LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.07 (01) [E]

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07 December 2005 * Volume 01
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From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar"

Hi Ben,

You wrote:

>Mark, my linguistics teacher told us that in Southeast Asia
>where he did his studies, they never use babytalk or
>motherese. "They talk at them, not to them." A guy that I know
>from church tried this method with a little girl that he was
>babysitting. He said that at first, she would hold full
>conversations with him in preverbal gibberish, but they then
>migrated to verbal expressions. Her parents were amazed that
>she suddenly began to talk when she had not expressed much
>interest in talking previously. He said that he just talked to
>her as if she were an adult, and she mimicked and imitated
>until God's programming language allowed her to enter the
>realm of our spoken language.

Truly very interesting! Maybe babytalk is nonexistent in Southeast Asia 
because male and female registers are more alike? I guess, this assumption 
doesn't apply to Japanese however, as adult speech there would be highly 
partitioned.

Anyway, I do believe mimicry has always been a strong and thriving force in 
the process of language acquisition (if not in all things pedagogical and 
even beyond). When two people meet for example, both speaking mutually 
unintelligible languages, the situation often ends up with one of them 
purely imitating whole phrases of the other speaker (don't worry, I won't 
hint at apes now *s*). Surely, this is not meant to be highly efficient 
(rather a (comic) means to ease tension), but it goes to show that as a 
species we're quite skilful in remembering rhythm, rhyme and sounds! This 
makes me think that we'll never be able to fully grasp how language works, 
unless we discover how music/dance works. Music seems primal to me; a source 
from which other activities like poetry, storytelling, acting, shamanistic 
rituals, mere singing and spoken language sprang. Maybe grammar in language 
can be somewhat compared to chords in music: given a finite set of 
words/notes, they are like rules that try to define/defy harmony.

Every once in a while though, when language seems to become impoverished, 
music will give it a new shot. Now that the number of languages is dwindling 
at a fast rate; now that languages are shedding their complexity; I expect 
musicians to come up with something new...and the influence of artistic 
verbal behavior (speaking, rapping, singing, lyrics) on teen talk can hardly 
be overestimated.
So there you have it...a perpetuum mobile.

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

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From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.06 (05) [E]

Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>Now- it's hard to imagine for me that while the world around us is getting
complexer everywhere and everyday our languages allow 'themselves' to
become
less structured, to loose older fussines.<

But strange to tell that is what appears to be happening -

 it is as if the more complex we become, the less we need to be utterly
unambiguous in language.
As if we are more capable of handling nuances, homonyms, (such as flies &
flies???)  homophones etc

We do not seem to need all the specific pointers that made  a language
inflected  and the 'who/whom' example given some days ago is a perfect
example. Today's children find 'the 'm' of whom superfluous to
understanding so they omit it. But has anyone heard or seen anyone trying
to drop the 'se' of whose ? No -  because it serves a clear purpose.

Heather

PS re light - a question I posed some days ago

Most post war English publications have 'lighted' in print - yet listen to
a book being read aloud - on the radio for instance - and you will hear
only 'lit'.

What do you wrote and what do you say?
"I lighted a cigarette" or ' I lit a cigarette'
"He lighted the fire' 'He lit the fire'

and then go and check with some books on your shelves. lighted/lit?

Language change in action - or is it language manipulation by publishers
that isn't going down well with the grassroots speakers?

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.06 (05) [E]

> From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.05 (03) [E]
>
> Dear Ron and all Lowlanders,
>
> just being an absolute ignoramus I'm watching all the postings which came
> lately about phonological/grammatical developments with due respect and a
> more general interest.
>
> Already in earlier comments I stumbled over some remarks regarding a
> tendency of 'lazyness' in modern languages causing e.g. changes of
> consonants or simplification of grammar- and this to be watched
> worldwide,
> as I learned here.
>
> Now- it's hard to imagine for me that while the world around us is
> getting
> complexer everywhere and everyday our languages allow 'themselves' to
> become
> less structured, to loose older fussines.

Hi Jonny!

But then again people in the old days were a bit lazy about the word
order! The Romans couldn't be bothered worrying about whether:

"The girl ate the cake"

or:

"The cake ate the girl"

Because the case inflection told them which was the subject and which
the object. And they couldn't be bothered with the "the"s at all, the
lazy sods!

We still have one case inflection left in English, the genitive (though
some call it the "Saxon Genitive" and say it's not a case at all, hence
the apologetic apostrophe), but in Welsh they can't be bothered with any
sort of inflections on nouns and show the genitive by word order too.
It's as if in English:

"The girl's cake"

became

"Cake girl"

(because the Welsh can't be bothered with the "the" either, the lazy sods!).

