English speaker walks into a bar in China hoping to practice his Chinese*. Chinese waiter walks up to the gweilo hoping to practice his English, and the game begins. A lingo-blogger takes on the heavy challenge of analyzing this linguistic power struggle in a post on sinosplice. In classic linguistic fashion, he devises a rule:
John's Rule For Determining Language:
Given a conscious choice between a number of languages to use for interaction, speakers will naturally tend to choose the common language in which the poorer speaker’s level is highest.
John wiggles by stipulating that "there’s no strict right or wrong here" (all linguistic "rules" require that same stipulation, haha, so what the hell's the point of a rule!!). But John uses this rule to define a linguistic strategy: "if I want to improve my Chinese without all this strife, I need to find Chinese speakers with English worse than my Chinese."
While John evokes communication efficiency as his basis for this strategy, he misses a crucial factor: appropriateness. It's not really appropriate for a customer to use a waiter for language practice, and vice versa. Even though it's effective for language learning purposes, that's just not why bars exist. Once John as customer violates the appropriateness, he's all but invited that waiter to do the same. At that point, all rules are off, it becomes a linguistic jungle with each speaker fighting for survival.
Unfortunately, neither John nor I could find any academic research on this topic (I found tons on inter cultural pragmatics, but nothing obviously on this particular situation). I suspect it's out there, it's just hard to find. What terms should I search for? Hmmm, it's an odd one, no doubt.
*The blogger did not specify what dialect, though Mandarin is likely.
Showing posts with label pragmatics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pragmatics. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
On The Campus Frame
(UT Austin's Main Building)
On Saturday morning, I found the above sign pragmatically odd.
Wondering down Guadalupe that morning after my latte at The Hideout (and wishing I'd known about the Texas Round-Up 5k ahead of time so I could have run), I decided to check out the UT Austin campus. The morning was a gloriously sunny 70 degrees, no clouds or wind, and I love exploring college campuses. UT has a nice, almost stereotypical layout with large academic buildings, rolling hills, stone staircases, the large football stadium to the West, and the UT Austin Tower ominously presiding over all. My meandering tour brought me up a series of stairs to the face of the tower's building. Academic buildings tend to be named after people (e.g., the building next to the tower is called the Dorothy L. Gebauer Building). But when I walked up to the tower building's sign, all I found was a pragmatics puzzle: Main Building.
I snapped the pic above and strode over to Caffé Medici to ruminate on why I found this sign so pragmatically odd. It is, in fact, less obscure than Dorothy L. Gebauer, right? Quite straight forward. This is one building amongst many which serves as some sort of center point for activity. First among equals, to borrow a term from the political realm. This should be a perfect instantiation of FrameNet's Locale_by_use frame (of which campus is in fact a lexical unit) whereby the NP Main Building evokes a Constituent_part ("Salient parts that make up a Locale") of a Locale (A stable bounded area). But why did did I find it odd?
After lunching at Veggie Heaven (and escaping a near death experience crossing Lavaca), I could only come up with the suspicion that the high frequency of person names for academic building trumps the logic of the frame model. In other words, I accept that there probably exists some cognitively real conceptual object roughly equivalent to a frame, and our human language system uses frames in some way to build a semantic representation of an input like Main Building in order draw inferences about the role of that object in some state-of-affairs; nonetheless, if objects within that state-of-affairs have a statistically significant tendency to be named using highly specific non-functional terms, then a building with a general and functional name will stand apart as somehow not a proper member of the state-of-affairs. Membership in the group is NOT determined by its role in a frame, but rather by its similarity to other members of the group.
I'm reminded of the beer from Repo Man:
This generic BEER (which was, ever so briefly, a real product in American stores in the early 1980s) never quite took hold. It just didn't fit. I suspect BEER is a nice example of monopolistic competition. They flouted the need to distinguish their nearly identical product in a tough competitive market, hoping their floutestation alone would distinguish it (yep, I made that word up and I'm sticking with it). It would, however, take some logical flips and leaps to make the connection to the Main Building example (not saying there ain't a cognitive connection, just sayin I'm a lazy blogger). Phew! That took a lot of words to state the obvious...and explaining the card game frame necessary to understand my use of a trumps is another post entirely.
NOTE: Yes, I challenged myself to include as many Austin sites as possible in this post. Just 'cause I've been spending the last few weekend sin Austin. But rest assured, my morning followed almost exactly this story.
BTW: What the hell is that image on the banner of UT Austin Linguistics homepage? Is that an FSA leading into a spectrogram? Huh? If yes, shouldn't the nodes have state labels and the arcs have transition labels? And why does the final node transition to the little stop image?
