Inishmacsaint

Monograph Forthcoming? Yes!

2011-12-15T19:32:00.000-08:00

Though progress at times may seem almost glacially slow, I continue to work on the chapters of a monograph on Vietnamese grammar that may one day be completed. Over the last months, I have continued work on Chapter 1—A Descriptive Sketch. Click on the link below for the latest version of Part 1 of this chapter (alternatively go to the Monograph page link at top)

Click to download pdf

Comments and suggestions welcome!

Unpeeling an onion: what Vietnamese tells us about the lexicon-syntax interface

2011-11-14T17:57:00.000-08:00

Last week, I had the great fortune to attend the International Conference on Linguistics Training and Research in Vietnam, held at USSH, VNU, Hanoi. My first visit to Vietnam, I hope the first of many. During my stay, I was able to give two presentations. I'm posting the slides from the first colloquium talk, which will be written up more fully shortly (and essentially a synopsis of Chapter 1 of the elusive, but not quite mythical, monograph). In the meantime, there should be enough on the slides to make for useful reading. If you have comments or questions—about Vietnamese syntax, though not about onions—please get in touch.

Click to view presentation

(I've replaced the html version with a pdf file, which should be easier to read)

Problems with 13 Little Boats

2011-11-14T16:52:00.000-08:00

For a number of reasons, I have had cause to go back to—and reformat—a paper on Irish numeral phrases that I presented long ago (in 1995) at a Canadian Linguistics Association Meeting. The paper was to have appeared in the Proceedings, but I have not been able to find any existent copies or links to such. If anyone knows of a link where this publication can be found, I'll take this down; otherwise, it's available here.

Click to access pdf file

Arcane as the topic may seem, the syntax of numeral phrases is, I think, a revealing phenomenon, showing the possible limits of conventional phrase-structure syntax to handle discontinuous dependencies and spreading agreement. It also offers a good treatment of classifier phrases in East Asian languages (developing ideas originally due to Elisabeth Löbel 1990). It was written at a time when I still believed that a purely syntactic solution was the best solution to every problem: I'm less sure now, but it's not a bad technical attempt.

Skin Deep…or Fatal: Wishful Thinking and the Logical Implications of Cultural Relativity

2011-10-24T23:16:00.000-07:00

Some more thoughts about cultural relativity and perception.

Click here to download pdf file

Over the last couple of years—and in more concentrated fashion in recent months—I have been giving attention to the serious1 psychological literature on cultural relativity/relativism (CR), and especially to reports of significant differences between Western Caucasians and East Asians, with respect to visual perception, discrimination and categorization, and to moral and aesthetic judgments. The familial relevance of such issues should be obvious: if cultural relativism is more than skin deep, then it is important for me to have a greater appreciation of how Japanese people see the world and organize experience if I want to understand those close to me, and help my bicultural children reconcile what are allegedly quite distinct world-views (not that this appears to be a great stretch for them).

What I’d like to believe about CR is that it is a largely cosmetic phenomenon—deeper than make-up or fashion perhaps, or even than politeness conventions or signals of aggression, but superficial compared to the “stuff that counts”: that beneath the variegated surface lies a universal perceptual system and universal higher cognition (including a common Language of Thought and moral psychology). I want to believe that although we may be strongly influenced by our language and culture to see the world in particular ways, to form culture- or language-specific conceptual categories and to organize experience in terms of varying analytic and moral judgments in unreflective situations, nevertheless—fundamentally, essentially—we are all equally capable of the same types of perceptual, moral, and aesthetic discrimination, and bound by the same genetically-constrained limits on personality and cognition: there may be moral or aesthetic parameters of variation (Dwyer 1999), but there are no societies or groups of individuals who lack essentially the same moral or aesthetic codes that inform my own perception and behaviour. No-one, barring individual pathology, is “beyond The (moral) Pale,” nor is anyone perceptually or cognitively blessed, in virtue of their cultural inheritance.

Of course, this is not to deny the vast range of diverse cultural values and behaviours, from culturally-sanctioned homicide, honour killings, geronticide, cannibalism and state-sponsored executions, through physical mutilation of various kinds—male and female circumcision, neck or lip stretching, piercing, tattooing—to different dietary regimes (eating people, eating monkeys, eating whales, eating pigs and cows) and forms of dress, and ways of dealing with litter. A basic course in anthropology—or a couple of evenings watching National Geographic—will tell us all about these bizarre practices (bizarre to us, of course).2

But this brief list simply illustrates a range of behaviours and displays of which we are all capable, and which we might sanction given a particular set of social conditions. Each society may have its own set of preference rules, ‘rankings’ of moral and social imperatives—loyalty to one’s own above or below compassion for others, for example—Yet, though the rankings may be different, in an Optimality theoretic way perhaps, we can still think that the principles are the same. The Universalist assumes, for instance, that no cultural group shows complete equinamity in the face of any of the last six of the Ten Commandments: killing people, stealing stuff, committing adultery, bearing false witness, and coveting various kinds of chattels, are all basically wrong for everyone, even if we can imagine mitigating circumstances. Eating people, too (as Malcolm Bradbury pointed out in 1959)3…

In addition to my essentialism, as a card-carrying Fodorean modularist, I also want to believe that low-level attentional and perceptual processes—such as visual discrimination and visual memory—are immune to the ‘top-down’—influences of higher-level cognition, including moral and aesthetic beliefs and desires: as suggested by visual illusions (Müller-Lyer, Neckar Cube, etc), I’d like to think we are obliged to see what we see—what our visual system constructs for us—even when we know that it is not real. As Fodor points out in the Modularity of Mind, there would be good evolutionary reasons for such cognitive impenetrability, if it were true: individuals whose perception is informed by hopes and expectations rather than on bottom-up sense-data tend to be eaten first (If you see a panther, don’t anther!).

Increasingly, however, these dual beliefs—in essentialism and cognitive modularity—are being challenged by scientific reports that claim to show deep-seated (low-level) effects of cultural diversity: articles that document differences between East Asians and Westerners in highly implicit perceptual tasks, where the relevant dependant measures are entirely unconscious responses such as eye-movements or involuntary physical gestures. And such results are very unsettling, a real cause for concern, since they imply that there may in fact be no necessarily common ground in how we perceive, internally represent and thus explain reality (either to ourselves or to others). To adapt Sapir’s famous comments regarding Linguistic Relativism:

The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the [cultural] habits of the group…No two [cultures] are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different [cultural] labels attached (modified from Sapir 1929)

In front of me is the most recent article on this topic by Dr. Rachel Jack and her colleagues of the University of Glasgow, published in the latest issue of Journal of Experimental Psychology. Prosaically if accurately entitled Internal Representations Reveal Cultural Diversity in Expectations of Facial Expressions of Emotion, the article documents a set of experiments investigating differences between East Asians (EA) and Western Caucasians (unselfconsciously abbreviated to WCs) with respect to which facial features are judged most relevant for attributing different emotional states; in other words, what features do we focus on to tell if someone is happy or sad, fearful or angry, disgusted or surprised? The authors constructed a very nice experiment, in which they presented observers with the same race-, gender- and emotion-neutral face overlaid by a randomly-ordered series of “white noise masks”, in which white pixels added to particular regions changed the apparent shape of the mouth, eye-brows, the shape of eyes and/or the gaze direction. Incredibly, each observer was presented with 12,000 trials; for each trial they were asked to categorize the facial expressions in terms of six emotional categories (significantly, there was also a can’t tell category).

On the face of it (!), Jack et al’s findings are impressive—which is presumably why the paper got published. The results show a clear divergence with respect to which specific facial features were deemed most important—by implication, most revealing to the observer—in attributing emotional states: whereas WCs were more sensitive than EAs to manipulated changes in the eye-brows and mouth regions, EAs paid more attention to the eyes themselves—in the case of surprise and anger, a lot more attention than did WCs. In addition, manipulated change of gaze direction was highly correlated with non-neutral emotions for East Asians, but not for WCs.

The statistical results and conclusions are limited by the experimental design—the chi-squared results (p <.05 for location, p <.0001, for change of gaze) show only that WCs and EAs patterns of categorization are different across the whole range of locations, and not, for example, which features are most important for everyone, which emotions are more or less distinguished by the two groups, or what kinds of within-group variation are significant. Nevevertheless, the research points up an important subconscious difference between the two groups: East Asians and Westerners ‘read emotions’ differently.

Yet, as surprising this finding might be, the big question is not whether but why: why do we find this difference, and has it anything to do with culture?

In the commendable, if dull, tradition of mainstream British psychology (and SOCO investigations), Jack et al do not really commit themselves to any particular interpretation of the observed differences, cultural or otherwise: as they might say: ‘here are the facts, you deal with them.’ However, at the outset to the paper, they allude to work by (smongst others) Richard Nisbett, who—as readers of this blog will know—has a particular view of the ways in which ‘Asians think differently from Westerners, and why’ that I have taken issue with in the past, and continue to resist. Specifically, Jack et al contextualize their paper by means of the following paragraphs:

How could culture exert such an influence on the production and perception of basic emotion signals? Each culture embraces a specific conceptual framework of beliefs, values, and knowledge, which shapes thought and action. Culture-specific ideologies could exert powerful top-down influences on the perception of the visual environment by imposing particular cognitive styles. For example, individualistic (e.g., Western) cultures could generate tendencies to adopt local feature-processing strategies, whereas collectivist (e.g., East Asian) cultures may promote the use of global processing strategies, as suggested by relative size judgments (Davidoff, Fonteneau, & Goldstein, 2008), categorical reasoning styles (Norenzayan, Smith, Kim, Nisbett, 2002), change blindness sensitivities (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006), and eye movements (Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset, & Caldara, 2008; Caldara, Zhou, & Miellet, 2010; Kelly, Miellet, & Caldara, 2010). By using distinct cognitive processing strategies, observers likely acquire culture-specific perceptual experiences of the visual environment, including facial expression signals.

