Movement and universality

This release was just passed along by a contributor and ultimately comes from an esteemed colleague (so HT to AS). The basic news is about a new MIT Press book, by Shigeru Miyagawa, Why Agree? Why Move? He examines agreement and movement data from Japanese, English and Kinkande.

Some things aren't quite clear from the release, like this:

The existence of similar structures in such otherwise disparate languages, Miyagawa asserts, provides strong evidence that all human languages have a common origin.

Common origin in human cognition, sure, but is the assertion one about monogenesis?

I guess we'll have to read this one ... .

When we say Madison is 'wild' ...

we mean wild.

‘Wolf or wolf hybrid’ captured near Monroe Street

Monroe Street ends by the University of Wisconsin and is an increasingly upscale business district further away. 

From here.

Lévi Strauss and structural linguistics

We haven't noted the passing  of Claude Lévi Strauss here yet (nor that of Dell Hymes). For a piece that talks about Lévi Strauss in connection to linguistics, check out this obituary, including these quotes:

he came into contact with structural linguistics, a behaviouristic amalgam of European and American theories, and particularly the more imaginative work of Roman Jacobson, the Russian theoretician of language who was also at the New School at the time.

 …

For him anthropology was scientific and naturalistic, that is scientific in the way that structural linguistics had become scientific. By looking at the transformations of language that occur as new utterances are generated, by using the tools that a particular language makes available, structural linguistics was able, so Lévi-Strauss believed, to understand not only the irreducible specificities of a particular language, but also the principles that made their production possible. In this way, linguistics, as he understood it, was a branch of the humanities and a natural science that is able to connect directly with psychology and neurology.

Any reactions to that?

Palinorama

I guess nobody's noticing like the folks in Alaska, but the release of Going Rogue is generating another huge wave of attention to Sarah Palin. This piece from the Fairbanks Daily News gives a good survey. And this is probably the last blast for the Wisconsin team that wrote about her accent (see here). "Defining dialect, perceiving dialect and new dialect formation: Sarah Palin’s speech" by Tom Purnell and colleagues is now available from the Journal of English Linguistics website.

Maybe now we can really move on.

Update, 7:30, by Joe: We can't move on quite yet!  It turns out the Tina Fey did pick up on the feel/fill merger. I just got email from an alert reader in Canada with this link to a video from immediately before the election, where she clearly pronounces deal with a lax vowel, sounding like dill.

I've also added an image (from here) to underscore just how far from over this deal (or dill) could be.

A question not (quite) asked

For a while, the issue of how to refer to the present decades bubbled in the blogosphere — should it be, for instance, called 'the aughts'? This never really resolved itself in speech, at least that I know of, and the decade is coming to a close. I was reminded of this on seeing David Segal's piece in the NYT this morning, "Naming the '00s". But he's not talking about what to call the decade in that sense, rather what cliche handle to give it, so that it can sit alongside the roaring '20s and the 'me decade' of the '70s. I'm with the poet Billy Collins on this one:

"Let’s call this one Bob.”

And that answers both questions; any reference to the decade could be done with that moniker, like this:

Yah, well, I remember back in Bob, the kids were all about the piercings.

And now it's time to work on learning to say '10 without putting an '0' in front of it ...

Image from here.

FOXP2 in the news again

I saw a couple of stories about new work on the gene people are very eager to associate with the ability of humans to create and use language, FOXP2. I haven't had time to read the Nature piece, though, and only this morning saw a piece that seems clear about the news. It's this, by Nicholas Wade in the NYT. Daniel Geschwind of UCLA says about the work of his team that they want “to use FOXP2 as a lever to get a view of the molecular machinery in a biological language circuit.”

Update, 11:00: Here's the Nature new bit on the topic.

Image from here.

Wearing your peevology on your sleeve

This t-shirt is available now from Signals (here):

I'm not exactly sure why, but this somehow looks like a shirt that women are far more likely to wear than men. (The missus confirms that.) Maybe the purported tendency of women to be more invested in Standard Language Ideology?

I'm way too old to remember the days of being single, when social settings were opportunities to meet potential romantic interests. (John Cowan makes appropriate guesses about my age in a comment here.) But this is the exceptional case where I would have taken motherly advice about such matters very seriously.

Possible WOTY? Adhocracy?

A colleague just passed on the word as new to her. It gets 79K g-hits, including a wikipedia entry, here. I don't know how old it is, but it's ever-relevant, certainly.

Image, obviously, from Amazon.

Verb forms: seent, spunt, skinded

Sometimes people start off with a linguistic peeve and piece together a better picture of things. That looks like what Betty Winston Bayé of the Lousiville Courier-Journal did in this article, called

Speakers haven't 'seent' the harm of casual language

(It's short … it's better for you to read it than for me to summarize it.)

The piece caught my eye mostly because it deals with a common linguistic phenomenon that's not so common as a peeve: Many speakers simplify final consonant clusters, so that -nt is pronounced as -n, for example. So, dent gets pronounced as den. (Let's just leave aside for the moment the huge number of speakers who pronounce it with a glottal stop — that's relevant to the broader structural picture but not of immediately concern to my point.) A lot of research by sociolinguists has shown that people do this more often in words like dent that happen to end in the pattern and less often when the -t or -d is marks past tense, like in went, sent, and so on. For non-linguist readers, Winston Bayé is observing a hypercorrection, that is, where speakers who do this simplification are aware that they do it. They try to avoid it, but ending up adding a final consonant where it wouldn't normally appear, like seent for seen or spunt for spun. This bothered her enough to write a piece about it, so she talked to some linguists who make the usual points about informal speech and so on. (It's interesting that hypercorrection is really not about casual speech in some sense.)

The piece starts out feeling like it's going to be a rant about a peeve, but it seems like over the course of the article you can feel how Winston Bayé is actually wrestling with the notion of socially charged linguistic variation: We have good reasons for using distinct and distinctly non-standard varieties, but we can pay a price for it. She remains really concerned about the latter point but seems to get the former point. I don't know how journalists think about such a tone, but I find it kind of refreshing to see what's in some ways an opinion piece that lays it out that way.

"Who’s vetting Amazon’s site? Hugh Hefner?"

A friend emailed me about a search she did, looking for works on the Native American language Central Pomo. Here's what came up in Amazon!!!

HT to CB.

The Halloween Provost

SiftingandWinnowing.org has remained the central forum for discussion of the Grad School / Research reorganization that's been under intense discussion here at Wisconsin in recent weeks. The latest post there is the most important contribution yet to the topic that I've seen anywhere. (To see the low-water mark in coverage, click here.)

Penned by the "Halloween Provost", the piece makes a case that has needed to be made. Namely, the provost has — and this seems bizarre to me — said at the town halls basically, 'well, if you don't like my plan, why don't you provide an alternative'. The Halloween Provost does. And it surely sounds way better than the non-Halloween Provost's to me.

The time and effort already expended on this ill-conceived and poorly defined proposal has taken us a long way down the wrong road. A lot of us fervently hope that the chancellor will take charge of things and get the discussion back on course — for instance, along the lines suggested by the Halloween Provost.

Image from here.

Lou Dobbs available in Spanish?

OK, sure, there ARE reasons this would happen, but Lou Dobbs' show, the best known forum for anti-immigrant and pro-English vitriol, is now being broadcast in Spanish?

The irony meter on my computer is now broken beyond repair. Do you know how expensive those are?