Oh yeah, and I really hate this: (hint, see source for HTMl code).
Wondering down Guadalupe that morning after my latte at The Hideout (and wishing I'd known about the Texas Round-Up 5k ahead of time so I could have run), I decided to check out the UT Austin campus. The morning was a gloriously sunny 70 degrees, no clouds or wind, and I love exploring college campuses. UT has a nice, almost stereotypical layout with large academic buildings, rolling hills, stone staircases, the large football stadium to the West, and the UT Austin Tower ominously presiding over all. My meandering tour brought me up a series of stairs to the face of the tower's building. Academic buildings tend to be named after people (e.g., the building next to the tower is called the Dorothy L. Gebauer Building). But when I walked up to the tower building's sign, all I found was a pragmatics puzzle: Main Building.
I snapped the pic above and strode over to Caffé Medici to ruminate on why I found this sign so pragmatically odd. It is, in fact, less obscure than Dorothy L. Gebauer, right? Quite straight forward. This is one building amongst many which serves as some sort of center point for activity. First among equals, to borrow a term from the political realm. This should be a perfect instantiation of FrameNet's Locale_by_use frame (of which campus is in fact a lexical unit) whereby the NP Main Building evokes a Constituent_part ("Salient parts that make up a Locale") of a Locale (A stable bounded area). But why did did I find it odd?
After lunching at Veggie Heaven (and escaping a near death experience crossing Lavaca), I could only come up with the suspicion that the high frequency of person names for academic building trumps the logic of the frame model. In other words, I accept that there probably exists some cognitively real conceptual object roughly equivalent to a frame, and our human language system uses frames in some way to build a semantic representation of an input like Main Building in order draw inferences about the role of that object in some state-of-affairs; nonetheless, if objects within that state-of-affairs have a statistically significant tendency to be named using highly specific non-functional terms, then a building with a general and functional name will stand apart as somehow not a proper member of the state-of-affairs. Membership in the group is NOT determined by its role in a frame, but rather by its similarity to other members of the group.
I'm reminded of the beer from Repo Man:
(image from qbn.com)
NOTE: Yes, I challenged myself to include as many Austin sites as possible in this post. Just 'cause I've been spending the last few weekend sin Austin. But rest assured, my morning followed almost exactly this story.
BTW: What the hell is that image on the banner of UT Austin Linguistics homepage? Is that an FSA leading into a spectrogram? Huh? If yes, shouldn't the nodes have state labels and the arcs have transition labels? And why does the final node transition to the little stop image?
Oh yeah, and I really hate this: (hint, see source for HTMl code).
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Give it to me!
Sean, a grad student in linguistics at University of Edinburgh who blogs at The Adventures of Auck (which has a nifty header that you get to play with), has a nice post where he walks through competing hypotheses and experiments regarding the role of pragmatic cues in children's word learning. Read it HERE. Money quote:
Children try to integrate cues from different domains into one coherent communicative intention. It is suggested that it may be harder to modify lexical entries for familiar words without a clear reason than to link novel words to familiar objects.
Children try to integrate cues from different domains into one coherent communicative intention. It is suggested that it may be harder to modify lexical entries for familiar words without a clear reason than to link novel words to familiar objects.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Family Guy Linguistics
The most recent Family Guy episode ("Family Gay": Season 7, Episode 8 ) relied on some interesting linguistics in two separate jokes.
First, when Peter enters his brain damaged horse, 'Till Death, in a race, it runs amok in the crowd and the announcer on the loud speaker says the following (about the 5:50 mark on Hulu):
What's this? It looks like 'Till Death has taken a right turn and is heading into the stands. Dear god! I could describe the horror I am witnessing but it is so unfathomably ugly and heart rendering that I cannot bring myself to do so, although I do posess the necessary descriptive powers. Haw, well at least the horse raced past the class of visiting deaf second graders...oh no! Dear god he's going back oh I know you can't hear any screams but I assure you they are signing frantically just as fast as their little fingers can shape the complicated phonemes necessary to convey dread and terror.
Having never studied the linguistics of sign language, my first reaction was to ask, are there truly phonemes in sign langauge? In spoken language, a phoneme is a conceptual clustering of phonetic segments into a single group. For example, in English the segment /p/ can occur with a little extra burst of air called aspiration (typically at the beginning of words), or not, like at the end of words (try saying the words "pat" and "tap" with your hand in front of your lips and, if you're a native speaker if English, you should be able to feel the little burst of air that accompanies the /p/ in "pat" but not in "tap"). So, there is a difference in how we articulate /p/ depending on where it occurs in a word. Nonetheless, we still consider both versions of /p/ to be "the same sound." We say there is a single phoneme [p] with two phonetic realizations, aspirated and unaspirated.