Similarly, ideological concepts underlying societal functioning (e.g., Triandis, 1989) highlight important cultural differences, which likely influence the production of facial expressions. For example, individualistic versus collectivist cultures may adopt different display rules that govern when, how, and to whom emotions are expressed (e.g., Matsumoto, Seung Hee, & Fontaine, 2008), thus diminishing, enhancing, or altering facial expression signals. As a result, cultural differences in the expectations of expressive signals could give rise to the reported cultural confusions (e.g., Biehl et al., 1997; Ekman et al., 1987; Ekman et al., 1969; Jack et al., 2009; Matsumoto, 1992; Matsumoto & Ekman, 1989; Moriguchi et al., 2005) when expectations are not met.

The implication of the first cited paragraph is that that there is not simply a correlation, but a causal relationship, between higher-order cultural values and visual perception: the correlations between historical, philosophical and social tendencies and areal culture—Western society being more individualistic and analytic, Asian society more collectivist and holistic, at least traditionally—have given rise to distinct cognitive-processing strategies. Asians and Westerners literally “see the world differently” because of their cultural traditions.

Once again—as is the case in all of Nisbett’s papers too, as well as I can judge—the case for a causal relationship rests entirely on circumstantial evidence. In the absence of any specification of cognitive mechanisms for tranducing higher-order information about cultural values into low-level sensory-motor instructions, this is simply handwaving. And it doesn’t matter how often or deftly the hand is waved at culture, or how many experiments show that Asians perceive things differently from Westerners: without a proposed mechanism, it is an empty and—to me, for one—an irritating gesture.

Ironically (since most social psychologists are offended by nativism) the only way I can see the CR story to work is if it’s genetic: Asians are genetically predisposed toward a different kind of sensory perception, acquired through millenia of selection for this cognitive trait. It is the biological fate of Westerners to attend to focal objects, to ignore the context, to explain the world in terms of essential properties not contingencies of the situation, just as it is the fate of Asians not to see the wood for the trees, to attend to the context, etc. Indeed, it seems a good deal more plausible to think of differences in perception as driving higher-order beliefs—such as individualism vs. collectivism—rather than the other way around.

I’m not going to develop this idea, though, not only because—as someone with mixed-race children—the implications are just too disturbing, but because I think it’s nonsense: the arrow of causation flies no more cleanly in this direction than the other.

Moreover, there’s a much simpler, local explanation (as anyone who knows East Asians could point out), and my graduate students—Japanese themselves—did. It is this: compared to typical Westerners, typical Asians are considered and consider themselves rather deadpan, they don’t betray their emotions as obviously as less continent Westerners, who delight in more elaborate facial gestures. Doesn’t everyone know this?! (see footnote 1).

Now, supposing this simple idea to be true (i.e., experimentally validated), it should be clear why Westerners look to the eye-brows and mouth, and East Asians focus on the eyes. To use an apposite metaphor (cf. Masuda & Nisbett 2001) if you want to catch a fish, you don’t stare at a dead pond: you cast your line—in this case, your eyes—to where you’ve seen fish jumping in the past—in htis case, their eyes: experience has told Asian adults a long time ago in their childhood developments that mouths are not a likely source of information about emotions, but the eyes don’t lie…

Of course, this explanation is cultural in its own way, but that way is not philosophically disturbing to my essentialism:4 If it is the right way of thinking about things, then with respect to these phenomena CR is not skin-deep..but nor is it fatal. And I can sleep at night.

Notes
1. By ‘serious’ is meant peer-reviewed articles appearing in reputable scientific journals: I ignore—at any rate, try to ignore—the copious anecdotal first-hand reports of such differences, which may be suggestive, but are for the most part unreliable and unvalidated. That includes my own observations. Some radical Cultural Relativists would no doubt see this distinction—at least, the preference for scientific data over naïve, first-hand reporting—as itself culturally determined: see the Catch 22 article (forthcoming). Whether or not this is a valid objection, I’ll continue to discount anything that has not passed peer review…but see below.
2. And, for a different perspective, showing nicely how narrow of our view of normal is—especially in American Psychology—see Heinrich, Heine & Norenzayan (and commentaries). (What a happy collocation of authors’ names!)
3. This is a book that I haven’t yet read, for my sins. The following relevant quotes suggest that I should get on with it:

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world. Ch. 5

With sociology one can do anything and call it work. Ch. 7

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar. Chap. 8.

More can be found here.

4. And it’s relatively testable, given a good experiment with infants. That’s the thing to do next…

Grammatica una et eadem est...: reflections on language universals and linguistic diversity

2011-10-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

This the prefinal draft of a public lecture I'm due to give next week at Kobe College. It continues the discussion in Sapir-Whorf Redux, rehearsing some of the arguments presented there, taking up some other issues, in what is, I hope, a more accessible form (given that the lecture is directed at non-linguists, it had better be).

Click here to download pdf file

Comments welcome, as ever.

Polarity Emphasis and ‘Low Modality’ in Vietnamese and English

2011-09-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

This is a pre-final draft of a paper presented at GIST4 (Workshop on Polarity Emphasis) in Ghent. The paper is a revised and refocussed version of my Linguistics article (Duffield 2007), incorporating findings from some more recent work (Duffield & Phan 2010, Duffield, in press). Comments welcome.

Link to pdf file

"Tomorrow, after we got on the boat ..." (Past morphology as anterior))

2011-08-25T09:19:00.001-07:00

Recently, I've been posting some of Julian's more interesting grammatical misanalyses. Most of them have been lexical, but the one that I've noticed recently is syntactic and really quite frequent. Julian's 5;2 now, and typically adult-like by most measures, except for some lexical misanalyses, and morphological overgeneralizations of various kinds, especially perfective/passive.

He generally has control of past/non-past and can correctly distinguish preterite/present perfect in production of main clauses. All the more surprising then that he uses preterite forms in adverbial clauses to designate future perfect. So, for example:

"Tomorrow, after we came back from the doctors, can we go on our bikes?"
"Next week, when we got back from Ireland, can I play with Isaac?"

As far as I can judge, all when-(before/after/as soon as) clauses with future reference, where the topic time is further in the future—i.e. future perfect clauses—contain a preterite form.

(This is just like Vietnamese anterior da, except of course, that Julian does not speak or hear Vietnamese. It's not a feature of his other L1 (Japanese), either)

If anyone has similar data, perhaps you could let me know.

Why Shakespeare is wrong about Love

2011-07-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

This is a cross-posting of two pieces I posted on the Family blog Devenish, which is now suspended. When I started regular posts on Devenish last year, I wasn't quite sure what the project was. I think I know now: this is part of it.]

...And jealousy, Time and infinite longing. So nothing serious, then. Click to play.

Let’s start with Shakespeare and me. First, the words of one of his most famous sonnets, which I now recall was read at our wedding ceremony…

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken

It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheek
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

…then the words I wrote a few weeks ago on the topic, with particular reference to the love of one’s children:

There is no such thing as unconditional love, beyond the intoxication of adolescence. There are always strings. It’s simply that for our children we are infinitely willing to alter the conditions of our emotional contracts, on the turn of a dime......whereas for most other people we are not: in the case of other adults, we prefer to maintain the illusion of personal integrity, and clinging forever to the letter—rather than the spirit—of the original document. As if were real...

Clearly both of us can’t be right: either Love alters when it alteration finds (as I suggest), or it alters not—[it] is an ever-fixed mark), as Will would have it: there is not much wriggle room here.

Now, I shan’t for a moment claim any superiority of style, scansion or high sentiment—no-one is likely to have my words performed at their wedding or engagement party—but nor am I about to recant. This is because I believe as a matter of fact that Shakespeare was dead wrong in his characterization of Love. Being a theoretical linguist in my day job rather than a poet means that what counts for me as an empirical demonstration may seem highly abstruse and pedantic to some, but I use the only analytical tools I have to hand. If you don’t care for, or about, arguments of this kind, and simply want to enjoy the sonnet as a expression of a poetic ideal—what love should be, not what it is—read no further, though bear in mind that throughout the sonnet Shakespeare uses is not should be; he is (emphatically now!) making existential claims.

Part I: A little bit of Logic

Before attempting to show why ‘this be error, upon [him] proved…’, it’s worth pointing out, as I mentioned last time, that Shakespeare is not just advancing a false claim, he’s sneaky with it too, using the last two lines to insulate this claim from any criticism by means of dirty logic. Indeed, these lines may count as the finest and most creative misuse of material implication in English literature (and which I’ll use in next term’s Meaning & Cognition class). For those unversed (!) in basic logic, material implication refers to the truth or falsity of ‘if…then’ conditional sentences, in which the truth of the consequent (then)-clause necessarily guarantees the truth of the whole conditional, irrespective of the truth of the antecedent clause. By embedding the ‘this be error’ in the antecedent (if)-clause—and then further muddying the waters with implicit or actual negatives (error, never, nor no man ever)—Shakespeare is able to trade on a common misunderstanding of logical properties to scotch any possible contradiction.

The truth table below shows that the only way for a conditional statement of this kind to be false is where the antecedent clause is true and the consequent clause is false, as in the following example:

1. If it’s raining outside, then a lot more people than usual will be carrying umbrellas.

(1) is true if, as a matter of contingent fact, it is raining outside (A=T) and a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=T). (1) is also true if it’s not raining outside (A=F) and it’s not the case that a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=F). And it is true even if it’s not raining (A=F) and a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=T). It’s only false if the consequent clause is false, but where the antecedent clause is true: i.e., it is raining (A=T), but no more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=F) (~q -> ~p).

This is of course how the ‘then I’m a Dutchman’ trope works in an argument.* For example, if I say “If Brit-art is Art, then I’m a Dutchman’” then the fact that I am not a Dutchman logically implies (the claim) that Brit-art is not Art (~q -> ~p).

