Steven Menefee 1981-2010

I just found out today that Steven Menefee has passed away. I only just learned that he had cancer last weekend, though I gather he had been fighting it for a while. I first met Steven at the Workshop for American Indigenous Languages at UC Santa Barbara in 2008. He and a couple colleagues from University of New Mexico had come to present on creating linguistics terminology in Navajo. After the talk I went up and introduced myself, told them how much I was interested in what they were doing, etc. That probably would have been the end of our contact, but Steven was such a friendly guy that when he saw that we were staying at the same hotel he shouted across the courtyard at the Super 8 to see if I and my University of Montana colleagues wanted to join them for dinner. Steven knew the area, so he was our guide to a rather wild night that summer weekend in 2008. The only other time I had the pleasure of his company was in Albuquerque at the High Desert Linguistics Conference that fall.

I saw his name on a presentation at SILS last weekend, so it was an unpleasant surprise that when I got there and asked his UNM friends if he was there, the answer was crestfallen faces and an explanation about Steven's cancer. Steven was one of the most caring, friendly people I have met, and a linguist who cared deeply about the people who spoke the languages he studied. He was a man of strong convictions and above all open, warm-hearted compassion. He laughed easily and always created a positive atmosphere with those around him. He struck me as the kind of person whose goal in life was to make the world a better place, and I can say without a doubt that it is indeed a better place because of him.

We'll miss you Steven.

In Oregon

I'm in Eugene, OR for the meetings of the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium, Athapaskan/Dene Languages Conference, International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages, and Hokan-Penutian Languages Conference. It's been a pretty good weekend, with some good presentations, and I've gotten to meet some fun and interesting people. I just got out of Leanne Hinton's keynote address, and soon it will be time for the conference dinner.

A minor note of displeasure has to do with my native language. My native language is English. I love the English language, and as much as I want to teach my children to speak another language, I know that it's not going to happen, both because I'm not fluent in any other language, and because English is a big part of my own heritage and that of my parents and grandparents, and I want my children to share in that heritage. I recognize that English speakers often exert an oppressive force on speakers of other languages, especially in the U.S. Even so, it annoys me to hear my language denigrated, insulted, and vilified. I do not think that English is inferior, and I do not think it is stultifying. What English speakers do is not a reflection on the language itself. A similar effect can be seen in anthropologists, most of whom argue passionately for religious diversity, as long as the religion isn't Christianity. I think we need to remember that no matter what terrible things English speakers have done to speakers of other languages, viz., boarding schools for Native American children, the language itself is just as valuable and just as beautiful as the languages I am, quite honestly, more interested in: Navajo, Lillooet, Karuk, Cherokee.

Plurals

In linguistics we often use the term "marked" to mean a structure or sound that is in some sense more difficult or less common across languages. The "unmarked" structure is the one that is default, typically in a cross-linguistic perspective. Thus you (to my knowledge) never find languages in which the present tense is derived from the past, or in which all obstruents are voiced and all sonorants are voiceless; the "default" tense is past, and the default voicing for obstruents is [-voice]. The term "marked" comes from literal morphological marking, i.e., past tense is literally marked in English by the suffix -ed, whereas the present tense is unmarked (in the first and second person singular). Likewise, singular is unmarked and plural is marked, in that languages add something to signify the plural, or don't change anything, but there aren't any languages (again, to my knowledge) that have an unmarked plural and then add an affix to derive the singular. This should correlate with frequency: unmarked forms and more common and marked forms are less common. Thus in doing a corpus based search for singulars and plurals, you should find more hits for singular forms of a word than plural forms, with a few exceptions for special cases like "pants" and "scissors". So I wondered the other day why I kept adding -s to things while I typing.

I noticed especially that I was doing it on the word "consonant" -- I kept typing "consonants" even when I meant the singular. So I decided to check out COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) to see if I was just weird. (Since this is a blog post and not a research paper, I haven't gone through the effort of determining the percentage of forms that are exactly what I'm looking for; thus the numbers for "consonant" below could include adjective usages as well as singular noun usages.)

• consonant -- 443
• consonants -- 323

So at least in this case I do seem to be an anomaly. It's not that "consonants" is used more often in English, like "scissors". Most likely I most commonly use the plural rather than the singular in my own (typed) usage. A word count check on my M.A. thesis confirms this: 75 counts of "consonants", but only 71 of "consonant". This may be because I rarely would talk about a specific consonant, but rather a specific phoneme, whereas I often have cause to talk about the natural class of consonants as a whole, as a subset of the phonemes of a language.

