talking isn't writing, part 3

The typical grammar of conversation is radically different from the typical grammar of informational writing.

Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad

Katharine on awkward student sentences

Here is Katharine on students using "it" as the subject of their sentences:

In terms of awkward sentences written by students, what I'm seeing is an avoidance of modified nouns as subjects. Instead, the would-be modified-noun subject is "factored out" of the sentence into a modifier, and then replaced by "it":

In Happe’s article it is said that this deficit is due to an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions.

[As opposed to Happe's article says that... Notice, btw, that the final noun phrase, the object of "due to", is heavily modified]

Or:

By discovering which parts of communication are more challenging to develop, it can help speech researchers discover where people with other language and communication challenges stumble as well.

[Instead of: Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging can help...]

Actually, only the first example ("Happe's article") is a modified noun; the second one is a sentential subject ("Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging"). So more precisely what I'm seeing is an avoidance of any syntactically complex element in subject position.

Perhaps this goes for speech as well?

in the predicate: an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions

in the subject: it

Interesting.

talking isn't writing, part 2

John McWhorter gives the timeline.

I think he may be wrong (or perhaps I mean misleading) about the simplicity of spoken English, however:

Thus spoken language is fundamental, while written language is an artifice. Not surprisingly, then, the earliest writing was based on the way people talk, and that meant short sentences with a direct logical throughline. Researchers have found that even educated people today speak in word packets of 7 to 10 words a pop.

Talking With Your Fingers

I'm not so sure about that "direct logic throughline" concept, I must say. As far as I can tell, the Longman Grammar corpus study found that conversational English is more grammatically complex than linguists have assumed, which may (or may not) mean that the logic of spoken English is less direct than the simple Subject-Verb-Object ordering we imagine is typical of speech. And it strikes me that transcripts of spoken English often show a certain meandering quality.

But I don't know.

[update 4/27/2012: As I think about it, I realize I have no idea whether transcripts do or do not show meandering...]

RELATED: The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing is Bill Robinson's Rhetorical and Grammatical Dependency in Adverb Clauses, which appeared in a 1995 edition Syntax in the Schools.

Robinson summarizes Kellogg Hunt's study comparing K-12 students to professional writers. Surprisingly, Hunt found that professional writers did not use more subordinate clauses than novice writers:

In short, the high school seniors were using coordination and subordination at almost the same rate as professional writers of superior ability.

The major difference between professionals and students was that professionals wrote much longer sentences, 40% longer to be exact. And what made the sentences of professionals longer wasn't the presence of more clauses per sentence, but the presence of longer clauses.

It seems that professionals do a great deal of "noun modification."

Which, upon reflection, I'm thinking is right. At the moment, if I had to say what I do that a student writer does not do, I would go with: noun modification and plenty of it!

EXCEPT: I'm not so sure that's true of blog writing.

How much noun modification is going on in this post, for instance?

Not too much. Assuming I know what noun modification actually is, of course, which I may not.

I probably need a 1200-page corpus study to nail this down.

update 4/27/2012: Actually, there's a lot of noun modification going on in a subject as long as this one: "The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing..."

answer key

Most common verb in spoken English: get

[T]he extremely high frequency of the verb get in conversation is more surprising for most people. This verb goes largely unnoticed, yet in conversation it is by far the single most common lexical verb. The main reason that get is so common is that it is extremely versatile, being used with a wide range of meanings. These include:

• Obtaining something: See if they can get some of that beer.
• Possession: They’ve got a big house.
• Moving to or away from something: Get in the car.
• Causing something to move or happen: It gets people talking again, right?
• Understanding something: Do you get it?
• Changing to a new state: So I’m getting that way now.

Corpus Linguistics and Grammar Teaching
Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad

I missed it by a mile. (I said 'be,' which I gather is right if you're talking about the most common verb used in writing.)

New Blogger post window is not easy, and not fun.

Right-side menu is now stuck open, covering up one or two words at the end of each line.

I wonder how hard it is to move to Wordpress?

I love Wordpress.

Pop quiz

What is the most commonly used verb in spoken English?

I have discovered the joys of corpus studies.

answer

teach clauses first

A lot of my students have been told never to start a sentence with the word "because."

I assume they've been told this because they write so many sentence fragments that start with subordinating conjunctions.

Because the sky is blue.
Because money doesn't grow on trees.
Because I said so.

If you tell students never to begin a sentence with because, you don't get sentence fragments that start with because. That's good.