Shakespeare’s ploy is devious because he exploits the fact that in ordinary language (outside of Dutchman contexts) people typically don’t think logically: we can’t help but interpret conditional statements as bi-conditionals, assuming either that both parts of a condition must be true or both parts false. Consider a well-worn statement (in our household at least) such as that in (2):

2. If you don’t do your homework, we won’t go to Mr. Donuts.

This is correctly interpreted by most children as blackmail, a threat not to go to Mr. Donuts if the homework is not done. But it’s also incorrectly—if conveniently—interpreted by many children—though not Sean, who’s now very wise to such tricks!—as an implicit bribe: if you finish your homework, we shall go for donuts. But this doesn’t follow: ~ ((~q -> ~p) -> (~p -> ~q)). I could truthfully utter this even if I had no intention of going to Mr. Donuts under any circumstances: that wouldn’t be nice, of course, but it would be perfectly logical. No-one said logic was fair, or reasonable.

Because of this common interpretive failing, when we read the last two lines of the sonnet, it is natural to infer that the antecedent clause and the consequent clause must agree in truth or falsity (TT, FF): since we know that I never writ, nor no man ever loved is false, we assume that this be error must be false, too. (Note the tricky implicit negative in error: if [this be error] were false, it would mean that this [=the claim] is not false, but true—that Shakespeare is right about love. ) But really Shakespeare is playing us for fools, using a cunning variant of the Dutchman ploy. Because [this be error] is in fact true…

*Needless to say, this ploy doesn’t work—or works differently—if one happens to be Dutch. Helaas!

End of Part I

Just in case this all seems too serious, and for want of a better place to put this clip, we should start with some comedy, lest we end up "like the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat...that isn't there!" Enjoy (Click to play)

Part II

Having established the logical point that Shakespeare’s characterization of love could be mistaken, even while he ever writ, it is time to tackle the central challenge of demonstrating how and why Shakespeare is wrong about Love in this sonnet. This discussion will only be interesting and of any value if I can somehow develop a proof, such that it is is more than a matter of subjective opinion, but rather an analytic truth: that is, I will need to show that if my intuitions and analysis are correct, then Shakespeare is wrong by logical necessity.

I aim to achieve this in three stages, moving from a set of general intuitions about what love is, stemming from Julian’s question of some weeks ago, through an exploration of Shakespeare’s metaphors in the sonnet—explaining why they are so unsatisfactory given these intuitions—to a linguistic consideration of ‘Love as concept’ and love as an English predicate, exposing the gap between these two notions. May God forgive me if I end up sounding like a literary critic or—geschweige denn, God forbid—a cognitive linguist: I pretend no talent or experience in either domain. And yet in the words of the sadly under-rated Spandau Ballet—and the justly under-rated Wally Lamb: I know this much is true. I’ll end the piece with a brief discussion of episode two of the second series of Wallander, the Swedish detective show (Prästen—The Priest), which provides the most beautiful, accurate and revealing representation of love, jealousy, death—and what is mistakenly called ‘chemistry’—of any piece of contemporary drama.

First, to Julian's question: "Daddy, do you love me more than Sean?". This affected me at the time, and has bothered me since. The trite and politic answer, which is the one I probably gave (being generally a trite and politic sort of person) is: "No, don't be silly, I love you both equally, and baby Justin too." Yet the truth is that there can be no answer to this; the question is a non-sequitur. There are two kinds of reason for this, one quantitative, the others qualitative. The dull, quantitative reason—for arguments about quantities are rarely of interest to anyone except university and health service administrators, computational linguists, baseball fans, and some autistic children—is this: I cannot compare what I cannot measure. Since I don't know how much I love my eldest son, it's impossible to say whether I love my middle child more or less. (The claim that I'm advancing here is that love is never unconditional, not that it is not infinite.) Of course, I could with some difficulty calculate and compare the acts of parental love: since Sean is 5 years older than his brother I must have expressed my love for him on more occasions. But that would yield a meaningless statistic, since—as in the case of language—it is the immanent mental state(s), not the associated behaviors, that are important; (emotional) 'competence, not performance' in linguistics jargon. Incidently, this is another place where Shakespeare is mistaken: the line "Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken" clearly implies that one can measure love ('take his height'). But this is wrong: Love's height is as well unknown as is his worth.

As for the qualitative reasons for the unanswerability of Julian's question, these are considerably more interesting. First off is the observation that my love for Sean is qualitatively different from my love for Julian or Justin, or indeed my love (of any kind for any other human being; be it sexual or filial, parental or vicarious—eros or agape). So, even if I could compare amounts, it would be to compare two different properties; as it were, chocolate ice-cream vs. sushi, waterskiing vs. piano-playing. Only an alien, or other creature devoid of Theory of Mind, would think to ask about such preferences, and yet we frequently ask about love, as though it were the same on each occasion.

This reason, of course, underpins the other glib answer I could have given Julian, and which we too commonly use to wriggle out of tight spots: "I love you both equally, but in different ways." Yet glib though it may be, it expresses a profound truth. For love is different, every time, and each time around; if this were not the case, there might be very little reason to go on living. This is why jealousy and envy in respect of love is so deeply irrational: it makes no sense to be jealous of someone's love for another person, since you could not enjoy that strain of love in any case; it is—as the measurers would say—a 'non-transferable' benefit. This does not mean that jealousy is irrational tout court: for love (of any type) takes time, attention and energy, and all of these are finite resources. Our capacity for loving relationships may be unbounded, but our time is not, and we may rightly resent the person who steals from us our lover's hours. Which brings me rather naturally to the next error in the sonnet: 'Love is Time's fool', as are we all—as Shakespeare himself noted in many other places:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

But perhaps the more important question is why love is different every time. To this question, the most obvious answer, which is no doubt partly correct, is that as we are all constituted differently, different physical bodies as it were—so the interactions between us will perforce be different as well. Just as sound-waves produce a different effect when they come into contact with different surfaces, or a ball assumes a different trajectory as a consequence of the smoothness of the cushion, the composition and weight of the golf club, the tension of the racquet strings, the angle of the kicker’s foot—pick your favourite sporting metaphor—so the quality and intensity of our emotional interactions will be determined and individuated by our physical properties; the roughness of our edges, the depths of our respective layers…But this is ballistic love, love as Newtonian physics. Or perhaps, love as inorganic chemistry: the high-school chemistry teacher safeguards his job—and his charges—by knowing which chemical compounds will react in which range of specific conditions; a peck of this, a pinch of that, heated above this or that critical temperature. Love whose outcomes can be replicated, as long as the initial conditions remain the same, as long as the same quantities of chemicals are combined: 'Take a girl like you,’ a guy like me, and the results will be the same each time. Except that they won't of course, for the physics and chemistry both change, as a result of contingent experience. I am not the person I was last week, let alone thirty years ago: my physique and chemistry is altered, mutated, by the history of my interactions, and by the ravages of Time and Fate.

What’s more, even if I had remained constant the nature of my relationship to another person would have changed as a function of the others in my ‘universe of discourse’. A basic and enduring insight of linguistic structuralism is that elements have meaning only in relation to one another, whether one considers word-sense, or semantic roles, or any other notional constituent of the grammatical system. In a language like Japanese, for example, without a separate word for foot, one’s leg (ashi) extends from hip to toe; in a language like English, with such a word foot~feet, the meaning of leg is discretely terminated—docked, as it were—at the ankle. (If we need an expression to cover both leg and foot, we have recourse to technical language—lower limb—but in English no single morpheme can do the job for us). In respect of semantic roles, the interpretation of a subject noun-phrase is immediately transformed from ‘involved participant/experiencer’ to ‘agent’ by the presence of an object in the same clause: cf. Alice burned with righteous indignation/Alice burned the toast. So it is with love—as concept: I’ll come to the predicate meaning anon: the particular quality of my love for Julian is affected by the presence of his siblings as much as by his character and mine: it is different since he became the middle child, and can never be like that of an only child, as it was for Sean before Julian came along; we are all equally—but disparately—victims of birth order. Likewise, my response to him will be continually adjusted by the myriad interactions with all of the other people I know and care about, not just now—over whatever stretch of proximate time that term extends—but in all my recorded experience.

(If the enduring insight of structuralism was the essential interrelatedness of things, its enduring flaw—which persists in post-structuralist linguistics, including generativism, as well as in all conventional science—is its zealous ahistoricism: the notion that current physical, chemical and biological states form coherent, closed systems, and that everything can be explained by internal, synchronic mechanisms. In the case of love, though—and I suspect, of any construct complex enough to be intellectually interesting, including language—this is tosh, bunkum, a face-spiting nasal amputation (so to speak). A ‘misleading idealization,’ at best. For the particular quality of love I feel for any person is constantly infused and infected by past associations, and remembered sensations: a particular perfume, the after-dinner cigarette, that view from the bridge in the summer of ’83; the recollection of some private ritual. I leave the details to experts—Baudelaire or Proust—but the point should be clear: our feelings and emotional responses are the non-linear sum of our life’s travails. Which is no doubt why it is so damned easy to be young, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time...)

But if only a fraction of this is correct—if love is dynamic, interactive, ever-changing, always contingent, if it is neither (classical) physics nor (inorganic) chemistry, but rather biochemistry—the biochemistry of the specific human at that, not the disembodied gene—then Shakespeare just has to be wrong:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark

If Love did not alter when it alteration finds, it would not be human love: it would be an aberration of Nature, wherein no straight lines are found;
If Love did not bend with the remover to remove, we should lose contact with those we love everyday;
If Love were an ever-fixed mark, it would have no place in our metaphysics, for nothing else is so rigid in that domain;
If Love is the star to every wandering bark, then it is also a wandering star (as all stars are).

And yet, though the metaphors are bankrupt (!), there is something true about the basic sentiment. What Shakespeare is surely right about—what is eternally fascinating—is the constancy of the fact of the love that can exist between two people: the qualities of that relationship may change almost beyond recognition, the individuals themselves may change, still the connection remains, at times tugging, churning, comforting, flowing. It’s just that there are better metaphors for this: for instance: if I am loved by someone, I am paddling in their stream, however I move my feet their water surrounds me; I once said to Sean, ‘I love you as I love my little finger’—I still feel that constant inseparability, even when we fight and argue. There is no rigidity to this type of constancy. Quite the contrary: like the water of the river, it alters where it alteration finds; it can do no other.

