Category: Linguistics

David Crystal

By Simon

We met David Crystal today and had a very interesting question and answer session with him. He’s an Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, but has so many other commitments that take him all over the world, he rarely has time to visit.

Among the topics we discussed whether it’s possible for major world languages such as English and Spanish, to live in ‘harmony’ with minority languages. David believes that this is possible, if the minority languages are supported politically and economically, and if their speakers are determined to continue using them. He gave the example of Catalonia, where major investment in the economy has been a major factor in the strength and growth of Catalan. In other regions where investment has been mainly in language teaching and language preservation organisations, the minority languages are not doing nearly as well.

We also talking about the future of English as a global language – David believes the current dominance of English is likely to continue, that the centre of English is shifting towards those who speak it as a second or foreign language, and that a new form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) could emerge. ELF is likely to be a simpler, formal style of English stripped of region and country-specific idioms and expressions. This is already happening to some extent. He also mentioned that English as a global language only started to be seriously discussed by linguistics about ten years ago.

Ambiguous images

By Simon

Yesterday I did a bit of research for my Bilingualism class with a couple of classmates. It was the first time I’d done this kind of research so it was quite exciting.

The aim was to find out whether bilinguals were faster than monolinguals at seeing alternative interpretations of images like the ones below. The ability to switch between languages and to ignore irrelevant information is thought to be more developed in bilinguals.

We asked students and staff in the university, which was easier than going into town to try to find willing participants. Most of the people we asked were willing to help, which probably wouldn’t be the case in town.

We did find that the bilinguals were faster to see the two versions of the images, though nobody was able to see the second interpretation of the first image without clues. I saw a cowboy straight away, but it took me ages to see an old man, which some people saw as an old woman. Once you can see both versions, they seem so obvious that you wonder how you couldn’t see them at first. One person suggested that being left handed might also make you quicker to see the different versions of the images.

Here are the images we used:

Ambiguous images

What can you see for each one?

Adjusting to a new language environment

By Simon

Research undetaken at Michigan State University has found that girls can find it more difficult than boys to adjust to a new social and linguistic environment, according to an article on Science Daily.

The study was of 3-6 year olds at an international school in Beijing where the children, from 16 different countries, are in immersed in Mandarin and English. Most of them are learning at least one new language, and the researchers found that the girls generally had more trouble adjusting to the new environment than boys.

Previous studies have found that girls usually have better social and linguistic abilities than boys, however the girls in the Beijing study who could not understand their teachers or the other children tended to have more behavioural problems than the boys.

The study also showed that children find it harder to learn a new language than is generally thought. The popular idea is that children soak up new languages like sponges without too much effort, however this isn’t necessarily true.

Metonymy

By Simon

Metonymy cropped up in the readings for my Semantics class this week, so I thought I’d write about it here to make sure I understand what it is.

The word metonymy come for the Greek μετωνυμία (metōnymia), which means “a change of name”. A metonym substitutes one word to stand for another that’s connected in some way.

Here are some examples which show some of the ways in which this figure of speech is used:

All hands on deck! – here hands stands for sailors (part for whole)
To fill up the car – the car stands for the petrol/gas tank (whole for part)
I’ll have a Heineken – Heineken stands for beer (producer for product)
No. 10 declined to comment – No. 10 Downing Street in London is the official residence of the British Prime Minister (place for institution)
Can I pay with plastic? – plastic stands for a credit/debit card

The first example is also known as a synecdoche.

These examples are based mainly on those found in An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics by Freidrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid.

Word of the day – mezzanine

By Simon

I had my first lecture today, which took place on one of the rooms on the mezzanine floor of the Main Arts building. A mezzanine or entresol is usually an extras floor between main floors of a building. A mezzanine might often projects from the wall like a balcony and may share the same ceiling with the floor below. The term can also be applied to the lowest balcony in a theatre, or for the first few rows of seats in that balcony. The word mezzanine comes via French from the Italian mezzanino, which is derived from mezzano, middle, which itself is from the Latin medianus, of the middle.

The lecture was on semantics and focused on theories of meaning. The lecturer had little time for the formalist view that each word has a core definition independent of context. Instead she explained how the meanings of words and sentences are derived from the context and our knowledge of the world. One exercise we did was to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for defining pet, friend and bird – quite a challenge.

Baby talk

By Simon

Our brains are wired to recognise repeated auditory and visual patterns, an ability that possibly evolved as a way to detect the non-random sounds made by predators, and which is also used in language acquisition.

According to a report on canada.com, researchers from Canada, Chile and Italy have done studies of newborn babies in Canada and Italy using brain scans to discover which parts of the babies brains are active when they hear words, and whether they react differently to different words. They found the part of babies’ brains that responds most to language is the same part, the temporal lobes, used for language processing in adults, and that babies react most to words with repeated syllables, such as mama, dada and banana.

One of the researchers, Judit Gervain of the University of British Columbia, believes that rudimentary language structures already in place from birth, and that it’s easy for a baby to attach meaning to the words like mama and dada.

Irreversible binomials

By Simon

Irreversible binomial is a linguistic term I came across today on this blog post. It was coined by Yakov Malkiel in a 1959 article in the linguistics journal, Lingua, and refers to pairs of words on either side of a conjunction such as and that are always used in a particular order. For example, bread and butter, salt and vinegar, fish and chips, meat and potatoes, gin and tonic, time and tide, cloak and dagger, ladies and gentlemen, knife and fork, and head over heels.

Some such pairs are reversible in parts of the English speaking word – is it cheese and bacon or bacon and cheese, for example? Both versions are used in the UK at least. To some extent is depends on the ratio of cheese to bacon – if you have more cheese than bacon in your sandwich, then you might call it a cheese and bacon sandwich.

Can you think of any other irreversible binomials in other languages?

In Welsh there’s bara menyn (bread (&) butter).

Articulatory Phonetics

By Simon

Today I came across an online collection of recorded exercises from W. Smalley’s Manual of Articulatory Phonetics. The exercises are design to help distinguish different types of sounds based on their point of articulation, articulators, manner of articulation, or point and manner of articulation. This looks useful if you have the book, and quite useful if you don’t.

Articulatory phonetics is a sub-field of phonetics which involves documenting how humans produce speech sounds. Specifically how our articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc), interact to create the specific sounds.

Reading baby

By Simon

According to an blog post I found today, teaching a baby sign language can help him or her to learn to read at an very early age.

The post is about a 17 month old girl who can read, as she demonstrates on the video embedded in the post. Her parents, who are both Speech Pathologists, have taught her American Sign Language as well as English and have encouraged the development of her language skills, though they haven’t drilled her in reading. Learning sign language can also help children develop their spatial and visual abilities apparently.

Have you heard of any other similar cases?

Soaking up languages like a sponge

By Simon

A report I found today talks about a school in Seattle called sponge which aims to teach babies and children four languages – Spanish, Mandarin, French and Japanese – through play, songs, stories, etc. They have teachers who are native speakers of the languages they teach and take children from as young 5 months and up to 5 years old.

This sounds like an interesting approach to language teaching and I’m sure that children will benefit from this multilingual environment. I wonder whether they’ll become fluent in all the languages though – they may not get sufficient exposure to each to acquire them fully. Perhaps that isn’t the point of the school.