Unfortunately, if you tell students never to begin a sentence with because, you also don't get any real sentences that start with because, and that's bad:

Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry.
Because money doesn't grow on trees, I am canceling your data plan.
Because I said so is why.

These are all excellent sentences, perfectly legal, and English teachers oughtn't to be ruling them out of bounds. But they have, and it falls to me to enlighten my students as to the acceptability of the word 'because' at the beginning of sentences.

However, trying to explain to a class-full of college freshman that, yes, it is OK to begin a sentence with the word "because," just so long as the because-clause is connected to an independent clause, is hopeless.^* They've never heard of clauses, and they've certainly never heard of coordination or subordination. (pdf file) Neither had I when I started teaching the class. Not really.

As far as I can tell, the best way to teach the grammar of writing, which is to say the best way to teach the grammar of the sentence, is to forget about sentences and teach clauses instead. Or, rather, teach the clause first and the sentence second.^**

Sentences are made of clauses, so start with clauses!

Starting with clauses works because all clauses have subjects and predicates, which is the essential point you're trying to get across about sentences anyway -- but when you start with clauses you can talk about dependent marker words from the get-go, giving everyone a shot at writing complete sentences that start with because, instead of incomplete sentences that start with because.

P.S. I think the Grumpy Grammarian was Philip Keller's father-in-law. (Unless...I've mixed up Grumpy Grammarian with The Underground Grammarian. Will have to ask Phillip.)

P.P.S. I like Richard Nordquist's way of putting it.

^*I'm avoiding the possibility that, in the third example, Because I said so is a dependent clause acting as a noun phrase....as well as the possibility that Because the sky is blue is also a noun phrase....
Math is much easier than grammar, I think.

^**Actually, I think the best approach is probably to start with words-and-phrases. Nouns and noun phrases specifically, I'm thinking.

adjectives, adverbs, and "sentence modifiers"

Reading the thread about Groucho's elephant in my pajamas, I think I see what the problem is. I think FedUp may be talking about modifier clauses in general, while I am talking about adjective clauses in particular.

When I write, I follow different rules for two different kinds of modifiers: adjectives and "adjectivals" on the one hand; adverbs and "adverbials" on the other.

I'm certain I follow a (third?) set of rules for a third category -- sentence modifiers -- but I still don't consciously understand what sentence modifiers are, so I can't take that thought any further. (Katharine's explanation is at the end of this post.)

I'm going to steer clear of sentence modifiers for the time being.

Grammar books, including at least some linguistically-informed grammar books, tell us that adjectives  must be put next to the words they modify, but adverbs can go all over the place.

Hence:
The black cat is sitting on the roof.
not:
The cat is sitting black on the roof.
or:
The cat is sitting on the roof black.

Adverbs are different:
The black cat is sitting happily on the roof.
The black cat is happily sitting on the roof.
The black cat is sitting on the roof happily.
Happily, the black cat is sitting on the roof.

The same principle holds for adjective & adverb phrases & clauses:

The cat that is black is sitting on the roof. (adjective clause)
not:
The cat is sitting that is black on the roof.
or:
The cat is that is black sitting on the roof.
or:
The cat is sitting on the roof that is black.

Adverb clauses can move around:
The cat is sitting on the roof because she likes high places.
Because she likes high places, the cat is sitting on the roof.
The cat, because she likes high places, is sitting on the roof.
And even, in some cases:
The cat is, because she likes high places, sitting on the roof.
(I wouldn't write that sentence, but I'm pretty sure I've seen the occasional adverb clause dropped inside a 2-word verb.)

According to grammar books - at least according to the ones I'm reading - the words "because she likes high places" are an adverbial clause modifying the verb "is sitting."

I find that explanation confusing, but I don't find the rule confusing. I follow the rule automatically and unconsciously, and I always have. I also follow, automatically and unconsciously, the rule that says adjective clauses must go beside the nouns they modify (though dangling participles are something of a temptation, which I think is interesting.) Importantly, if we're talking about English teachers imposing artificial, made-up rules they learned in books upon captive students, I didn't learn either rule from a book.

I learned these rules from talking and reading. I'm not just a native speaker of English. I'm a native writer.


Katharine on sentence modifiers

I'm starting to think maybe the reason I find adverbials confusing is that the category grammar books call "adverbials" includes the category linguists call "sentence modifiers." I don't know.

In any event, here is Katharine on sentence modifiers and Groucho Marx, and this explanation does make perfect sense to me, which is a great relief!:

It's true that modifiers are generally placed next to the things they modify. But sometimes it's the entire sentence that is being modified, in which case the modifier can go at the beginning or at the end.