In the final part of this piece—should it ever appear—I’ll consider the predicate ‘love,’ rather than the concept. This really might be for linguists only, except that you’ll miss the discussion of Wallander...Which would be a shame. There again, you’d be better off just watching it without commentary.

End of Part II

Why can't we talk to each other?: Why can't we listen?

2011-06-22T21:20:00.000-07:00

In a very thoughtful review of Fritz Newmeyer's Language Form and Language Function, Martin Haspelmath (2000) poses the (partially rhetorical) question Why can't we talk to each other? which is also the title of the piece. The "we" in question are formalists* and functionalists, who—despite the best efforts of linguists like Newmeyer and Haspelmath—seem locked in a Middle East-style conflict without compromise or meaningful concession. One of the reasons for non-talking, Haspelmath proposes, is that our fundamental goals are incompatible. This may be so, but I think there is a simpler explanation: a conversation requires listeners as well as talkers, and we just don't listen.

Let me climb off the fence for a change, to make clear which kind of non-listening I'm referring to.
It may be true that, by and large, Chomsky doesn't listen to anyone who proposes an alternative perspective on language and language acquisition, and that on the rare occasions he does, his response is infuriatingly dismissive. As an example, one need only listen to the first 20 seconds or so of this lecture (Chomsky not addressing the question of statistical learning). Depending on one's perspective, this failure to engage with—or even cursorily acknowledge—the theoretical and empirical contributions of others to our understanding of language diversity, acquisition, or processing may be interpreted either as arrogant provocation, or simply as reflecting his frank appraisal of the value of such work. The truth often hurts. Whichever is correct, there is no question that Chomskyan rhetoric sticks in the craw of many people, and is provocative to some. But the relevant point here is that Chomsky doesn't bash other researchers, he simply ignores them. An unproductive stance, to be sure, but not a counter-productive one. And not a wasteful strategy either: the refusal to countenance alternative approaches has freed up a lot of time for internal theory development that his detractors regularly steal from their own pockets.

By contrast, these same detractors who lay continual siege to the Chomskyan keep—a vast, uneasy heterogeneity of opponents coming from a bewilderingly diverse range of theoretical schools and academic disciplines, more reminiscent of the attacking hordes in Narnia or Lord of the Rings than of a coherent opposition—are passionately engaged in a different kind of non-listening, which—not to put too fine a point on it—wastes their own time, and everyone else's too.

Chomsky, by general consensus, is an intellectual genius of the first order; there are few human beings of his calibre alive in the world at the moment. This doesn't make him right about everything—notwithstanding the assertions of his more fawning students and disciples, who treat his writings as ex cathedra bulls—but his status does make his work worth reading carefully, and his lectures worth listening to with the same attention. So why does the opposition not listen (carefully)?

Their difficulty cannot be intellectual: many of the most prominent nay-sayers are considerably more successful academically—and smarter—than I have ever hoped or wished to be. Nor are they lazy. Quite the opposite: I would wager that the work of the average functionalist linguist, or typologist, or developmental psychologist shows more scholarship, academic rigor, and empirical responsibility than any paper by Chomsky one might choose at random. This fact only demonstrates what we know already from other fields, namely, that creative genius and craftsmanship are not closely correlated.

So if it’s not intelligence or diligence, it can only be willful ignorance, or relativist perceptual failure…or perhaps a third factor (!) I’m not a fan of either of the specific alternative explanations: as for the first, surely the scientific world has something better to do than to deliberately misconstrue Chomsky’s claims for the purpose of debunking something that he has never claimed—this would be a perverse, Quixotic Strawmanism; as to the second, I don’t want to believe that our ideological discourse and practices so cloud our perception that we can only view the world through our particular perceptual filters. So I don’t really have an answer to this question.

Whatever the reason, the empirical observation is that we don’t listen; at least, we don't hear what others say. The latest example of this to come to my attention is found in an April 14th Nature podcast, in which Michael Dunn, from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, adds his load to the band-wagon of claims to have shown that Chomsky was wrong about Language Universals…

Michael Dunn‘…The various universalist ideas about language change have a very strong hold on linguistic theory. They predict that language change is determined by human cognitive structures and what all these theories ignore is the contingencies of language evolutionary history…

(Over the years, I’ve read quite a lot by Chomsky, but nothing significant about any predictions for language change; indeed, I cannot recall any work of his dealing with language change. On the basis of the lecture below, though, I’d guess he’d say there has been no language change in our evolutionary history since the ‘Great Leap Forward’).

Michael Dunn: …So we found that if you take language evolution into account many of the things that we thought of as being universal properties of language change turn out to be specific to particular families. So, there are particular historical contingencies within families that make these various correlations between linguistic features happen.

Charlotte Stoddart: These are things like, and things to do, with word order for example in a sentence?

Michael Dunn:All the features that we examined were word order characteristics of different thoughts, yes? [I think their transcription service could do with an overhaul, in the last few words, but the rest is accurate enough].

A lot hinges here on that word “we” (as in “many of the things we thought of as being universal properties of language turn out to be specific to particular language families”). Perhaps Dunn is saying that he and his colleagues previously imagined these properties to be universal, but I don’t think that is what he means by “we” at all. Rather, I’m fairly confident that “we” means “they”: the clear implication here is that 'we'—exclusive we, that is—know better! The thing is though, Chomsky has never proposed that are Language Universals in this Greenbergian sense—unanalyzed properties of surface word-order—either. Indeed, Chomsky has been consistently dismissive of the idea that languages—in the plural, and in the lay sense of the word—have any place in a scientific theory of Language (in the singular, with a capital, a term of art). He calls them E-Languages: E for external, extensional—also, if one wanted to wickedly co-opt an opposition term, epiphenomenal. If E-languages are not even deemed coherent objects of inquiry, why would Chomsky make any claims about their properties? He wouldn’t, of course, and doesn’t, but this hasn’t prevented generations of opponents from asserting that he does, and then working tirelessly to debunk these claims. What he does claim is that there is Universal Grammar, that language acquisition is biologically constrained, and that underlyingly—at a very abstract level—I-language grammars are determined by a invariant set of syntactic principles and mechanisms. These may be universal properties of language, but these do not map in any reliable way to surface properties, like word-order. Indeed, as a matter of logic, they cannot be reflected in surface properties: no generativist denies that surface word-order varies cross-linguistically—we are not fools—so if it is true that languages are ‘cut to a common pattern’ then that pattern must be a very abstract one (DNA, rather than surface morphology, to use a genetic analogy). Universal Grammar has been re-branded in several ways over the past 50 years (LAD, the language faculty, Knowledge of Language, I-language, Faculty of Language), but it has never been called Language (or linguistic) Universals. In this extract from the interview, Chomsky is unusually explicit in distinguishing the two:

Chomsky Video (around 2:35)

The theory of the genetic endowment is often called Universal Grammar, UG…that’s kind of borrowed from a traditional term, but adapted to a new framework, so it actually means something different, it doesn’t refer to properties that are found in all languages, which is the traditional usage…just the theory of the genetic endowment, whatever it is. And if language is a real object, we can be confident that that exists. Now it’s often called a controversial hypothesis, but…the alternative is…magic!’

Lest this is insufficiently clear, let me spell out in two lines, shouting:

UG is not a theory of Language Universals

Language Universals are not part of Universal Grammar

In Sapir-Whorf Redux, I elaborate on this: if you are interested, please click here. But that should do for now. Given this, the problem with the remaining part of the Dunn interview should be clear:

Michael Dunn: so the kind of universal the linguists talk about, I think a lot of them are like feathers on birds that these different word order features do tend to go together and there are good reasons for them going together but there are not universal reasons for them going together.

Charlotte Stoddart: You're not the first to suggest that Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar is wrong, how much support does his theory still have and how do you think your paper will be received?

Michael Dunn: Our results are not consistent with any kind of simple view of a specialized language module. If there was a universal language model, then all languages should follow a single set of rules and the historical development and our phylogenetic approach shows that this is not the case. I think, like any sort of challenge to scientific orthodoxy then people who have more invested in the theory who resisted more than people who have not invested in the theory, I think there is a big change underway in how we view the role of language within cognition and I think there is an emerging consensus that language is much more integrated in general cognition than people had previously thought and that ideas of a simple language module separate from every other aspect of cognition just don't hold water. There is no evidence for them and some evidence against.

Charlotte Stoddart: So the picture that's emerging is that our language is much more a product of more generally the way our brain works but also of our culture than we previously thought?

Michael Dunn: That's right, yes.

There are main three points to observe about this extract. First, the discovery that apparently universal word-order patterns emerged independently, and for different reasons, in different language families, is genuinely interesting, and an important contribution to our understanding of evolutionary change in the world’s languages. It’s hardly earth-shattering stuff, though: I should have thought that it was the null hypothesis, given the massive explanatory contribution of external historical contingencies in the development of languages. (To take a relatively modern example, close to home, consider word-order in Present Day English: but for the influence of Old Norse through Viking-Anglo-Saxon language contact in the Danelaw, and later Old French, as a result of the Norman Conquest, English (the E-language!) would most likely be an unremarkable West Germanic variety, with verb-second and underlying OV word-order. But it’s not: typologically, English is a bastard language, the world’s most sophisticated, lexically resplendent, creole (see, e.g., Bailey & Marold 1977).

The second observation is that Dunn does not correct the interviewer’s assertion that he is suggesting ‘that Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar is wrong’. Charlotte Stoddart can be forgiven this confusion, but Dunn cannot, so either he believes it himself, or knows the difference and is happy to perpetuate the error. Neither conclusion is greatly exculpatory.

Finally, observe that, contra Dunn, none of the evidence for UG—which has always come from internal considerations or from language acquisition, in any case—is any less secure after this body of research than it was beforehand. The theory of UG has never been motivated by, nor grounded in, inductive generalizations about language diversity, and that is not about to change.