In British Sign Language we're very stict about grammar - and very lazy
too! We have lots of inflections - and none, too! We say:

"Cake girl ate"

or:

"Girl cake ate"

We don't care which way round it goes because we know the cake didn't
eat the girl! Of course if we really mean it we can say the cake ate the
girl, by putting "girl" first, with a comma after her to indicate a
little pause in the signing:

"Girl, cake ate"

Now, you might think, since we know what's eating what, we don't care
where the "ate" goes either:

*"Eat cake girl"

but we do! The verb has to come after the object, that's a strict rule,
so that last one was wrong!

So you see we have both strict and lazy in BSL.

We also have a lot of inflections in BSL, and at the same time we don't.
We have two signs for "run", for example - one takes loads of
inflections, the other, none at all!

Of course, the Romans weren't quite as fussy about prepositions as we
are. Do you ever think about sentences like this?:

"He looked towards the sun"
"He looked sunwards"

Maybe could speakwe English very much as the Romans spoke Latin, really
wantedweif, Simplit, just takeyou all those little words and stickem the
endson nounsof suchlikand!

Maybe English isn't that much different Latinfrom and nobody's really
lazy, Is justit six half-a-dozenand!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.06 (08) [E]

> From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.06 (01) [E]
>
> Hello Sandy and everyone,
>
> Wor Sandy wrote:
>
>> At which point do "I should cocoa!", "Tha'll burn
>> in hell thee will, lad!", "You should be so lucky!", "A Jedi seeks not
>> these things", "I enjoyed the party, I'm not saying that"*, "He don't
>> want to go,"** "I'd rather be the devil to be that woman man,"*** or
>> "It's got a certain je ne sais quoi," become not-English? They certainly
>> all seem to be part of English discourse.
>
>
> They may be English (I think they are) or not. But try to discuss
> whether they are or not without using syntax.
>
Well, we could try discussing it purely through neurolongistics - it's
only a question of whether we know enough about it!

>> I'm not sure exactly why you think you need an infinite number of
>> exemplars.
>
> Because no matter how many exemplars you present I can always present
> you with a new sentence that has no previous exemplar.

OK, let's see if you can!

> Any sentence that
> is longer than the longest exemplar does not have an exemplar for it.

But it does:

"George sat on a chair."
"Little Miss Muffet is a wimp."
"She sat criying her eyes out."
"Show me the box and wrappiing."

"Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey."

I think you're assuming that one examplar generates one sentence - ie
you're still thinking of syntax rules.

> Every child learning her/his mother tongue re-creates the rules of the
> language from the sentences they hear

But do they? Like I've said, the rules created by neural nets aren't the
rules of grammar (or juggling, or whatever). Each person's brain
probably contains its own rules for manipulating language. They might
give the same results, but it doesn't mean they're using the same rules.
It's a bit like in computer programming: ask two procrammers to write a
wordprocessor from scratch, according to a precisely defined
specification, the results may (or may not!) be as specified, but the
chances of their code being the least bit similar is remote (aside from
any common engineering techniques they've referred to).

> I'm not telling you to make every sentence to be a noun phrase followed
> by a verb phrase, (however dictatorial my personality). The rules are
> not legal injunctions, but descriptions, in the same way that physical
> laws are descriptions. Light doesn't travel at 299792.458 km/s. because
> Einstein or somebody told it to but because that's the way light works.

This is a pertinent analogy. You can look at the General Relativity and
say, "But is this the way light works? Or is it the end result of a much
more complicated process which we perceive as this simple end result?"
Is it possible, for example, that light doesn't travel at all (like the
ship in Futurama, whose engine moves the rest of the universe around it
:)? Whatever the answer to that is, it's true that just because syntax
rules can be derived doesn't imply they exist as a common structure in
different brains.

One thing you might think about is the way we handle not only syntax but
phonology, semantics, morphology, interfaces and so on. They're all very
different sets of rules but closely interconnected (for example, the
more morphology in a language, the less syntax and vice versa, as a
rule). To me that means that syntax as we describe it is an abstraction
of something quite different. Since we have to go through something
quite different from our syntax rules to get to the workings of language
in the brain, I'd be very surprised to find these syntax rules
represented in the brain (excluding where we've analysed language into
syntax rules and stored these rules in the brain thorugh memorisation!).

It is important not to confuse a description of a thing with the way the
thing works. Remember the problems we used to have in physics when we
thought space was flat? It's only when we say "but is it?" that we can
get beyond all those things that are obvious, but wrong  :)

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/ 

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