But this use of "phoneme" is based on spoken language. How does this relate to signed languages like ASL? After a quick bit of Googling, I've discovered that the term "phoneme" is in fact used to refer to segments of signed language by various sign language scholars, though it is used more as a conceptual borrowing than as a term referring to sound. The most relevant discussion I found was in an abstract for the paper "Sign language phoneme transcription with PCA-based representation" by Kong, W.W. and Ranganath, S. (from the National University of Singapore). They "first apply a semi-automatic segmentation algorithm which detects minimal velocity and maximal change of directional angle to segment the hand motion trajectory of signed sentences. We then extract feature descriptors based on principal component analysis (PCA) to represent the segments efficiently. These high level features are used with k-means to cluster the segments to form phonemes." According to this approach, phonetic segments are roughly approximated to sign language as feature sets composed of "minimal velocity and maximal change of directional angle" and phonemes are approximated as k-means clusters of those feature sets. Cool stuff, for sure. But it's not clear to me if this computational approach is consistent with the natural way humans actually perceive and analyze sign language segments. I'm still looking for more on that topic.
Nonetheless, there remains the issue of the Family Guy writers getting the nature of phonemes fundamentally wrong. Phonemes convey no meaning (excusing for the moment the weak possibility of sound symbolic associations). The writers, who were clearly willing to do a little research (even if a very little), could easily have substituted "morphemes" for "phonemes" in the script and would have had the same joke without the error. And just how complicated are the signs for dread and terror anyway?
(pssst, I've clearly spent too much time reading linguistics because when I first read "the horse raced past the class of visiting deaf second graders" I assumed it was a garden path sentence similar to Bever's famed example "The horse raced past the barn fell." It took me several reads to realize that, nope, "raced" is not a reduced relative clause, but rather a run-of-the-mill past tense main verb. A nice example of construction priming, eh? I'm primed to read any "X raced past Y" clause as being a reduced relative).
Second, the writers went out of their way to construct a joke not only based on conversational pragmatics, but based on EXPLAINING Gricean maxims (about the 9:50 mark on Hulu.com).
Lois: Peter, what exactly did they inject you with?
Peter: Oh all sorts of things. Hepatitis vaccine, a couple of steroids, the gay gene, calcium, a vitamin B extract...
Lois: What did you just say?
Peter: The gay gene. I assume that's the one you meant even though it wasn't literally the last thing I said when you said what did you just say, it's just that clearly (it) was most unusual... (note: the pronoun "it" was reduced to near imperceptibility).
In this exchange, Peter explains that, under normal circumstances, after listing a set of items and someone asks "what did you just say" he would interpret "what" as referring to the most recent item in the list (presumably because of the semantics of "just"). But in this case, one earlier item was more "unusual" than the others.
Let's re-explain this using conversational pragmatics and Gricean maxims, okay?
Peter lists five items. He believes that one of the five items is controversial while the other four are not. He believes Lois believes this too. The controversial item is in the middle of the list. Peter believes he articulated each item clearly such that Lois could properly hear all items. He believes Lois believes this too. So, when Lois asks "what did you just say," Peter believes 1) that she heard the most recent item clearly and 2) that this item has little informational value. He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes Lois is not flouting conversational norms. He believes Lois believes this too. Therefore, Peter believes Lois is trying to make her contribution (her question) informative (maxim of quantity). He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes that repeating a well heard, uncontroversial item has no information value. He believes Lois believes this too. Thus, he infers that "what" must refer to some item other than the last one. He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes there is only one item on the list that meets the information value requirement. He believes Lois believes this too.
This is a long-winded way of saying the same thing Peter did, but we linguists have to make things complicated and technical. It's our job.
First, when Peter enters his brain damaged horse, 'Till Death, in a race, it runs amok in the crowd and the announcer on the loud speaker says the following (about the 5:50 mark on Hulu):
What's this? It looks like 'Till Death has taken a right turn and is heading into the stands. Dear god! I could describe the horror I am witnessing but it is so unfathomably ugly and heart rendering that I cannot bring myself to do so, although I do posess the necessary descriptive powers. Haw, well at least the horse raced past the class of visiting deaf second graders...oh no! Dear god he's going back oh I know you can't hear any screams but I assure you they are signing frantically just as fast as their little fingers can shape the complicated phonemes necessary to convey dread and terror.