The shame of it all is that this research, like that of Dunn’s mentors and colleagues, Stephen Levinson and Nick Evans (Evans & Levinson 2009) is important, valuable and inspiring stuff. Moreover, to the extent that large-scale typological studies of this kind foster interest in language diversity and promote language documentation, such work has far more beneficial social impacts than anything achieved by Minimalists, as it does not greatly matter to UG researchers whether there is one language spoken on Earth or 10,000: at the epistemological depths, there is only one anyway (Faculty of Language, that is). But to the rest of us, it is diversity that makes life interesting, not just academically, but in every phenomenological, experiential respect. In common with many people, a principal reason that I got into linguistics in the first place was my fascination with languages—not Language—and with exotic diversity, not genetic uniformity. Beneath the surface, ‘I’m a deeply superficial person’ (as Andy Warhol is supposed to have said).

Perhaps because of my own career path, I am also a compatibilist: I really believe that it is possible to pursue a theory of Universal Grammar, while remaining open to the possibility that there are no Language Universals, as Evans & Levinson assert, and that, as Dunn says, language is much more integrated in general cognition than people had previously thought. In fact, if you listen to the whole interview, it is clear that Chomsky thinks so, too.

Linguistics doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

*For formalist, read generativist—I know at least one cognitive linguist who resents our appropriation of the term, there are probably many others.)

Do Asians really think differently from Westerners? - Revised Version

2011-06-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

Link to PDF file

This is the revised draft version of the article on Asian-Western differences in visual recall, which has been resubmitted to Cognitive Linguistics. It should be cited as Tajima, Y. & N. Duffield (2011) On Japanese-Chinese differences in picture description and recall. Ms. Keio University and University of Sheffield. Submitted.

Head-First: On the head-initiality of Vietnamese clauses

2011-06-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

Link to PDF file

This is the final draft version of an article on CP and 'Yes-No' questions in Vietnamese that will appear in 2012 in a Mouton volume edited by Daniel Hole and Elisabeth Löbel on the Linguistics of Vietnamese [title forthcoming]. This paper will form the basis of section 1 of Chapter 3 of my forthcoming monograph. This version should be cited as Duffield, Nigel (2011) Head-First: On the head-initiality of Vietnamese clauses, ms. University of Sheffield.

How flabbergasting is Extragrammaticality?

2011-06-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have been forced to think a bit harder about the concept of Extra-grammaticality, which is basically the idea that some elements of a linguistic utterance are not analyzed as part of the abstract, underlying sentential representation (even if they are legitimate lexical items that may, on another occasion, be so analyzed). The context for this concern is a paper that I recently submitted to a leading journal, which—the paper, that is—was tossed back at me after being savagely rejected by one of the reviewers. One of the many things the reviewer objected to was a section in which, in passing, I entertained the proposal that utterance final Q-morphemes in East Asian languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin might be extra-grammatical in the sense defined above; in the particular case at hand, which concerns the analysis of interrogative không, I was in fact rejecting such a proposal for không. But no matter: the mere suggestion of extra-grammaticality was enough to horrify, indeed flabbergast, the reviewer of the afore-unnamed journạl. Verbatim, if not literally (whatever the literal meaning of flabbergast might be, I think he was exaggerating). Quoth he: (“[The] statement ...that “many languages have lexical elements that are extra-metrical in this sense—present in utterances but not in sentences..."... left me flabbergasted.”

For this, and doubtless other, sounder, reasons, the reviewer was minded to urge rejection of the paper, and the editor duly complied.
(It should be said that this particular reviewer has issues with almost everything that I have ever written on Vietnamese—and this is mutual—so it's not clear whether the flabbergasting came from the content of this assertion or from the fact that I was the one to make it; the generative syntax sand-box is rarely a congenial place to play.)

In my defence—as I have written in a footnote to a revised version of the paper that will appear early next year—I wrote:

I know of no formal analysis that treats elements such as final ‘alright’, ‘ok’, ‘yeah’, etc—as in (i) below—as structurally integrated into English clauses, even though these elements also are functionally clause-typing, signaling a (rhetorical) question:

(i)     a.    I’m coming, alright?!
         b.    She’s my sister, yeah?!
         c.    I know what I’m doing, ok?!

Nor are these the only elements that can be viewed as extra-grammatical, but nonetheless linguistic objects: from affective noises (Brrr!, Whoosh, Zoom-Zoom) to the ubiquitous, conversational like, to paralinguistic gestures, including nods, head-shakes, turn-taking uh-huhs etc., natural language utterances are populated with morphemes—unique conventionalized pairings of sound and meaning—that show no signs of grammatical integration. Some of these elements are of course treated in theories of pragmatics or in cognitive theories of communication—see, for example, Kita & Ide (2007)—but not as syntactic objects.

So, what’s your verdict? I am genuinely interested in receiving your comments. Is extra-grammaticality real, as I naively, and pragmatically supposed, or ‘is every ***** thing that appears in an utterance analyzed as sentential **** constituent,?’—even asterisked expressions that can appear inside lexical****compounds?! Personally, I doubt it, but then, like, I would ****** say that, wouldn’t I…?!

Getting the GIST4 (September 29th-30th)

2011-06-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

It will be very good to come back to Belgium, and to linguistics, after too long away. If you are interested why don't you join us...

On 9 Jun 2011, at 00:13, Reiko Vermeulen wrote:

GIST4: The FWO-Odysseus project GIST at Ghent University is pleased to announce a workshop on

The syntax of polarity emphasis: distribution and locus of licensing

This workshop brings together researchers who have worked on the syntactic analysis of a range of polarity emphasis phenomena in a number of languages. The goal is to achieve a systematic classification of such phenomena, as an overarching description of their typology, as well as a unified terminology, are still largely lacking.

While most of the expressions of polarity emphasis discussed in the literature so far appear to be main clause phenomena (MCP) or root transformations, that is, patterns by and large restricted to main clauses, possibly including a restricted set of subordinate clauses known to be transparent for such phenomena/to pattern with root clauses (see Hooper and Thompson 1973 and Emonds 1970, 1976 for early discussion), recent work has shown that other expressions of polarity emphasis have a freer distribution (Danckaert 2009, Breitbarth and Haegeman 2010, Danckaert and Haegeman to appear). This difference in distribution of polarity emphasising expressions has been noted before; Hyman and Watters (1984) in their large-scale study of several African languages on what they call 'auxiliary focus' - emphatic assertion as expressed through focus on the auxiliary - show that while in most languages, it is restricted to main clause types, potentially including embedded clause types that can be assimilated to main clauses (1984:256), emphatic assertion through auxiliary focus is generally available in all clause types in some languages. They propose that in languages in which auxiliary focus is what we call an MCP, 'focus marking is grammatically [...] controlled' (1984: 256), while in languages in which it is unrestricted, it is pragmatically controlled.

A number of recent papers have proposed accounts of those expressions of polarity emphasis which appear to be MCP in terms of specialized structure in an articulated left periphery (LP) Most of the phenomena in question have been argued by the relevant authors to implicate an operator in a left- peripheral functional projection (a.o. Holmberg 2001 on Finnish, Hernanz 2007, on Spanish, Martins 2007 on Portuguese, and Poletto 2009 on Italian). On the other hand, crosslinguistically emphatic polarity phenomena do not always display this restricted distribution, and are possibly what Hyman and Watters call 'pragmatically controlled'. The question then arises whether with respect to the observed cross-linguistic differences in the expression of polarity emphasis, the crucial distinction is between syntactically vs. pragmatically controlled phenomena, or whether a purely syntactic approach e.g. within the cartographic framework is sufficient. An approach of the latter type could for instance take the difference to reside in the different syntactic positions of the expressions of polarity emphasis, viz. within the left periphery (MCP) or within the TP-domain (unrestricted). Duffield's (2007) treatment of do insertion in English is an example of such an approach. Proposals of TP-internal focus phrases, made to account for other phenomena might be applied here with success (cf. the work of e.g. Jayaseelan 2001 or Belletti 2004). On the other hand, a purely syntactic account may not be able to capture the discourse effects associated with specific patterns and it could be that a radically pragmatic account may offer a closer fit to the data. The question arises, of course, whether certain types of polarity emphasis phenomena should be unattested for principled reasons, such as polarity emphasis phenomena syntactically encoded in the left periphery that are not restricted to main clauses, or polarity emphasis phenomena encoded at the TP level, but which are MCP. Clearly, such considerations have wider implications for our understanding of the general architecture of grammar, in particular for the cartographic enterprise, which aims at 'syntacticizing as much as possible the interpretive domains' (Cinque and Rizzi 2010: 63).

The contributions to this workshop will take a serious look at the nature of the empirical differences between polarity emphasis phenomena cross-linguistically, and work towards a unified analysis able to account for these differences.

The workshop takes place on 29 and 30 September 2011 in Ghent. The following speakers have agreed to participate in the event:

- Montserrat Batllori (Universidad de Girona) and Maria Lluïsa Hernanz
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): Spanish and Catalan polarity emphasizers
- Anne Breitbarth and Liliane Haegeman (GIST, Ghent University): Flemish en
- Ernestina Carrilho (Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese ele
- Nigel Duffield (University of Sheffield): Vietnamese có
- Anders Holmberg (Newcastle University): Finnish auxiliary fronting
- Jason Kandybowicz (Swarthmore College): Nupe ni:
- Aniko Lipták (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics): Hungarian igenis
- Ana Maria Martins (Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese não/sim/verb doubling
- Cecilia Poletto (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice): Italian sentence-final NO
- Chris Wilder (Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim): English emphatic do

Anyone interested in attending the workshop is asked to inform the organisers by 1st July 2011 at the latest. There is a registration fee of 30EUR covering coffee and lunch breaks as well as photocopying. Further details, also concerning the location of the venue, travel and accommodation information etc. can be found on the workshop website: http://www.gist.ugent.be/polarityemphasis

Organising committee:
Lobke Aelbrecht

Anne Breitbarth (a.breitbarth@ugent.be)
Karen De Clercq (karen.declercq@ugent.be)
Liliane Haegeman (liliane.haegeman@ugent.be)
William Harwood

Rachel Nye

Amélie Rocquet

Reiko Vermeulen

References
Belletti, Adriana, 2004. Aspects of the Low IP Area. In Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP, 16-51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Breitbarth, Anne and Liliane Haegeman. 2010. 'En' en is níet wat we dachten: A Flemish discourse particle. Ms. Ghent University

Cinque, Guglielmo and Luigi Rizzi. (2010) The cartography of syntactic structures. In: The Oxford handbook of grammatical analysis, ed. Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog, 51-65. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Danckaert, Lieven. 2009. Polarity Focus and the Latin particle quidem in adverbial clauses. Paper presented at the conference on Root Phenomena, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, September 2009.