In the ordinary interpretation of "I shot an elephant in my pajamas" (before the "How he got there, I don't know" clarification), "In my pajamas" is a sentential modifier. That is, it most obviously characterizes the circumstances of the elephant shooting. In the bizarre interpretation (which becomes obvious only after the clarification), "in my pajamas" is a modifier of object noun "elephant." As such, it cannot be moved to the beginning of the sentence. Thus, "In my pajamas, I shot an elephant." is unambiguous.

The tradeoff is between stylistic concerns (e.g. FedupMom's) and concerns about clarity. Depending on the overall context, sentential modifiers placed at the ends of sentences can be misinterpreted as verb phrase or object noun modifiers, which both tend to go at the ends of verb phrases. Since the end of a verb phrase is often also the end of the main sentence, you often can't tell what an end-of-sentence modifier is modifying from word order alone.

Cf:
With Dick Cavett, I discussed sex. (unambiguous)
I discussed sex with Dick Cavett. (ambiguous; example from Steven Pinker).

project

from Don Stewart: Preface to the Third Edition - Notes Toward a New Rhetoric by Francis Christensen and Bonniejean Christensen:

I first asked [Bonniejean] to tell me about the research that her husband, a professor at the University of Southern California, had done that led him to discover the secrets of the world's great authors. She first had me conjure up in my mind an image of the classic English professor's study, lined from floor to ceiling with book shelves containing volumes of all sorts of writing, both fiction and nonfiction. In the middle of the room was a large mahogany table, and on that table stood dozens of glass canning jars, each with a label taped to it displaying the name of a particular grammatical construction and its placement in the sentence: participial phrase in initial position, adverb clause in medial position, absolute phrase in final position. In front of those soldier-like jars was a pile of coffee beans. Whenever he could capture a moment between classes or late at night, Francis would pull a book from the shelf, open to his bookmark, and read -- very carefully. Sentence by sentence. If the sentence began with an adverb clause, he picked up a coffee bean and dropped it into the jar labeled "Adverb Clause in Initial Position." He watched the jars as they filled up with beans, and at the end of each week he would pour out each jar's contents and count. He recorded the results and made charts that showed what types of grammatical elements these authors used, where they placed them, and how often each grammatical unit occurred. And from this most primitive of bean counting he discovered the answer to that most mysterious of questions, How do writers write?

Reading this passage, I recalled a Grade 5 data-collection project from Math Trailblazers:

So I'm thinking ... if you want 5th grade students to collect data, which apparently you do, why not have them collect data on number of participial phrases, adverb clauses, and absolute phrases and their positions in the sentences of professional writers? That would be interdisciplinary! 

First we'd have to tell them what participial phrases, adverb clauses, and absolute phrases are, of course.

Someone would have to tell the teachers, too. I myself had never heard of these things until two years ago, when I started teaching composition at my local college. 

Today I have a reasonably firm grasp of participial phrases and adverb clauses. (Reasonably). 

Still working on absolutes.

No idea what contemporary linguistics thinks of these entities. It appears I have to acquire the old, outdated knowledge along with the new, updated knowledge in order to know what I'm doing inside the classroom.

free books

An Introduction to English Syntax by Jim Miller
Jim Miller

The English Language: From Sound to Sense by Gerald P. Delahunty and James J. Garvey
Table of Contents (pdf file)

Now all I need is some free time to read them.

the mathematics in linguistics

In high school I was super-obsessed with linguistics. (I still am -- I just am less likely to burst out inappropriately into linguistic asides in casual conversation.)

In my childhood my father had always treated calculus like this esoteric and super-abstract thing that only erudites could know. It was a uselessly haughty attitude in retrospect; my father was kind of a weird character -- I remember at 7 or 8, I came home with the "we worked with fractions today!" excitement, and he gave me this dismissive, "Psh! With that excitement I thought you had learnt something truly enlightening, like calculus." My father piqued my interest in science, but he was also the type to leave the family when I was 10. My mother, who works in architectural drafting and currently designs ships for a defence contractor, has only the vaguest recollection of a derivative -- her knowledge of calculus is all procedural knowledge, like how to find shear stress or dead load, moment formulas for various geometric shapes, etc. AFAIK no one talks about the elegance of the Mean Value Theorem on the job.