Having never studied the linguistics of sign language, my first reaction was to ask, are there truly phonemes in sign langauge? In spoken language, a phoneme is a conceptual clustering of phonetic segments into a single group. For example, in English the segment /p/ can occur with a little extra burst of air called aspiration (typically at the beginning of words), or not, like at the end of words (try saying the words "pat" and "tap" with your hand in front of your lips and, if you're a native speaker if English, you should be able to feel the little burst of air that accompanies the /p/ in "pat" but not in "tap"). So, there is a difference in how we articulate /p/ depending on where it occurs in a word. Nonetheless, we still consider both versions of /p/ to be "the same sound." We say there is a single phoneme [p] with two phonetic realizations, aspirated and unaspirated.
But this use of "phoneme" is based on spoken language. How does this relate to signed languages like ASL? After a quick bit of Googling, I've discovered that the term "phoneme" is in fact used to refer to segments of signed language by various sign language scholars, though it is used more as a conceptual borrowing than as a term referring to sound. The most relevant discussion I found was in an abstract for the paper "Sign language phoneme transcription with PCA-based representation" by Kong, W.W. and Ranganath, S. (from the National University of Singapore). They "first apply a semi-automatic segmentation algorithm which detects minimal velocity and maximal change of directional angle to segment the hand motion trajectory of signed sentences. We then extract feature descriptors based on principal component analysis (PCA) to represent the segments efficiently. These high level features are used with k-means to cluster the segments to form phonemes." According to this approach, phonetic segments are roughly approximated to sign language as feature sets composed of "minimal velocity and maximal change of directional angle" and phonemes are approximated as k-means clusters of those feature sets. Cool stuff, for sure. But it's not clear to me if this computational approach is consistent with the natural way humans actually perceive and analyze sign language segments. I'm still looking for more on that topic.
Nonetheless, there remains the issue of the Family Guy writers getting the nature of phonemes fundamentally wrong. Phonemes convey no meaning (excusing for the moment the weak possibility of sound symbolic associations). The writers, who were clearly willing to do a little research (even if a very little), could easily have substituted "morphemes" for "phonemes" in the script and would have had the same joke without the error. And just how complicated are the signs for dread and terror anyway?
(pssst, I've clearly spent too much time reading linguistics because when I first read "the horse raced past the class of visiting deaf second graders" I assumed it was a garden path sentence similar to Bever's famed example "The horse raced past the barn fell." It took me several reads to realize that, nope, "raced" is not a reduced relative clause, but rather a run-of-the-mill past tense main verb. A nice example of construction priming, eh? I'm primed to read any "X raced past Y" clause as being a reduced relative).
Second, the writers went out of their way to construct a joke not only based on conversational pragmatics, but based on EXPLAINING Gricean maxims (about the 9:50 mark on Hulu.com).
Lois: Peter, what exactly did they inject you with?
Peter: Oh all sorts of things. Hepatitis vaccine, a couple of steroids, the gay gene, calcium, a vitamin B extract...
Lois: What did you just say?
Peter: The gay gene. I assume that's the one you meant even though it wasn't literally the last thing I said when you said what did you just say, it's just that clearly (it) was most unusual... (note: the pronoun "it" was reduced to near imperceptibility).
In this exchange, Peter explains that, under normal circumstances, after listing a set of items and someone asks "what did you just say" he would interpret "what" as referring to the most recent item in the list (presumably because of the semantics of "just"). But in this case, one earlier item was more "unusual" than the others.
Let's re-explain this using conversational pragmatics and Gricean maxims, okay?
Peter lists five items. He believes that one of the five items is controversial while the other four are not. He believes Lois believes this too. The controversial item is in the middle of the list. Peter believes he articulated each item clearly such that Lois could properly hear all items. He believes Lois believes this too. So, when Lois asks "what did you just say," Peter believes 1) that she heard the most recent item clearly and 2) that this item has little informational value. He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes Lois is not flouting conversational norms. He believes Lois believes this too. Therefore, Peter believes Lois is trying to make her contribution (her question) informative (maxim of quantity). He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes that repeating a well heard, uncontroversial item has no information value. He believes Lois believes this too. Thus, he infers that "what" must refer to some item other than the last one. He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes there is only one item on the list that meets the information value requirement. He believes Lois believes this too.
This is a long-winded way of saying the same thing Peter did, but we linguists have to make things complicated and technical. It's our job.
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