Danckaert, Lieven and Liliane Haegeman. To appear. Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis. In Advances in comparative Germanic syntax, eds. Caroline Heycock, Guido Vanden Wyngaerd and Robert Truswell. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Duffield, N. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45: 765-814.

Emonds, Joseph. 1970. Root and structure-preserving transformations. Ph.D.diss., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.

Hernanz, M. Lluïsa. 2007. From polarity to modality. Some (a)symmetries between bien and sí in Spanish. In Coreference, modality and focus, eds. L Eguren, Olga Fernández Soriano, 133-169. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Holmberg, Anders. 2007. Null subject and polarity focus. Studia Linguistica 61, 212-236.

Hooper, John and Sandra Thompson. 1973. On the applicability of root transformations. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 465-497.

Hyman, Larry M. and John R. Watters. 1984. Auxiliary Focus. Studies in African Linguistics 15/3:233-273.

Jayaseelan, K.A. 2001. IP-internal topic and focus phrases. Studia Linguistica 55, 39-75.

Martins, Ana Maria. 2007. Double realization of verbal copies in European Portuguese emphatic affirmation. In The Copy Theory of Movement, eds. Norbert Corver and Jairo Nunes, 77-118. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Poletto, Cecilia. 2009. The syntax of focus negation. Ms. University of Venice.

Prologue: The Onion Parable (Shrek and Donkey)

2011-06-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, spending time watching DVDs with the kids can be good for linguistic theorizing. So today, on the train to work, I realised that Shrek and Donkey's discussion of onions offers a perfect parable for understanding the significance of Vietnamese syntax, one of my two main theoretical concerns. Here are the excerpts that matter, the exegesis follows:

Shrek: For your information, there's a lot more to ogres than people think.

Donkey: Example?

Shrek: Example... uh... ogres are like onions! [holds up an onion, which Donkey sniffs].

Donkey: They stink?

Shrek: Yes... No!

Donkey: Oh, they make you cry?

Shrek: No!

Donkey: Oh, you leave 'em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin' little white hairs...

Shrek: [peels an onion] NO! Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.

[walks off]

Donkey: Oh, you both have LAYERS. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. What about cake? Everybody loves cake!

LATER

Donkey: Shrek, remember when you said that ogres have layers?

Shrek: Oh, aye?

Donkey: Well, I have a bit of a confession to make. Donkeys don't have layers. We wear our fear right there on our sleeves.

Shrek: Wait a second, donkeys don't have sleeves.

Donkey: You know what I mean.

Shrek: Oh, you can't tell me you're afraid of heights?

Donkey: No, I'm just uncomfortable about being on a rickety bridge over a BOILING LAKE OF LAVA!

Explaining the parable. Vietnamese syntax resembles both Shrek and Donkey. Like Shrek, it is layered like an onion, each level of hierarchical structure separate from the next, each revealing a different aspect of sentential meaning. Like Donkey however, it wears its meanings ‘right on its sleeve’. Like Donkey too, it has no sleeves: Vietnamese syntax is a transparent onion.

PS. It should be clear that the boiling lake of lava does no work, though.

Emotional Distance and Deixis

2011-06-06T06:36:00.000-07:00

Teaching a subject area that you are relatively unfamiliar with has several advantages, not least of which is that it is is easy to make discoveries, which in turn makes teaching more fun. I'm not pretending, by the way, that these are true discoveries—that is to say, facts previously unknown to linguistic science—only that they are not in the textbook I am teaching from, and that they are new to me.

Here at Kobe College I am teaching a two semester course entitled Meaning and Cognition. For the most part, it is a straight Intro to Semantics course, though in every lesson I try to think of a cognitive angle on a particular topic, as much as anything to inject something interesting into a subject that can be jaw-droppingly dull if not seasoned in some way or other with cute facts.

So today, I was teaching Deixis
(based on Unit 7 of the Hurford, Heasley, Smith coursebook). In discussing deictic spatial terms such as here/there and this/that, the coursebook discusses the rather obvious fact that this always contrasts with that in denoting objects in (physical or metaphorical) space that are closer to the speaker (and which may be further away from the listener):

1a. He bought me this one, not that one [this one = object closer (in space) to the speaker].
1b. That party was much better than this one is [this one = event closer (in time) to the speaker].

All well and good: nothing interesting here. What I found more interesting was the following cognitive effect. Consider two similar objects placed exactly equidistant from the speaker, say two color chips, or landscape photographs, depicting a tropical beach and alpine mountain. The speaker is then asked to say which color/picture he/she prefers. My intuition, which students seemed happy to accept, is that the preferred item is always construed with the more proximate deictic term, so that the sentences in (2) are acceptable, but those in (3) are anomalous.

2a. I really like this one more than that one.
2b. I don't like that one, but this one is fine.

3a. #I really like that one more than this one.
3b. #I don't like this one, but that one is fine.

In other words, even when physical distance is equal, we put emotional distance between us and the things we don't like, construing the things we like as closer. This observation is consistent with stronger emotional statements, such as:

4a. I really love these/?those people.
4b. I can't stand that man/?this man.

I assume there is some experimental work that validates this, perhaps also gesture work. If anyone has references, please let me know.

Toucan Triptych (cross-post)

2011-05-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

Consider these pictures, taken last weekend at Kobe Kachoen (Bird and Flower Park), our refuge from the miserable Sunday weather. The idea is that you get to interact with birds, and both of the older boys were able to feed and/or hold first owls, then toucans, then other smaller water-fowl. A larger selection of pictures can be found here, but what is most interesting is the following sequence of Julian feeding a toucan (the bird of choice of Guinness drinkers everywhere):

Now it may be pure coincidence or a fevered imagination, but the psychologist in me sees a boy subconsciously imitating a bird: down-up-down (all that is missing is the fruit in Julian's mouth!). Parrot-fashion, if you don't mind awful puns. Mirror Neurons, anyone...?

Unaccusative Effects in Vietnamese and English: Further evidence for Inner Aspect

2011-04-13T23:24:00.000-07:00

[This is a slightly edited version of a paper submitted to a volume out of the 2007 Forces in Grammatical Theory Conference (Paris). The paper brings together material from two recently published articles, a NELS paper from 2005, and an article recently published in an 2011 OUP volume edited by Rafaella Folli and Christiane Ulbrich Interfaces in Linguistics. Considerably more work is necessary to satisfactorily unify these ideas—in particular, the second section needs reworking to convince the sceptics, but it's a start. All comments welcomed!]

Inadvertent Causes and the Unergative-Unaccusative Split in Vietnamese and English

This paper draws together several strands of evidence in support of the claim that two kinds of cause relations are independently represented in phrase-structure. The first of these kinds is the familiar, intentional/volitional cause associated with the thematic relation AGENT, typically represented in the current generative literature as the argument licensed by ‘little v’: in recent years, it has once again become commonplace to assume that this intentional CAUSE is abstractly represented in phrase structure, either as a primitive predicate, or as a relational notion: see Hale and Keyser (1993); Baker (1997); also Pustejovsky (1991), Tenny and Pustejovsky (2000). This paper however focuses on the structural representation of the second type of cause: a less studied relation that that I’ll term INADVERTENT CAUSE (IC), and which—in contrast to its more robust cousin—has generally escaped detailed scrutiny until quite recently.2 The analysis presented here develops a proposal originally articulated by (Travis 2010, 2000, 1991), which associates the IC thematic relation with the specifier position of a VP-internal functional category, namely, Inner Aspect (IAspP). Travis’ proposal is originally motivated by facts from a completely different range of (Western Malayo-Polynesian) languages: to the extent that it extends naturally to the phenomena discussed here, the present work provides confirmation of the profitability of a syntactic approach to inadvertent cause.
Travis’ proposal incorporates two distinct empirical claims. The first of these is that the long-standing bi-partite division of subject arguments—as (underlying) Agents or Themes—should be reinterpreted as a tri-partite division, whereby some cause arguments are merged to an intermediate functional specifier position, situated between ‘little v’ and and the core thematic verb-phrase [Spec, VP]). The second, associated, claim is that this functional projection involves aspectual features of some kind, which predicts that its syntactic behavior should co-vary with the aspectual type of the root predicate. This paper pursues both of these claims independently: section 2 below offers evidence from Vietnamese causative constructions in support of an intermediate specifier position for IC arguments, while section 3 provides evidence from English participial constructions concerning the aspectual nature of this intermediate projection.

1 Preliminaries
Before presenting new data, it is worth drawing attention to some cases that have already received attention in the generative literature, and which draw out the distinction between the more familiar intentional/volitional cause and the IC relation: in each case, the distinction is syntactic in so far as one or other thematic relation is unavailable in a particular structural configuration.
Consider first the Binding contrasts in (1) and (2), which privilege DP subjects bearing the IC relation over agentive subjects. As discussed by (Pesetsky 1995, Harley 1995, and Fujita 1996 amongst others, backwards binding is permitted in the (a) examples, where the subject expresses inadvertent cause, but blocked in the (b) examples, where the surface subject anaphor must be interpreted agentively. Assuming with these previous authors that Binding contrasts are to be explained configurationally—that is, in terms of c-command—such contrasts offer prima facie evidence that inadvertent causes are initially merged prior to the merger of intentional causes (Agents), and that experiencer DPs intervene between the two positions (at whatever point in the derivation Principle A applies).

1. a. ?Each other’s remarks made Bill and Mary laugh.
b. *Each other’s friends (intentionally/deliberately) made Bill and Mary laugh.
2. a. ?Each other’s pictures annoyed Sue and Mary.
b. *Each other’s friends (intentionally) annoyed Sue and Mary.