So my father's leaving meant I became the mathy one in my family. Which was bad, cuz when I was 14, I basically failed my secondary two mathematics exam in Singapore with a score of 47%. (OK they also let me take a makeup exam and I passed, but it was none too glamourous.) I had lost most passion for mathematics, until I picked up this book called Fermat's Last Theorem. You mean .... there are active areas of research in mathematics? I was inspired to self-study ... in Singapore everyone has private tutors or something, even the lower middle class, but my single parent household was even below that. Now I can laugh at all those people who spent thousands of dollars a year on private tutoring ... when I spent an amazing amount of $0 using Google. This is why I don't really disagree with idea of an "Investigations" curriculum -- it's just implemented horribly, when there are so many more fascinating and intellectually-stimulating investigations one could use.

Like take linguistics.

It had come to pass that in high school I had become pretty fascinated with calculus and linear algebra. I was taking linear algebra via dual-enrollment, and was trying to wrap my head around things like vector spaces and determinants. "Yeah I get how to do this problem, and I get the fact that theorem X is proven, but I still don't get why it works." I made the mistake of treating it like a regular high school class, because apparently my constant question-asking had annoyed some of my classmates, and the Dean of Students came to me and was basically recommended a remedy of asking less questions.

This was around the same time I was really into historical linguistics and phonetics, and had discovered the real truth behind English "long" and "short" vowels, and suddenly English spelling made so much sense, especially since I was also working out sound changes between French, Latin and Spanish. I felt like a child again ...

But then came my beloved math teachers -- the last ones who I expected to ask, "Why are you studying all this math? You're going into linguistics, right?"

At that time I was totally caught off guard, and could only come up with replies like, "Well uh.... it's kinda interesting," or "It's good to know, if I ever switch fields..." or "There's so much physics in phonetics! Well, kinda...."

Well, I'm glad to report that the suspicions of my math teachers were wrong. Other than the fact that I suddenly became interested in materials science in college, there is so much abstract math in linguistics it's not even funny.




[the above is a CPG mutual-inhibition diagram for a nonlinguistic circuit, but I can't believe that some people -- math teachers of all people -- don't seem to get that in order to study acoustic signal processing, especially in the brain, you need to understand a) how to analyse a periodic function b) the general solution to the differential equation y'' = -ky]

linguistics, sign language and writing

With my previous post on a "phonetic basis" to language, I should make it clear that I consider signed languages to be close analogues to spoken languages. (From what I know, this is a commonly-accepted fact among linguists.)

However, one thing that linguistics hasn't really provided a unified theory is explaining cognitively what happens for sign language -- part of the problem is that a lot of people still perceive sign languages as proxies for spoken language, or an alternative to speaking, that is, taking signed systems to be like writing systems. This doesn't bode well for scientific attention or funding...

We know sign language systems are very similar to phonetic systems, and in fact can be analysed like a phonetic system as far as dynamics like sound change, lexical diffusion, acquisition, etc. goes, and signs can be broken down into equivalents of phonemes, etc. -- the most pertinent difference generally is that a signed language is often capable of much more co-articulation than a spoken one. (Co-articulation is very common in all spoken languages, but we can usually co-articulate sound elements only if their places of articulation are far enough apart. The /t/ in "tea" for example, is a co-articulated phoneme, composed of a consonant not unlike the Spanish [t] and aspiration [h].) Sign language is not ideographic either. The fundamental permitted gestures in a sign language do not represent "ideas" -- like phonemes, by themselves they are often meaningless, until combined together. The gestures obey the recombination principle -- if you make one gesture and then another to form a word, that word is not necessarily releated in meaning to either gesture, much like "party" is not a semantic fusion of the concepts "par" and "tea".

Signed languages are so similar to phonetic languages that they are often used as alternate means to research child language acquisition, especially in crosslingual settings, often because it's very common for the parents of deaf children not to be native speakers/signers of the language the child learns to speak/sign. (The other research sources that have been useful in the field are migrant families and pidgin-creole communities.)

Similarities include a critical window for sign language -- children who learn it early invariably become fluent signers, excepting cases like those with neurological disorders; children who hit puberty before learning to sign generally never become native-level signers except with intensive study. And even then, errors are frequent and signing is more jerky and less fluid.

A deaf infant, instead of babbling, will instead do the equivalent with his hands. In fact, the timeline for sign language acquisition among children is so similar to spoken language acquisition -- e.g. we can expect a six-year-old signer to be very fluent, replete with different inflections, conjugations, declensions, irregular constructions and syntactical phrase-shifting -- that biologically the mechanism for sign language acquisition must be very similar to the mechanism for spoken language acquisition.

