The Science of Language

We usually avoid shop talk here on Language Log. So those of you who are here for the cartoons may want to move along, since I'm about to (mis-?) use this forum to announce a new journal.

The Journal of Experimental Linguistics is part of the Linguistic Society of America's eLanguage initiative. Like the rest of eLanguage, JEL is an Open Access online journal. Regular publication will begin towards the end of 2009.

JEL is a linguistic "journal of reproducible research", that is, a journal of reproducible computational experiments on topics related to speech and language. These experiments may involve the analysis of previously­ published corpus data, or of experiment­-specific data that is published for the occasion. Other relevant categories include computational simulations, implementations of diagnostic techniques or task scoring methods, methodological tutorials, and reviews of relevant new publications (including new data and software).

In all cases, JEL articles will be accompanied by executable recipes for re­creating all figures, tables, numbers and other results. These recipes will be in the form of source code that runs in some generally-­available computational environment.

Although JEL is centered in linguistics, we aim to publish research from the widest possible range of disciplines that engage speech and language experimentally, from electrical engineering and computer science to education, psychology, biology, and speech pathology. In this interdisciplinary context, "reproducible research" is especially useful in helping experimental and analytical techniques to cross over from one sub­field to another.

Publication is in online digital form only, with articles appearing as they complete the review process. A rigorous but rapid process of peer review, designed to take no more than 4-6 weeks from submission to publication, will be supplemented by a vigorously­-promoted system for adding moderated remarks and replies after publication.

The editorial board, in alphabetical order, is Alan Black, Steven Bird, Harald Baayen, Paul Boersma, Tim Bunnell, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, John Coleman, Eric Fosler­-Lussier, John Goldsmith, Jen Hay, Stephen Isard, Greg Kochanski, Lori Levin, Mark Liberman, Brian MacWhinney, Ani Nenkova, James Pennebaker, Stuart Shieber, Chilin Shih, David Talkin, Betty Tuller, and Jiahong Yuan. Mark Liberman is the editor in chief.

My involvement with this idea started with a Language Log post: "Executable Articles", 1/3/2007. There was some further discussion, on the blog and off, and Dieter Stein asked me to organize a special session on "Open Data and Reproducible Research" at the Berlin 6 Open Access conference. The JEL eLanguage proposal followed; the LSA executive committee approved it;  after some infrastructure work in the background, we're now ready to start accepting submissions; and JEL should be on the air by the end of the year.

A recent xkcd:

Who knew that the guy in the hat was actually Sasha Baron Cohen?

Of course, almost every conversation is a little bit divergent in this way, or there wouldn't be much point in talking.

It has been two weeks now, and so far no one here at Language Log Plaza has commented on the BBC News story entitled "Monkeys recognize bad grammar." I suppose people are assuming that I cover the Stupid Animal Communication Stories desk. And often I have. But I have been procrastinating, because I am getting tired of being the animal grammar killjoy. People are beginning to think I hate monkeys and dogs and parrots and dolphins and such (my previous posts include this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and probably others).

The little animals in question (it's cottontop tamarins again) are cute. I don't have anything against them, or against the experiments on them being done by people like Marc Hauser. In the present case, the team was led by Ansgar Endress. And here is the evidence for these little creatures' ability to "recognize bad grammar". It's quite simple, and I don't think it's going to get them jobs as copy editors.

It turns out that if you expose a cottontop tamarin to a recording of someone saying shoy-bi, shoy-la, shoy-ro, etc., over and over again for a whole day, they get used to it; and then the next day if you do it some more, but then interrupt the monotony with the sound of someone saying bi-shoy, or la-shoy, they look at the sound source. It's novel to them now, and the novelty surprises them a little bit, so they look at the loudspeaker. That's it.

Clever monkeys: they know the sound sequences of the current ambient environment, and they're alert to what's new in the auditory environment. But really: recognizing bad grammar? I suppose Harvard behavioral scientists have to make their papers sound potentially relevant to cognition, and BBC science reporters have to make stories sound potentially interesting, and a headline like "Monkeys recognize changes in their auditory environment" would not set the world (or the World Service) on fire. But that seems to be what we have here. The researchers have just dressed up the description of the recorded sounds in linguistic terminology ("prefixation", "suffixation"). But it's not clear to me that a monkey's ability to notice the difference between shoybi and bishoy is any more linguistically interesting than an ability to notice the difference between thump-splash and splash-thump, or to notice that your door chime has just gone DONG DING instead of DING DONG or that you just changed the radio station.