As Fujita and others have pointed out, the paradigm in (1) and (2) extends to the double object constructions shown in (3), where binding facts once again suggest a lower underlying position for inadvertent causes than for Agents. The interesting twist here is that in English more generally—that is to say, in non-binding contexts—intentional agents show a wider distribution than inadvertent causes: evidence for this is offered by the fact that prepositional datives disallow IC subjects. To see this, compare the sentences in (3) and (4):

3. a. ?Each other’s pictures gave Bill and Mary (an idea for) a book.
b. *Each other’s friends (intentionally) gave Bill and Mary a book.

4. a. Interviewing Nixon gave Mailer a book/a headache.
b. *Interviewing Nixon gave a book/a headache to Mailer.

Postponing the question of precisely how these English contrasts should be analyzed, let us turn to a syntactic reflex of this thematic distinction in another language variety. The case in question is Travis’ (1994, 2000, 2010) treatment of the verbal prefix (ma)ha in Malagasy. Travis observes that the addition of this aspectual morpheme to certain initially intransitive predicates has a causativizing function. Compare (5a) vs. (5b) below:

5. a. Tsara ny trano. [Malagasy, from Travis (2000)]
        beautiful the house
        ‘The house is beautiful.’

b. Maha-tsara ny trano ny voninkano.
     PRES.a.ha.beautiful the house the flowers
     ‘The flowers make the house beautiful.’ (literally, ‘..beautified the house’)

c. *Maha-tsara ny trano Rabe.
PRES.a.ha.beautiful the house Rabe
‘Rabe make the house beautiful.’

Though apparently similar to other inchoative-causative alternations, the crucial difference here is that only IC arguments are licensed: the contrast between the acceptable (5b) and the unacceptable examples in (5c) shows that (ma)ha is incompatible with agentive cause arguments. Two points should be borne in mind. The first is that there is no general syntactic constraint blocking the introduction of agentive arguments in Malagasy—this constraint is specific to a particular transitivizing prefix. Second, the IC relation is linked here to a prefix that is properly treated as expressing an aspectual function: with other predicates, the addition of the same prefix serves to change the (Vendlerian) aspectual class of the base predicate, converting activities into achievements, as shown by the alternations in (6). In other words, there is a direct association in Malagasy between the IC thematic relation and a particular kind of aspectual semantic function, which Travis glosses as ‘[+telic]’:

6. a. mijery 'to look at' ~ mahajery 'to notice' [Travis (2000)(Phillips 2001)]
b. mandinika 'to examine' ~ mahadinika 'to remark'

In Travis’ analysis, this association is cashed out syntactically: ha is analyzed as heading a VP-internal Aspect projection, with the argument interpreted as the clausal subject in (5b) initially merged as the specifier of this head. This is schematized in (7):

7.

Two aspects of this analysis are especially relevant here: first, the articulation of a VP-internal argument position intermediate between that associated with prototypical Agents and that of Themes, thus presenting a three-way contrast in transitivity in place of the standard dichotomy; second, the explicit association of this intermediate position with aspectual features that are logically independent of thematic relations. With this in mind, let us turn to the new data. In the next section I present some new evidence from Vietnamese consistent with this intermediate specifier position: just as in Malagasy, Vietnamese causatives exhibit a thematic restriction that systematically excludes embedded subjects from being interpreted agentively. The section that follows then presents new data from English bearing on the syntactic relationship between transitivity and Inner Aspect: on the one hand, these data clearly support the idea that such a relationship exists; on the other, they challenge the view assumed by almost all commentators—see also also Folli and Harley (2005), Schäfer (2008)—that telicity is the key aspectual property underlying such alternations.

2 Vietnamese Causatives
In this section, the concern is with constraints on causativization in Vietnamese. In line with other morphologically isolating languages, Vietnamese has no synthetic causatives. Instead, causativization is invariably expressed periphrastically: the introduction of an additional subject argument (DP1) must be licensed by a higher causative predicate (V1) làm (which otherwise functions as a lexical light verb meaning ‘do, make’).
The most immediately significant fact about simple làm causatives in Vietnamese is their incompatibility with (already) transitive or clearly unergative V2s: so, for example, làm cannot be added to a base predicate to derive the equivalent of ‘John made [the girls help him]’ or ‘John made [the child sing]’, as shown by the unacceptability of the examples in (8) below. Instead, làm combines exclusively with monovalent predicates whose arguments are non-agentive, as is the case for the core unaccusatives exemplified in (9) and (10) below. Notice that with such predicates the (apparently) inverted order [DP1 V1 V2 DP2] is clearly preferred over the canonical [DP V] order, though both orders are grammatically acceptable:

8. a. ?*Tôi làm [đứa con gái giúp anh ấy].
I make cls. cls. girl help prn dem2
‘I make the girl help him.’

b. ?*Tôi làm [đứa con gái nhảy/hát/ngủ].
        I make cls. cls. girl dance/sing/sleep
        ‘I make the girl dance/sing/sleep.’

9. a. Tôi làm gẫy cái que.
        I make break cls stick
       ‘I broke the stick.’

b. Tôi làm rách tờ giấy.
     I make torn cls paper
    ‘I tore the sheet of paper.’

10. a. (?)Tôi làm cái que gẫy.
             I make cls. stick break
            ‘I broke the stick.’

b. (?)Tôi làm tờ giấy rách.
         I make sheet paper torn
        ‘I tore the sheet of paper.’

A less obvious interpretive fact about the examples in (9) and (10) is that grammatically acceptable làm causatives receive by default an indirect interpretation: that is to say, the matrix subject is normally interpreted as the inadvertent cause of the event: a ‘salient participant’, rather than an Agent. Notice that in contrast to the English periphrastic causative, this does not imply that the subject has any less involvement in the core event, only that there is less intentionality on the subject’s part. For this reason, a better translation of (10a), for example, might be through the ‘Ethical Dative' construction: ‘The stick broke on me.’ The interpretive parallels with the Malagasy paradigm in (5) above should be clear.
Matters become interesting when one considers the paradigm more closely: in particular, when one considers V2 predicates that are neither the excluded ‘core unergatives’ in (8), nor the core unaccusatives in (9), which show apparently inverted [DP1 V1 V2 DP2] word-order. The structural representation in (7), with causative làm projected under V1, directly predicts the existence of an intermediate set of grammatical V2 predicates: those whose sole argument is involved but non-volitional (in other words IC); these should obligatorily appear following làm but preceding V2. The sentences in (11)-(14) directly bear out this prediction: the examples in (11) show that predicates that are typically classed as unergative, but which—in contrast to example (8b) above—are uncontrolled, may be causativized; the examples in (12) show that even typically agentive predicates such as those in (8b) may be causativized if it is clear that the action is non-volitional/uncontrolled by the participant—compare the ungrammatical (8b) with that in (12), where ‘girl’ is replaced by ‘puppet’. The examples in (13) demonstrate that inverted order is strongly dispreferred in all of these cases, in clear contrast to the core unaccusative examples in (9) and (10):

11. a. Tôi làm đứa con trai khóc. ([DP V1 DP V2])
          I make cls. cls. male cry
        ‘I made the boy cry.’

b. Tôi làm đứa con trai cười.
      I make cls. cls. male laugh
     ‘I made the boy laugh.’

12. ?Tôi làm con búp-bê nhảy/hát.
         I make cls puppet dance/sing
        ‘I make the puppet dance/sing.’

13. a. *Tôi làm khóc đứa con trai. ([*DP V1 V2 DP])
           I make cry CLS. CLS. male
          ‘I made the boy cry.’

b. *Tôi làm cười đứa con trai.
       I make laugh cls cls. male
       ‘I made the boy laugh.’

c. *Tôi làm nhảy/hát con búp-bê.
      I make dance/sing cls. puppet
     ‘I make the puppet dance/sing.’

Pursuing the issue further, the examples in (14) below reveal a similar split among the set of predicates normally classed as unaccusative: even though—as we saw in (9) above—inversion is strongly preferred in cases where the causee undergoes a radical and permanent change of state, it is dispreferred where the causee is merely the ‘involved participant’ in the event:

14. a. Tôi làm (?ngã) thang-be (ngã).
           I make (fall ) boy (fall)
           ‘I made the boy fall.’

b. Tôi làm (?biến-mất) thang-be (biến-mất).
     I make (disappear) boy (disappear)
     ‘I made the boy disappear.’

This paradigm demonstrates that the traditional dichotomy between unergative and unaccusative predicates is unhelpful, at least for Vietnamese: moreover—given the contrasts between examples (8) and (12)—it suggests that the terms ‘unergative’ and ‘unaccusative’ cannot denote inherent and immutable properties of lexical stems/roots, but must refer instead to different patterns of syntactic projection, with thematic relations being read off different Specifier-Head configurations, as proposed by Hale and Keyser (1993), Baker (1997) amongst others.
Travis’ tripartite structure, by contrast, captures the paradigm extremely well: the interpretation of arguments projected to the intermediate [Spec, Asp] position as ICs directly explains the structural conflation—or rather, unification—of “more unaccusative unergatives” (12) with “more unergative unaccusatives” (14), both being realized as preverbal DP2s. Furthermore, if one assumes that làm is projected under V1 within a monoclausal structure, the structure in (15) explains not only the preverbal vs. postverbal distribution of DP2 arguments—as participants (ICs) vs. Themes—but also the impossibility of transitive/unergative complements *(8): làm cannot take a uncontrolled unergative predicate as a complement since the sole argument of such a predicate (prior to causativization) is normally projected to a position above that of làm, i.e., to [Spec,VP1]: that is, it competes for the initial merge position of the clausal subject:

Thus, these Vietnamese data seem to offer clear, independent support for the first part of Travis’ proposal, namely, that IC arguments are projected to an intermediate specifier position below that of intentional Causers/Agents but above that of Themes.
For evidence in support of the second part of the proposal—viz., that this thematic position is linked to a projection with aspectual properties—we turn now to English, this time to a previously unremarked constraint on adjective formation with English present participles.