Even signed languages obey all the rules of Chomsky's Universal Grammar. I won't go into hardcore syntax here, but the idea is that there are universal rules that govern language, where expressions can be analysed as sets of verb phrases and noun phrases, with embedding rules and phrase-order rules, and in the way the order of a phrase can be shifted in different situations. An example that gets used frequently for English-speaking audiences for the principle of shifting word orders is when you ask a question -- which verb and subject do you invert? When being asked to turn a sentence with a relative clause like, "The goat that is in the garden is eating the flowers" into a question, invariably all the young children fluent enough to understand the sentence invert the right phrases. They do not form constructions like "goat the that is in the garden eating the flowers" or "is the goat that in the garden is eating the flowers?" -- and Chomsky argues this must be a consequence of a natural rule of universal grammar, known as the argument of the poverty of the stimulus. For one, children learning language-specific rules generally demonstrate their acquisition of the rules in stages, just as we regularly observe young children saying "he hitted her!", "I bringed juice for doggie" or "she giggled me!" -- evidence that they haven't completely learnt the rule. But we observe no children making wrong inversions. There are other arguments too -- like how children would learn such an elaborate algorithm, and use it so fluently and automatically?

Teenage and adult learners of sign languages, however, generally commit many violations of universal grammar, probably because they are not using their L1 cognitive machinery to process the language, which would automatically organise words into phrases (e.g. mentally organising like "goat that is in the garden" into a noun phrase, or NP) and clauses -- just like learners of spoken languages. The ability to analyse a sign language along noun-phrase / verb-phrase lines isn't necessary for an ideographic system; try telling a linguistics student to find the noun phrase or a verb phrase in a picture, painting or musical score and you will get protests about the silliness of the effort. Computer language isn't organised along VP/NP lines.... and not even veteran computer programmers can "think" in the computer languages they know well; it's always "code" and generally not a very effective medium for thought for humans, even though computers do very well, performing vast amounts of symbolic operations in it.

Sign languages can be generated spontaneously, and are capable of undergoing a process called "creolisation" like spoken languages. It's the spontaneous origins of many sign languages that make their study useful to many linguists working in spoken languages -- it sheds light on the origin of language in general. Children, when exposed to a stimulus composed of ungrammatical or pidgin language (e.g. migrant parents on a plantation, a colony composed of many ethnicities speaking each other's languages brokenly, non-native parents who sign imperfectly), without a good competing grammatical stimulus, will spontaneously generate corrective rules. The resulting language they produce obeys a grammar, complying with all the rules of universal grammar -- and is as complex and full-fledged as any other language. It's a good example of how grammar, though it may be culturally transmitted, is a partial consequence of universal biology. However, for spontaneous language generation to occur, you need at least two people -- a baby raised by wolves will not generate his own language, while there exist many documented cases of a secret grammatically full-fledged language, spoken between two close twins.

Spontaneous language generation can fuse different source languages -- the most prominent examples are creoles like Haitian Creole, combining elements from French, Spanish, African and indigeneous languages into a new grammatical system; I speak a creole called Singlish, with elements from Hokkien/Teochew Chinese, Malay, English, among others. With signed languages, the most prominent example is the emergence of a single "Nicaraguan Sign Language" (LSN) from the pooling together of home sign after the first schools for the deaf were opened in Nicaragua in 1979. Suddenly, previously isolated deaf children were pooling signs on playgrounds, schoolbusses, classrooms, and then becoming fast friends and signing to each other in each other's homes... However, this LSN was like the pidigin language that parents of immigrant children speak, a mixture of the various languages of their new environment; the conventions were often irregular, with jerky, non-fluid signing, and trends rather than real grammatical rules. The younger children exposed to LSN weren't content; they took it and transformed it into Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), spontaneously standardising many of the grammatical rules and making many patterns that were previously mere trends obligatory. The new language also simplified many of the common constructions like a native language would, and had all the classic signs of assimilation rules found in natural spoken language. How a group of 4- to 8-year-olds achieves such efficient consensus on a matter like creating a unified "fusion" language has to be pretty fascinating if you ask me; the process is probably unconscious and memetic. I imagine a single child having a particularly ingenious way of signing something; some other child sees it and with excited eyes gestures something to the effect of "oh that's such a cool sign!" and then soon everyone's copying it. It's such a good meme that it outcompetes all other signing patterns for the same concept or grammatical rule; some signs occupy a slightly different niche (slightly different connotations, etc.) and they survive, becoming the signed equivalents of synonyms. Repeat for each convention. The process of creolisation is effectively identical for speaking children, only with spoken words.