The recent discussion of how to pronounce "Uyghur", and especially the treatment of the medial consonant, brought up the case of yoghurt/yogurt, which in French is "yaourt" — and today on the Omniglot Blog the Word of the Day is yaourter, "to yoghurt", which is said to be

a French word for the way people attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that they don’t know very well. Often they mishear and misinterpret the word or lyrics and substitute them with familiar words.

Some of the comments on the Omniglot post suggest that the English equivalent is the noun mondegreen. I've never heard anyone verbing mondegreen, and a bit of web search doesn't turn up much except for the http://twitter.com/mondegreened (which I'm sorry to say belong to someone named "Julian", not "Ed"), and a post on "The mondegreening of America", and a few other things.

But it seems that the key thing about the French word is the nonsense imitation of another language, which is more like a specialization of doubletalk than a verbal equivalent of mondegreen.

There's nothing available from Gallica,  nor from wordreference.com, nor from the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, so (pending asking Francophone friends) I need to fall back on general web search. And that turns up things like this comment:

Just for the story, in France, when we don't speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it "yaourter"(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the "cowboy" accent.

Or this one:

Prenez une poignée de bons amis, de préférence des amis aimant chanter, chantonner, fredonner ou même yaourter. Et qui n’ont pas spécialement peur, les liquides houblonnés aidant, de se cramer la honte dans des bars où ils sont pourtant connus. Mettez leur entre les pattes une petite boite carrée pleine de cartes, nommée Shabadabada, et laissez agir quelques heures. Observez le résultat : il semblerait qu’ils alternent des phases de faisage de gueule et d’autres de franche rigolade.

Or again this:

… j'ai rajouté de la super musique dans le lecteur sur votre droite… Playlist à chanter, yaourter, meumeumer, hurler, casseroler aussi!…

These examples do make it seem as if yaourter is a mode of vocal production, with any sense of "slip of the ear" being very much secondary. And it's not clear to me whether imitating the sound of another language is central to its meaning, or if it's rather something more like scat-singing, or sung double-talk, or something like that.

English has a lot of words for speaking or singing nonsensically, but I can't think of any word that refers specifically to nonsensical imitations of the speech of foreigners, although there's a long anglophone tradition of producing such imitations for the amusement of others.

It isn't often that I encounter an English word that I don't know other than names of chemical compounds, but I recently learned a new word for something not all that obscure. In a context in which I expected the word monopoly, I encountered monopsony. At first I thought it was a mistake, but it recurred. It turns out that economists distinguish between monopolies and monopsonies. When there is a single source for a product, that is a monopoly, but when there is only a single buyer for a product, that is a monopsony. Who knew?

The classic example of a monopsony is what I have hitherto known as the Chinese salt monopoly. Throughout most of Chinese history, anybody could produce salt, but they had to sell it to the government, which then sold it to consumers. This is why the classic work of Chinese economics, the proceedings of a conference held in 81 BCE with appended commentary, is entitled 塩鉄論 Discourses on Salt and Iron.

Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter for 5/27/2009:

This reminds me of some of the discussions of California's ballot proposition system — and since the cartoon came out the day after the California Supreme Court ruled on Proposition 8, I guess that it was supposed to.

The xkcd cartoon calls it "qwertial aphasia", but aphasia isn't quite the right term. The phenomenon is by no means unknown, however.

By the way, qwertial is a cute derivative from QWERTY.

(Hat tip to John Riemann Soong.)

[Addenda 7/22/09: I now realize that qwertial is also not really appropriate; the intrusive elements aren't single letters, but whole expressions.

Next, a message from Bruce Rusk:

Your post on LL today says of the accidental inclusion of spoken words in writing that “The phenomenon is by no means unknown, however.” Certainly true: a parable recounted by the 3rd-century BCE Chinese thinker Han Fei tells of a man who was writing at night and told the servant holding the light to “raise the lamp.” As he did so he accidentally inserted the words “raise the lamp” into his letter, setting off a chain of events of which Han Fei makes a great deal. So the phenomenon has probably been around as long as writing (or at least easy writing with pen or brush).

