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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”

Articles from the first edition of the Annual Review of Linguistics are appearing online this week.  Bob Ladd, Dan Dediu and I wrote a review of correlations in linguistics.

We review a number of recent studies that have identified either correlations between different linguistic features (e.g., implicational universals) or correlations between linguistic features and nonlinguistic properties of speakers or their environment (e.g., effects of geography on vocabulary). We compare large-scale quantitative studies with more traditional theoretical and historical linguistic research and identify divergent assumptions and methods that have led linguists to be skeptical of correlational work. We also attempt to demystify statistical techniques and point out the importance of informed critiques of the validity of statistical approaches. Finally, we describe various methods used in recent correlational studies to deal with the fact that, because of contact and historical relatedness, individual languages in a sample rarely represent independent data points, and we show how these methods may allow us to explore linguistic prehistory to a greater time depth than is possible with orthodox comparative reconstruction.  Whether researchers are for or against these new techniques, understanding them is becoming increasingly necessary to interface with discussions in the field.

One of the most fun parts of putting the paper together was drawing this diagram (below) of all the links that we discuss.  It turns out that there are a lot of complicated links between linguistic and social variables!  I’m currently working on methods to disentangle this web.

We also include three appendices as supplementary materials.  First, a list of electronic databases relevant for cross-cultural statistical comparisons.  Secondly, a very brief introduction to statistical hypothesis testing, which could be useful for linguists who are not familiar with statistical approaches.  Thirdly, a discussion of robustness and validity in statistical approaches to linguistics.

Other reviews also look interesting, for example, Johansson on Language abilities of Neandertals, Fisher and Vernes on genetics and linguistics, de Vos on village sign languages and Kroll et al. on bilingualism.

Ladd, D. R., Roberts, S. G., and Dediu, D. (2015). Correlational studies in typological and historical linguistics. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1(1). preview

The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics is now available in electronic format.  In the highest tradition of satire, this book gives a unique insight into the world of linguistics.  It is crucial reading for any linguist who is trying to maintain a sense of perspective (or for those seeking the comfort of realising their own perspective is relatively grounded ).

There’s also a special discount for the readers of Replicated Typo! Follow this link for 16.8% off.

From the blurb:

The book is written for linguists, by linguists. It’s about Linguistics and Language, but it’s not a textbook. Rather, it takes a sidelong look at all that is humorous about the field. Containing over 150 articles, poems, cartoons, humorous ads and book announcements—plus a generous sprinkling of quotes, proverbs and other witticisms—the book discovers things to laugh about in most major subfields of Linguistics.

What people have been saying:

“Don’t wait for Jon Stewart or Louis C.K. to do something with linguistics—it ain’t gonna happen. Just get this book and give a copy to everyone who needs a laugh.”

—Stephen Dodson, Languagehat

“[The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics] will be a symbolic expression of your inner linguistic nerd.”

—Phaedra Royle, on Linguist List

“Complete with a choose-your-own-career-in-linguistics adventure game (German-sign-language-shaped dice not included), this is the ultimate gift for the budding language student, the jaded academic or the holistic forensic linguist.”

—Sean Roberts, A Replicated Typo

And just in time for Christmas.