There's a good argument to make for the idea that objectively, all languages have equal difficulty to the infant, and ultimately have all the same complexity and are biologically constrained to be that way. Latin has a mediumly-complex inflection system that tortures high school students, but on the other hand it only has a collection of word order rules that are not very strict and relatively simple phonology; Chinese languages have little inflectional grammar but have complex syntactical and phonological rules; when English dropped the sheer majority of the gender, case and conjugation systems, it converted other previously-normal words into grammatical auxiliaries and suddenly gained a complex word order system, and when English dropped vowel length distinction, it also started recognising a large degree of other vowel phonemes that previously didn't exist, and as such, English has a large amount of vowels compared to most other languages. English vowels are a torture for Arabic speakers, who have only 3 vowel qualities, yet an abundance of exotic consonants. In fact a general rule I'd like to propose is when a language is undergoing a change that will simplify or add complexity to its grammar, it must also undergo a complementary change that will compensate for the added or removed complexity in the opposite direction -- in a different area of course.

So that would imply signed languages must be as equally complex as spoken languages -- just extracting grammatical information from the secondary visual cortex rather than say, the auditory cortex. Curiously, the frontal cortex, auditory cortex and visual cortex converge roughly around the Sylvian Fissure, along which are located several important sites for language processing (though recent research suggests we've misidentified the actual locations of Broca's and Wernicke's areas -- partially because of the imprecision of the 1800s). Research into signed languages may have implications for phonics and children who learn spoken languages, and learn to read and write in them, because it shows the brain can process visual information grammatically. It is not the case however, that the visual information in sign language can be processed as a direct representation of symbolic thought and ideas: damage the same language centres that speaking people use, and sign language ability goes with it. In fact, Google tells me there's some good research out there on "sign language aphasia".

However, there's some further complexity for neuroscientific research into linguistic processing and the shared machinery that spoken and signed languages would both use because of the concept of neurplasticity. If you damage or lesion the areas commonly regarded as Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area in a child that is young enough (e.g. a large fall at two weeks of age), the child will probably grow up into a normal, healthy, fast-talking young child. Why? The appropriate neural tissue couldn't develop in the place it usually develops, so it develops somewhere else, sometimes in radically different areas (and later the remnants of these lesions show up 30 years later on medical imaging scans in an otherwise neurologically-normal patient). But neuroplasticity is also probably part of the mechanism for native-level sign language processing; if a language centre is supposed to be receiving signals from the auditory cortex but isn't (or isn't receiving enough signals, as with a damaged ear or damaged auditory cortex), some neuroplasticity mechanism probably has it adapt to processing from the visual cortex instead, and growing and sending out networks and pioneer neurons accordingly. Notably, the degree of neuroplasticity is greatest in children -- if being fluent in a language requires your language processing centres to send out pioneer axons (or even new neurons or networks) to the appropriate auditory or visual cortex and vice versa, and you're 13 years old ... well, hard luck.

writing as a phonetic system

Without some context, you might be puzzled (or misinterpret) what exactly Bloomfield's quote means in the passage cited by Catherine...

The question raised is: Can a marking that conveys a general idea be called writing, or must all writing represent specific units of speech?

To this question, the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield apparently gives his answer when he states, "Writing is merely a device for recording speech."

Bloomfield was addressing several questions of his day. Before Bloomberg, linguistics was sort of like a slightly more holistic version of philology, which might be found as a subset of some philosophy or history department. Certainly that was the sort of linguistics I perceived the field to be before I got interested passionately obsessed with it -- dry, pedantic stuff. Today, linguists are slightly more confident about some of the questions today -- thanks to cognitive science, psycholinguistics, documentation of creoles, cross-cultural studies, study of child language acquisition, the acoustics of phonetics, modern evolutionary synthesis, game theory, and 100 other disciplines that emerged in the 20th century. As an aside, I will say that I think true potential of linguistics is still in its infancy, despite the advances of this century. We still don't really know a whole lot about language -- in both its social and biological aspects.

Anyway, Bloomfield was probably commenting on the idea of an ideographic writing system, or even an ideographic language -- a communication system that doesn't ultimately have sound as its foundations. For those in the dark about the meaning of "ideographic" -- there's a popular conception of the Chinese writing system as an organised system of pictographs, with each character standing for an object or an idea, and the characters interacting with each other as though they were abstract symbols, functions and variables performing operations on each other. For example, when a Sinophone expresses "I love forest(s)" in Chinese writing, the ideographic viewpoint would analyse the writing as a graphically-symbolic representation of the ideas contained in such a statement, as though the written statement was an abstract depiction of the first person hugging several trees. (At least I think the character's origin is that of hugging, based on the old ancient seal script way of writing the character 爱 -- ai, or to love. I'm probably very wrong though.)