Just for fun, let's see some other COCA counts for singular and plural.

• computer -- 51,711
• computers -- 15,832
• woman -- 130,459
• women -- 211,930
• man -- 253,485
• men -- 157,413
• scissor -- 102
• scissors -- 1846

Those show some interesting patterns. "computer(s)" shows the expected pattern, with more than three times the hits for the singular than for the plural. However, we see an interesting difference with "women" -- more than 1.5 times more hits for the plural. My hunch is that this represents a similar pattern as my use of "consonants". People have little need to specify a singular person as a woman; they can just talk about a "person" named Mary. It's apparently when speaking about groups that gender becomes relevant. On the other hand, "men" shows the opposite pattern, with many more hits for the singular, just like "computers". My first thought would be that many of these are interjections: "Man, I'm tired", since much of COCA comes from spoken conversations. However, on looking at the actual results, it looks like very few are actually usages of this type. Another possibility is that many of these represent generic usages, like "the fall of man". But looking over the hits it appears this too is not very well represented, though there are some. I suppose we just have to chalk it up to the fact that in English masculine is the unmarked geneder, and possibly also that despite affirmative action women are still underrepresented in many sections of professional and academic life. "scissors", of course, patterns as expected: only a small minority of people use "scissor" in the singular. In fact, almost all of those hits turn out to be the adjective form, rather than the singular noun form.

Ejectives

I gave my students a brief introduction to IPA last week, and this coming week we're spending every class on a different aspect of phonetics, including IPA transcription. So I'm getting ready for a fun week of making silly sounds and writing with symbols that most people have never seen. One sound class that people seem to enjoy encountering for the first time is ejectives. They occur only in about 15% of languages, and most of those languages are minority languages that mainstream people never hear. In fact, they're exotic enough that Paul Frommer chose them as an element of the Na'vi language used in the movie Avatar.

Most inexpert descriptions of ejectives are mindbogglingly useless. If I tell you to pronounce /t'/ by pronouncing a more forceful "t" sound, I'll wager just about any amount of money or hat-eating that you're not going to come up with an ejective. The best way I've found to describe ejectives is to pronounce a consonant while holding your breath. After all, this is essentially what distinguishes ejective stops from regular stops: regular stops use the pulmonary airstream, while ejective stops use the glottalic airstream, without accessing air from the lungs. Ejective stops are the most common ejectives, but languages also have ejective fricatives such as /f'/ and /s'/, and Tlingit even has an ejective lateral fricative (it's a pretty tough one the first couple times). Though no language has ever come up with one of my favorite possible sounds: an ejective alevolar trill. Give it a try and see how many contacts you get before your tongue runs out of air.

Linguistics 101

I'll be embarking on my first official foray into linguistics teaching on Tuesday, with a summer section of LING 101 here at Rutgers. As opposed to 201, which is more focused on analysis, 101 is essentially an introduction to the kinds of things people talk about in linguistics; students are expected to come out of it knowing what assimilation is, but not necessarily how to write a rule describing it. I plan on focusing in part on why I think linguistics is interesting, and what kinds of things linguists do.

For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of language (with a lowercase ) is the variety we see in human languages. For many linguists this variety is a minor annoyance in their Universal Grammar exploits, something to be explained away and something that is ultimately superficial. My opinions about some contemporary formulations of UG aside, I think the variation among languages is something to revel in, and to explore. Most people are shocked to find out that there are almost 7000 languages spoken around the world (give or take a few), or that they've only been grouped into about 80 families, as opposed to the 2 or 3 I thought existed before I became a linguist. While some comparative linguists insist that there is evidence of a very small number of language families, people that actually work on those languages very rarely accept such a small number. While Greenberg posited only 3 families for the Americas, you'll be hard pressed to find an Americanist who accepts fewer than at least a couple dozen families, though work is being done to properly demonstrate genetic relationships between some of those families.

People are also sometimes intrigued by how different languages can be. As speakers of Indo-European languages we often assume that our way of doing things is the right way, or even the only way. But then you come across the Algonquian languages, where the ordering of person-marking affixes on the verb indicates not grammatical role, but simply the presence of that person in the action. The order of the affixes is fixed, and their person hierarchy combined with a large set of thematic verbal prefixes indicates which person is acting on whom. Many linguists still think every languages has nasals, because they haven't heard of Chemakum, Makah, Nitinaht, Lushootseed, or Twana (don't let the spelling fool you; pronounce all those as if you had a bad cold).

