Author: Sean

Natural causes of language by Nick Enfield discusses theories behind cultural transmission of language.  From the blurb:

What causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated. But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has been diffused and kept in circulation through social interaction in the history of a community. This book makes the case that a proper understanding of the ontology of language systems has to be grounded in the causal mechanisms by which linguistic items are socially transmitted, in communicative contexts.

I like the argument that a particular ‘language’ (like English or Welsh) is not a real entity, but a “convenient fiction” – something I also argued in my thesis.

It’s a special book in two senses.  First, it comes from the new Language Sciences Press: an open access publisher where publishing costs nothing to the author and reading costs nothing to the reader.   Hopefully we’ll see this being used to good effect.

Secondly, it comes with a video introduction from the author!

This is a guest post by Christine Cuskley.

As a general rule, there is much that is very badly written about specialist academic disciplines. From farts curing cancer to hot wet aliens, academic research often isn’t well-represented in popular outlets. Research on language and language evolution are no exception. So, generally, people who spend their working days immersed in language research let such flawed reports flow over them like so many offers to publish their thesis for the small fee of £300. You can’t possibly feel miffed at every one or you would explode and get nothing done, and there’s already so much on the internet to distract me even the most focused linguist.

But today I’ve seen something so utterly cringeworthy that it simply shall not pass. In a recent article for The Daily Mail, a man named Christopher Stevens For The Daily Mail adapts an excerpt from a book called Written in Stone, which is by Christopher Stevens (presumably) For Himself. I will direct all criticism towards his nom de plume, on the off chance that he originally submitted a clear, well-thought out, and accurate excerpt from his excellent book which was then mercilessly butchered by an ignorant editor. As an up-front disclaimer, I haven’t actually read the book itself, and I am very unlikely to. Assuming this adapted excerpt is any indication, the book is a mess.

Continue reading “How to speak stone-age bullshit”

The MPI for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig is hosting a workshop on Causality in the Language Sciences on April 13 – 15, 2015.

There is a call for talks and posters here (deadline January 10th, 2015).

Invited speakers include Balthasar Bickel, Claire Bowern, Morten Christiansen, Dan Dediu, Michael Dunn, T. Florian Jaeger, Gerhard Jaeger, Anne Kandler and Richard Sproat.

From the conference website:

Although the tenet of “correlation does not imply causation” is still an important guiding principle in language research, a number of techniques developed in the last few decades opened new scenarios where testing causal relations becomes possible. Recent advances in information theory, time series analysis, phylogenetics, stochastic processes, dynamical systems, graphical models and Bayesian inference (among many others) set the stage for a new and exciting chapter in the field.

In parallel, in the last few decades an unprecedented amount of data became available on a large number of language-related phenomena. We have massive matrices of voxel activation in the neural circuits involved in speech production and comprehension, several years of annotated conversations between young children and their caregivers, hundreds of hours of phonetic and anatomical measurements and multiple environmental, genetic, and demographic variables related to populations of speakers for a large number of the world’s languages.

The aim of this workshop is to address these two issues: how do we properly test causal relations in (eventually noisy, sparse or incomplete) data, and how can we infer or test the mechanisms underlying them?

Following a half a day school on cutting-edge methods for causal analysis, world class scientists will present their research on topics ranging from language history, writing systems, speech processing, typology, lexical semantics, and others.

We invite contributions from researchers facing specific problems in determining causality in language systems and also from researchers offering perspectives from the methodological and theoretical point of view of causal inference.

Mark Dingemanse and I will be appearing the Discovery Festival in Amsterdam on Friday.  We’ll be talking about spurious correlations in language and culture as part of the Occam’s Beard symposium.

The idea is to take some real data, then throw away Occam’s razor and go after the most complicated explanation possible.

I foresee no problems.

This year’s Nacht van Kunst en Kennis Science Festival in Leiden features an experiment on language evolution.  Come and take part in our interactive iterated learning experiment at the Museum Boerhaave from 19:30 on Saturday 20th September.

Mark Dingemanse, Tessa Verhoef, Shawn Tice, Marisa Cassillas and I will be there to answer questions.  Our results will be displayed live on the night!

You can read more about the experiment at the Taal in de reageerbuis page.

Languages can use pitch to make lexical contrasts (so called tone languages) or to mark contrasts at the utterance level, usually called intonation, such as using rising pitch to indicate a question as opposed to a statement.  In fact, a language can use pitch to do both by various means such as changes in pitch range.  However, lexical tone and intonation are often seen as mechanisms that compete for pitch resources.  Yip (2002) holds that “it is commonplace that many lexical tone languages avoid the potential conflicts between intonation and lexical tone by using a different mechanism altogether: the sentence-final particle.”

Can we see the evolutionary effects of this dependency in the typology of the world’s languages? (at the very least, the terminology is in competition!  I’ll use ‘intonation’ to mean phrase-level pitch)

Continue reading “Functional trade-off between lexical tone and intonation”