But of course, the ideographic viewpoint is all wrong. There's a fairly good essay on why exactly the ideographic viewpoint is wrong in an article called "The Ideographic Myth". Victor Mair -- a linguist, sinologist, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania -- has also blogged a few posts about it on Language Log. The basic summary of the arguments is that the Chinese writing system is not actually pictorial, in as much as we do not mean an ox's head every time we write the letter A, which has its origins in the Proto-Canaanite symbol Aleph. (I do not dispute however, that knowing such origins make characters more fun or easier to learn.) On top of that, only a minority of characters in the Chinese writing system have pictorial origins -- frequently, other characters, representing semantically-unrelated meanings, are borrowed and then combined with a few other radicals to form a new character to represent some word. Why? The character that was borrowed simply carried the same (or even just similar) sound. One complication that often makes this less obvious today is that the spoken language has changed since the Chinese writing system was first invented, on top of the fact that the characters themselves evolve, so words with initially the same pronunciation might diverge, not to mention the divergence of the characters themselves. This can often obscure the Chinese writing system's highly phonetic nature. Like English and French, the Chinese writing system doesn't do a good job of updating itself with the spoken language. In fact, it would be rather hard to do that today, because Old Chinese has since diverged into a plethora of mutually-unintelligible language families (colloquially known as "dialects"). Such divergence shows further evidence of the necessity of a phonetic basis in a writing system, because each Chinese language has a "colloquial writing system", with different character sets, different vocabulary frequencies, different idioms, different word orders for different constructions. However, because the Chinese writing system itself is fairly stable, you can occasionally say, write a Mandarin phrase using Chinese characters and have a Cantonese speaker be able to interpret it -- but the effect is rather like reading Latin. Sometimes, speakers of different Chinese languages cannot interpret each other's writing at all!

Bloomfield posed more general arguments. He was arguing that as far as communication goes, the foundation of it is based on spoken language. Sure we can perform all sorts of symbolic operations in our heads, but when we fluently communicate such operations, we must use a system based on spoken language.

The mechanisms of reading and writing are pretty wondrous biologically -- they take advantage of the fact that we're capable of repeating sounds in our heads. There are various theories of memory based on this, as well as various theories of reading and language processing, and some exploration of the different types of working memory that might be involved linguistically -- as well as long-term acquisition of grammar and vocabulary (at an L1/native level -- second language learning is a bit more complicated). Some concepts that might be interesting to people working in phonics include Baddeley's model of working memory, including concepts like a "phonological loop". Of course the theory is highly incomplete, but it's a good place to start, and there are many experimental precursors to the model that demonstrate the necessity for a phonetic basis to reading.

For a writing system to express precise and fluent thoughts, it must be dependent on sound -- because that is the basis of communication. Sure there's art and music ... but you can't really communicate fluent and precise ideas with them, only gists. Could you communicate something like Newton's laws of physics to someone who didn't know them based on a picture, or a series of pictures? Take for example, the former practice of some of the Plains Natives to draw symbols on teepees for communciation -- such systems were really imprecise, and used for communication purposes that didn't have too many symbolic operations -- like "need bow-wood, twine; offer leather" or "off to river 3 days" as well as various artful depictions. In contrast, look at the complexity of many Native American languages, such as Cherokee and Sioux. Known as polysynthetic languages, they have high levels of inflection and morphological agreement, with agreement between subject, verb, direct and indirect objects, clauses. Certainly quite complex enough to express instructions on the precise order of steps to take to cook a buffalo recipe, explain the finer principles of riflemanship to a young child, suggest how you should take this flank to corner Custer and cut him off from the other Union troops, or argue why we need to stop the practice of counting coups because the situation dictates that our survival is dependent on seizing every defensive advantage possible.

You can't do this with teepee writing. There's just not enough complexity, or even vocabulary. The Chinese writing system probably evolved from a pictorial convention not unlike teepee symbols -- representing things for sale, things for buying, common objects, weather, etc. But as you wanted to use the system for more and more things, you got bogged down with the picture aspect. Really, try a convenient arrangement of symbols to symbolically depict the idea that Charlie tried to intercept a letter sent from Alice to Bob, but that Alice and Bob already know of his intentions and have come up with a plan to trick Charlie. The eureka moment was when the system switched from depicting ideas to depicting sounds. Sure, you're still using a little drawing of the sun to represent the word for sun, but now you can also use it for words with unrelated meanings (an English equivalent would be using a symbol for "sun" for the word "asunder", or combining it with a radical element related to "math" to make the word "sum"). The system exploded with the sudden possibilities. The side effect is that since you were now representing sounds and not ideas, you could drastically simplify many of the characters. Characters with elaborate depictions of mountains, trees and fields were reduced to series of short quick strokes to the extent that often you can't figure out what the character originally depicted.