In short, I'm looking forward to six weeks of showing a group of students that not everything is like English, and that there are more languages in the world than are dreamt of in most naive conceptions of it.

Anglicizations

I did a double take when I saw that my last post was over a month ago, but I guess I have been that busy. At any rate, but got me thinking today was a Language Log post on the myriad (mis)pronunciations of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano (properly pronounced [ejafjatłajøkʰʏtł]). Obviously English speakers are going to have a hard time with the rounded front vowels and lateral affricates, so it seems worthwhile to have a general Anglicization.

Or does it? I guess I'm generally in favor of Anglicizations. I find it obnoxious when people pronounce Chile [tʃile] rather than the more standard [tʃɪli]. On the other hand, I routinely say Tlingit [łɪŋlɪt] and Nahuatl [naxʷatł] with the original laterals. I think the key issue is one of faithfulness to the original form versus creating an easily pronounceable form in the target language. In the case of Chile, only the vowels are changing, and the vowel changes are fairly minor: laxing of the /i/ and raising of the /e/ (the latter being part of the Great Vowel Shift in English). On the other hand, changing a consonant sound strikes me as more major. In cases where a spelling pronunciation of the foreign term is just too different, as in Eyjafjallajökull, I think it's best to simply pronounce the word as in the original language.

This might not be possible or useful for the average person, but I don't think it's too high a standard to hold newscasters to. It's there job to report on things, and I think it should also be their job to say things right. Sure, foreign words are a bit tongue-twisting at first, but a little practice and Eyjafjallajökull will be rolling off your tongue. And the more someone practices foreign sounds and foreign words, the easier it is not only to pronounce words in that language, but in other languages as well.

The conflict of faithfulness and ease of pronunciation of course shows up in much more unconscious speech as well. I'm in the midst of a project with James Crippen on exactly this type of conflict in Tlingit, a Dene language spoken in Alaska. Since Tlingit doesn't have the sounds /b/ or /p/, it's interesting to see how words are adapted when they are borrowed from languages that do have them.

Movement

I was watching an old episode of Seinfeld the other night, and a line of dialogue caught my attention: "That's the guy I told where the elevator was." It's not ungrammatical for me, but it's marked in some way that made my analytical skills perk up. According to current syntactic theory, this type of sentence is created by movement from one original, underlying position to a different surface position. You don't have to take this literally as movement; many syntacticians take "movement" as a relation rather than an actual move from one position to another. But the key is that a clause like "where the elevator was" is assumed to be in some way structurally the same as "the elevator was there". In some analyses of relative clauses, the same thing is true for nouns described by relative clauses, so that the DP "the guy" comes out of the CP "I told <the guy> where the elevator was". So the so-called D-structure (don't read any theoretical assumptions into that, I'm just using it as a convenient label) of "That's the guy I told where the elevator was" would be something like "That's I told the guy the elevator was where", changed by movement into "That's the guy I told <t> where the elevator was <t>".

But why did I find this remarkable? I'm fairly certain I use such structures. Before I analyzed the sentence, I thought it might involve some sort of movement where one constituent crosses over the trace of another (which, at least in Relativized Minimality, wouldn't necessarily involve a violation, but might be more marked in some way), but this isn't the case. The "the guy" movement occurs entirely in the matrix clause, and the "where" movement is entirely limited to the subordinate clause. So there's no crossing involved, just regular movement in two separate clauses. I tested out some similar, simpler examples, and found out that I find "I told him where the elevator was" completely unremarkable, but "That's the guy I told to clean up the mess" (very) slightly remarkable. (Side note: can we really have judgments about such minute differences? Maybe not everyone, but I've been dubbed "most sensitive speaker of English" at Rutgers, so I claim the right to make such judgments. I'll happily give different numerical scores to subtly different subjacency violations.) So what, I don't like relative clauses? It's not that, because "That's the guy I told" is also completely unremarkable. I think it's some very slight underlying preference for traces to be at the end of a clause. This would make questions unremarkable ("Who did you talk to <t>?"), as well as simple relative clauses ("That's the man I talked to <t>"). But more complex relative clauses with material after the trace make some small part of my language faculty slightly uncomfortable.