Finally, a note on aphasia. Sometimes when I cite ordinary-life examples of glitches of one kind or another, people identify them as aphasic, explaining that they're just the sort of thing you hear (or read) from aphasics. This is true, but in an important sense it has the relationship backwards. There are all sorts of everyday speech errors, and they aren't symptoms of pathology. Instead, in aphasias and other language pathologies, errors occur much more frequently and in greater profusion (making speech and writing often very hard to understand) — but with rare exceptions, the errors in language pathologies are of the same sort as everyday errors.]

An editorial by Miranda Robertson in the latest Journal of Biology, "Of primordial genomes and cooperative kittens", discusses the problems that horizontal gene transfers pose for phylogenetic analysis of bacterial genomes:

The extraction of tree structures from the web of gene transfers requires that transferred genes be subtracted by some means from the database of genes used to construct the trees. […]

Whether because of horizontal gene transfer or the compression of branching events early in the evolution of prokaryotes, the lines of vertical descent […] defy resolution, at least for now and perhaps for ever. There is a character in the comic opera The Mikado, by WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who claims: 'I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently my family pride is something inconceivable.' Inconceivable and probably misplaced, it would seem. The character is named, more appropriately even than Gilbert could have imagined, Pooh-Bah.

As you'll see if you read the editorial and the articles it references, the analogies between the evolution of species and of languages are closer than Charles Darwin knew when he first suggested the metaphor. Like languages, species exhibit the borrowing of traits ("horizontal gene transfer"), and also areal features ("false vertical signals reflecting preferential gene transfer between bacterial species from quite separate branches of the phylogenetic tree and that happen to share a habitat").

One difference: horizontal gene transfer, as I understand it, is much less common as you look higher up in the evolutionary tree of species. (Though I guess there are some theories according to which rates and even types of linguistic "horizontal transfer" might have been strikingly different in different historical periods.)

As for the cooperative kittens,

Sleeping kittens are invoked to explain the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model for cooperative binding of oxygen by hemoglobin, in which it is assumed that oxygen binding to one subunit has no effect on the affinity of the other subunits for oxygen, but that the conformational changes that increase or decrease oxygen affinity occur in unison. Readers who find the behavior of kittens easier to understand than the behavior of molecules may be encouraged by the analogy to read the non-kitten paragraphs too.

There are linguistic analogies here as well, but I'll leave those for another day.

Normal 0 0 1 189 1082 9 2 1328 11.1282 0 0 0

A few years ago, before my wife was released from the hospital after hip replacement surgery, her leg began swelling up and she had great pain and discomfort. Quickly she was sent back to surgery to have a previously undetected bleeder repaired. The highly respected surgeon obviously missed it. Next day a huge bouquet of roses appeared in her hospital room, sent by that very doctor. And then, perhaps coincidentally, he retired from practice within the next few weeks. I don’t recall now whether he actually said he was sorry for his error, but the roses gave us every indication that he was. It was a malpractice suit waiting to happen.

We had no intention to sue him and we didn’t, but of course he couldn’t have known that. We were actually pleased that he acknowledged his error (indirectly at least). Contrary to the belief of some surgeons, he was as subject to error-making as any other human being.

These days it looks like saying you’re sorry seems to be catching on in the medical world (see here). According to this article, it not only makes everyone feel better, but saying you’re sorry also actually cuts down on medical malpractice suits. I'd guess that being honest is one way to deal with the current debates about cutting medical costs. As many politicians are learning these days, things get much worse when you try to cover up your mistakes.

It's common practice in the trademark world to never, never, never use your trademarked name as a verb or a noun. If you do this, you'll be committing genericide, because your brand name will surely lose its distinctiveness and pretty soon you'll be losing your market edge. Why else would Xerox try so hard to teach us to say " to photocopy" rather than "to xerox"? Always use your name as an adjective, "Xerox photocopiers." But the New York Times reports that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer doesn't much believe in common practice, and he's now busily ignoring what everyone else is doing. He wants us to say, "he will bing you tomorrow," which more problematically might lead to, "he banged you yesterday."   

Maybe Ballmer recognizes that things change so rapidly in this wonderful electronic age that there's no real benefit to be derived from long-term brand names. But while Google is still holding firm against "googling" and "googled," I wonder if Ballmer is on to something here. He seems to delight in the possibility that  Bing has the potential "to verb up."