There are some who argue that language is essentially a learned social construct, and this argument was probably in vogue during Bloomberg's day (the era also spawned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). If you can make a language on a phonetic basis -- why not one on an ideographic basis, or one that exists only in writing? But scientific evidence shows a huge biologically-determined component to language. Granted there is a huge memetic (culturally-transmitted) aspect, which is what makes it so fascinating to study (especially from an evolutionary dynamics standpoint), but an interesting thing to note is that the children of all the world learn their native language at around the same timelines. Indeed, intralanguage variance (for the time it takes for a child to learn to speak fluently) generally exceeds interlanguage variance by far. It's strong evidence that many aspects of language are human universals and are biologically/genetically constrained.

what is a plosive, Mommy?

Master Green, commenting on What is a consonant, Mommy?:

I can only speak from personal experience, but most of the high school students I teach in Latin had (before they came to me) no idea at all what the differences are between consonants and vowels, never mind the distinctions between the types of consonants. When I explain the shift of 'n' to 'm' before plosives, and then explain what plosives are and why we call them that, it invariably prompts immediate "ooh"s and "aah"s before triggering a digression into all the English words they know that now "make sense" to them. There's also usually at least one student in the class for whom this revelation explains how the English prefix "im-" is the same as "in-" but they never knew it.

I'd give this all up and go teach basic English to small kids if I didn't know that I'd be drummed out in a week. But we do what we can, with a smile and a quiet sigh.

Tell us, too!

Please!

John McWhorter on "oral culture" and the direct quesstion

Have only skimmed Liz's post on Ruby Payne, on Ruby Payne, but it prompted me finally to get this passage from a John McWhorter column up. I had no idea -- none -- that "oral culture" was linguistically different from whatever culture it is I live in:

One wonders whether people .... truly understand what barriers poor kids face to learning how to read in a truly functional way. In countless American communities, flyers are routinely full of major misspellings, more than a few are only fitfully comfortable with e-mail, and few read newspapers above the tabloid level. Life is fundamentally oral.

Students from places like this — which include Appalachia and the rural white South as much as black and brown inner cities — get next to no reinforcement from home life in acquiring comfort with the written word. Eternally dismal reading scores make it clear that a school day ending at 3 p.m. is not alleviating the problem. We have become sadly familiar with every second black 8th grader reading below basic level.

Reading is not the only cultural hurdle. In black culture, for example, the direct question is not as central to normal communication as it is in mainstream culture (consult, for example, Shirley Brice Heath's "Ways With Words"). For kids from this kind of setting, getting comfortable with being asked point-blank "When was the Declaration of Independence written?" and answering clearly and directly takes work. Many black people of working-class or poor background mention how ticklish this kind of interaction felt when they first went to a decent school.

Direct questions as regular interaction are largely an epiphenomenon of the printed page. Most humans on earth lead fundamentally oral lives in the linguistic sense, and need to adjust to direct questions. Middle class American kids inhale them at the kitchen table. Poor kids learn how to deal with them in school, and it takes practice.

One objection is that supposedly, in the old days even poor kids just sat down in school and learned what they needed to know. But the grandparents who recount this were among the sliver of poor kids who even made it through school. A century ago, only 14% of native-born American kids even made it to high school, and more to the point, only 2% of Italian and Polish immigrant kids did.

Here is Betty Smith in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" on what poor children's schools were really like one hundred years ago this year:

"Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district around 1908 and 1909. Child psychology had not been heard of in Williamsburg in those days. ... Few teachers had the true vocation for their work. They taught because it was one of the few jobs open to them; because they had a long summer vacation; because they got a pension when they retired."

Few children stayed around in places like this any longer than necessary. Today, however, even low-skill service jobs require a basic comfort with the written word. A school day that ends at 3 p.m., in the America that we live in, isn't enough to give that to people from bookless homes whose parents are unsure how to make the system work for their kids.

Fighting Words in Education Crowds
John McWhorter February 28, 2008
NY Sun

It never crossed my mind to think of "direct questions" as anything other than utterly natural and universal.