2011), Elly van Gelderen tackles the question of such ‘cyclical’ changes.

The book is a catalogue of examples of linguistic history repeating itself, with over a thousand example sentences drawn from nearly 300 different language varieties, and ranging over negation, tense, case, object agreement and beyond. Beyond this descriptive role, however, the book is also an attempt to understand the processes that we see within a Minimalist syntactic framework, in which economy on the part of the language acquirer is crucial for language change and semantic features are continually reanalysed as syntactic before being lost entirely.

In this interview, among other things, we discuss the notion of the linguistic cycle, the relationship between historical linguistics and syntactic theory (sometimes strained, but usually mutually beneficial), the polysynthetic languages of the Americas, and whether Old English can be classified as polysynthetic.

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Willem J. M. Levelt, “A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era” (Oxford UP, 2012) Feb 19, 2013

Show notes

The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics. He says that telling the story of the last few decades is a task for someone else. The task he’s taken on here is to describe the progress made in the psychology of language between its actual foundation – around 1800 – and the point at which it’s widely and erroneously believed to have been founded – around 1951. The story that the book tells is remarkable in many ways: not only for its vast breadth and depth of scholarship, but also for the number of misconceptions that it corrects. Levelt uncovers how many modern theories in psycholinguistics are in fact independent rediscoveries of proposals made in the 19th century, and charts the significant positive contributions made to the science by figures who are often overlooked or even derided now (we discuss a couple of such cases in this interview). He vividly depicts how the rapid march of progress was catastrophically disrupted in the early 20th century, by a combination of political strife and scientific wrong turns, before being restored in the 1950s. In this interview we talk about some of the recurring themes of the book – forgetting and rediscovery, the remarkably prescient nature of much 19th century theoretical and experimental work, and the collective misunderstanding of the history of the discipline. And we touch upon the intentional misunderstandings that allowed research in psycholinguistics to be exploited for financial gain or more sinister purposes.

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Nick J. Enfield, “The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances” (Cambridge UP, 2012) Jan 16, 2013

Show notes

Linguists are apt to get excited when a language is identified that exhibits exotic properties, and gladly travel halfway round the world to document it, particularly if they think it’s going to support a pet theory of theirs. Nick Enfield‘s fieldwork in Laos differs from this paradigm in at least three respects. First, his choice of location reflects a prior interest in the culture of the region; second, the object of his study is gesture rather than just speech; and third, it’s quite possible that the forms of gesture he documents are actually very typical – we just don’t know yet.

However, as well as the fieldwork, which is attractively summarised and depicted in The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances (Cambridge University Press, 2009/2012), there is a theory at stake, or at least a theoretical outlook. For Enfield, the use of gestures alongside speech illustrates something profound about the nature of meaning, specifically that it is a composite notion to which justice is not done by an insistence on treating speech and gesture separately. In reality, language users are adept at conveying and comprehending complex packages of (at least) speech and gesture, and our theories should encompass that versatility.

In this interview, we talk about the motivations for both the fieldwork and the theory, and consider how the bewildering complexity of gestural interaction can be approached by the analyst.

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James R. Hurford, “The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2)” (Oxford UP, 2012) Dec 21, 2012

Show notes

Building upon The Origins of Meaning (see previous interview), James R. Hurford‘s The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2) (Oxford University Press, 2012) second volume sets out to explain how the unique complexity of human syntax might have evolved. In doing so, it addresses the long-running argument between (to generalise) linguists and non-linguists as to how big a deal this is: linguists tend to claim that the relevant capacities are unique to humans, while researchers in other disciplines argue for parallels with other animal behaviours. James Hurford sides with the linguists here, but not without giving careful consideration to the status of birdsong, whalesong, and similar systems.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the evolutionary process (so far), interest is growing in accounts of human syntax that are incidentally much more gradualist in nature and which invite potential explanation in evolutionary terms. Moreover, the idea of quantitative limits on human processing are being appealed to, in conflict with the tradition view of ‘infinite’ generative capacity. In the second part of the book, Hurford charts a course through this field in order to characterise the ‘target’ of the evolutionary story.

Finally, he turns to the process itself, positing a role for the ‘symbolic niche’ in the rapid co-evolution of culture and individual capacities throughout the span of humans’ existence, and considering how grammaticalisation might be responsible for the earliest, as well as the most recent, innovations in human language.

In this interview, we touch on many of these topics, and try to situate this work within the history of linguistics. We consider the implications of new trends in linguistic theory and research practice, and look at how evolutionary claims might be validated – or at least shown to be plausible, in the face of residual scepticism. And we discuss whether and when genome research will inform linguistic analysis.

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James R. Hurford, “The Origins of Meaning (Language in Light of Evolution, Vol. 1)” (Oxford UP, 2007) Dec 16, 2012

Show notes

Evolutionary approaches to linguistics have notoriously had a rather chequered history, being associated with vague and unfalsifiable claims about the motivations for the origins of language. It seems as though the subject has only recently come in from the cold, and yet there are already rich traditions of research in several distinct fields that offer relevant insights: insights that are crucial if we consider Dobzhansky’s maxim, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, also to apply to human language.

In his two-volume (so far) work, James Hurford brings together many of these disparate strands of research and endeavours to answer the question of how humans, uniquely among extant species, came to have such elaborative, productive, referential language. His work is at once vast and authoritative, stimulating and original, and highly accessible. It serves both to introduce new ideas and to draw out potential connections between familiar ones. It’s critical without being dismissive, and seems to succeed in its goal of being genuinely interdisciplinary.

This first interview revisits the 2007 book, The Origins of Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2007), which sets out some ideas as to how both meaning (as a relatively ‘private’ matter) and communication (a ‘public’ one) came to be elaborated in humans. We discuss how meaning can be characterised in a way that is evolutionarily friendly, and the kinds of neural processes that might underlie the shape of propositional thought. We look at the relation that might be argued between visual attention and (pre-)linguistic semantics. And we turn to studies of monkey alarm calls, and ask whether the origins of referential meaning are already exhibited by our distant primate cousins.

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Tony Veale, “Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) Dec 03, 2012

Show notes

In these days of increasing automation, the prospect of obsolescence is an alarming one for those of us who make a living by stringing words together instead of doing something demonstrably useful. From this perspective, it’s tempting to think of “computers”, “language” and “creativity” as the constituents of a literary behemoth that writes that brilliant novel, and a million others besides, only in seconds and for no money, while human authors starve in their garrets.

The future as envisaged by Tony Veale in Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) is rather more benign. He sees the technology as assistive to human creativity, but able to inject a level of complexity and originality that cannot be achieved in static works of reference. In particular, by extracting patterns from large corpora – most obviously the World Wide Web – software can already, for instance, suggest expressions to achieve a certain effect, leaving it up to the human author to choose from the options available.

In this interview, we talk about some of the insights into human language use offered by the computational approach, and how it may lead us to renegotiate our concepts of what constitutes creativity. We discuss how existing forms, including idioms, cliches and metaphors, can be re-used and re-purposed, and what goes into making a new variant truly original.

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