3 Dancing Girls and Flying Squirrels: Constraints on Adjective Formation
There is a long tradition of work, dating back at least to Jespersen (1940), that documents and/or attempts to explain an asymmetry in the distribution of English past participles, such that typically unergative participles are prevented from functioning as pre-nominal modifiers: see, for example, Jespersen (1940), Lakoff (1965/1970), Bresnan (1982, 1985, 2001, 1982), Levin & Rappaport (1986), Langacker (1991), Haspelmath (1993), Ackerman and Goldberg (1996). This constraint is illustrated by the contrasts in (16):

16. a. the frozen river/ a fallen leaf/ a broken spoke
b. *the run man/*a coughed patient/*a swum contestant

In previous work, I have sought to draw attention to a more subtle interpretive contrast among present participles running in the opposite direction. In Duffield (2005), it is claimed that typically unergative present participles are able to form adjectives with dispositional (property/atemporal) readings, and thus may enter into lexical compounds, whereas typically unaccusative participles may not, being forced to retain their verbal (or temporally-bound) status. Before articulating the analysis of this constraint with reference to the Inner Aspect projection, let us consider some relevant data, beginning with the sentences in (17) and (18):

17. a. She wants to buy a burning candle. [*DR/okBR ]
b. They didn’t want to have a crying baby. [okDR/okBR]

18. a. He found the burning candle. [*DR/okBR/okIB]
b. They found the crying baby. [okDR/okBR/okIB].6

The observational claim is that the (a) and (b) examples in (17) and (18) crucially differ with respect to TEMPORAL ANCHORING, in the sense of Klein (1994, 1998, 2006): whereas the temporal value of unaccusative predicates such as burning is obligatorily linked to some Topic Time in the immediate discourse, unergative participles such as crying may also be interpreted dispositionally, as properties, temporally independent of any Topic Time. In this respect, crying is ambiguous in a way that burning is not: for (17a) to be true the candle must be burning at the time of purchase, but this is not the case in (17b), where the baby must only have the habit of crying more than is usual for babies. To better appreciate this contrast, compare the examples in (19) and (20):

19. a. I'd like to buy a *melting/soft cheese. (cf. a cheese that melts easily).
      b. Don't buy lenses with *breaking glass; only buy specially toughenecd glass, or plastic ones. (cf. brittle glass, also “breaking saddle” — see below)
      c. Do you have *burning material in that waste-paper basket? (cf. flammable material)

20. a. I'd like to buy a rocking chair, a whistling kettle.
      b. Hire non-singing (i.e., instrumental) bands for your event.
      c. Do you have any chatting room-mates in your house?

Example (19a) is perfectly acceptable with a temporally-bound reading; that is, if it is my wish to purchase a cheese that is melting at the time. What this example does not mean is that it is my wish is to buy a type of cheese, in whatever state at time of purchase, that has the property of melting easily: Raclette, as it might be, as opposed to Monterey Jack. Likewise, were it acceptable, breaking glass could refer to those types of glass that break easily—compare the acceptable pre-nominal adjectives fragile or brittle, or the equally acceptable post-nominal relative. Again, (19b) and (19c) are fully acceptable with a temporally-bound reading: although it may be strange to buy a product that is breaking at the time of purchase, (19d) is perfectly acceptable if the speaker sees smoke emanating from the waste-paper basket. No similar constraint applies to the examples in (20).
A point to stress is that the failure of predicates of this type to form dispositional adjectives is not due to pragmatics: this is shown by the fact that for every instance in (19) where the dispositional reading for an unaccusative participle is blocked, an acceptable paraphrase or equivalent bare adjective is available.
The interpretive difference between core unergative vs. core unaccusative participles is reflected in contrasting patterns of lexicalization (or perhaps is reflective of such patterns, depending on the grammatical theory one assumes). For present purposes, a participle is operationally defined as lexicalized just in case:

(i) it has an entry as an adjectival participle (ppl.a.) in the OED (online edition) that is independent of the entry for the verb stem;
(ii) at least one sub-entry is not listed as obsolete;
(iii) at least one sub-entry can be directly paraphrased by a relative clause (...that X’s).

A survey of the 68 monovalent predicates examined in Sorace (2000), plus a number of others, reveals that unergative participles with dispositional readings are lexicalized significantly more often than unaccusatives.9 The distinction is not absolute, since there are isolated collocations with unaccusative predicates ('BE' predicates, in Sorace’s terms): these include Dying God, Falling Leaf, and Burning Bush. Nevertheless, the distribution is heavily skewed in favor of HAVE participles.
Furthermore, most of the cited collocations with BE participles involve the ‘other’ thematic relationships discussed in more detail below: whereas a weeping ash is one that figuratively weeps, a wilting coefficient doesn't itself wilt, nor does a descending letter descend (rather, part of the letter descends below a fixed height).
Finally, listed collocations formed from BE participles tend to be of very low frequency and restricted to specific registers; Falling Leaf is a good example of this, referring as it does to a particular aerobatic trick. By contrast, collocations formed from HAVE participles show up in a much wider range of registers and have markedly higher token frequencies.
Notice once again that there is no pragmatic or logical reason why many of these present
participles should not allow a dispositional reading. In principle, for example, one could have coined the term sinking ship for submarine, or subsisting farmer instead of subsistence farmer; persisting headaches might compete with persistent headaches, and so forth, yet the former term of each pair only admits the temporally-bound reading.
Also, even where unaccusative participles are listed as a sub-entry of the verb, their interpretation is invariably temporally-bound (verbal), rather than dispositional (adjectival). This is illustrated by the examples in (21):

21. a. 1848 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. I. 182 Indications of a coming storm.
b. 1848 MILL Pol. Econ. III. xxiv. §3 The speculative holders are unwilling to sell in a falling market.
c. 1876 FREEMAN Norm. Conq. IV. 73 Norwich, with its newly rising castle, was put under his special care.
d. 1884 Century Mag. Jan. 356/2 Wilting flowers are hardly appropriate to a steamship.
e. 1704 RAY in Lett. Lit. Men (Camden) 206, I look upon my self as a dying man.
f. 1853 R. S. SURTEES Sponge's Sp. Tour xli. (1893) 217 The staying guests could not do much for the good things set out.
g. 1859 MILL Liberty i. (1865) 5 The still subsisting habit of looking on the government as representing an opposite interest to the public.
h. 1980 G. M. FRASER Mr American II. xvii. 322 Mr Asquith...would find himself out of office, and the ticking bomb of Ireland could be hastily passed to his successor.

As just mentioned, unaccusatives are not absolutely barred from forming dispositional adjectives. The constraint is more subtle: viz., unaccusatives cannot form dispositional adjectives that are transparent in terms of their thematic relations: Whereas unergative participles are typically interpreted as bearing the same thematic relationship to the modified head noun as the base verb does to its sole argument (X-ing Y = Y that X’s), the head nouns in collocations involving unaccusative participles are either interpreted as instrumental arguments, or as arguments bearing some ‘other’ thematic relation, as in (22) below; alternatively, as in (23) and (24), they are coerced into ‘inadvertent cause’ readings with a separate object (implicit in (23), explicit in (24). In all cases, the directly corresponding inchoative reading is blocked.

22. a. I'd like to get a melting iron/knife. (= an iron used for melting sth.)
      b. He drove her to breaking point. (= point at which s.o. breaks)
      c. The conjuror performed the usual vanishing tricks. (the trick doesn’t
vanish).
     d. America is the Melting Pot of cultures. (the pot doesn’t melt)

23. a. sinking-verbal ships (= temporally-bound = ships that are themselves sinking)
      b. ?sinking-adjectival ships (= dispositional = ships that cause others to sink: e.g., battleships, not submarines)

In (22a), a melting iron is not one that itself melts, but one that serves to melt something else; similarly, in (22b)-(22c) it is not the point that breaks or trick that vanishes.
Alternatively, unaccusative participles can evade the thematic restriction through overt causativization, that is to say, by incorporating a Theme nominal into the derived adjective. This process is illustrated in (24):

24. heart-breaking stories/mind-bending drugs/bulb-growing countries

Aside from usage statistics, the split between unergative and unaccusative participles is reinforced by three other kinds of distributional evidence. First, where a dispositional reading is intended the participle in unergative A-N collocations attracts lexical (compound) stress : as the contrasts in (25) and (26) show, this is not available to the few unaccusative participle-N collocations listed in the OED.

25. a. 'Rocky the Flying Squirrel' wasn't in fact a Flying Squirrel.
b. Those dancing girls aren't dancing girls: the dancing girls are sitting over there!
c. Don't confuse that running back with the running back: they're different players (in different sports).

26. a. The Falling Leaf is not a falling leaf; it's an aerobatic stunt.
      b. A blooming letter is not the same thing as a blooming (‘bloomin’) letter.
      c. In some cases, it’s not the staying horse that wins, but the staying horse.
       d. On one side of the parapet was a disappearing gun; on the other, a Disappearing gun, which happened not to be disappearing that day.

The exclusive ability of more unergative participles to enter into lexical compounding and thus to attract lexical stress is directly reflected in an obvious distributional difference: viz., only (dispositional) unergatives can appear to the right of prenominal adjectives denoting nationality, which is normally taken to be that class of adjectives positioned closest to the N head: see Sproat and Shih (1991), Cinque (1994, 2005), amongst others). The examples in (29) show that certain unergative participles can in fact appear twice in the same phrase: to the left of the nationality adjective with a temporally-bound reading; to the right with a dispositional reading (attracting compound stress):

27. a. The falling British [ inflation-rate/?*The British [falling inflation-rate
      b. The rising Japanese [ yen/?*The Japanese [ rising yen
      c. The disappearing Vulgarian [ diplomats/?*The Vulgarian [disappearing diplomats.

28. a. The singing English nuns (BR only)/The English singing nuns (DR only)
      b. *The weeping Irish willow/The Irish weeping willow

29. a. The Canadian running back/The running Canadian back
b. The running Canadian running back

The examples in (30) and (31) below highlight an additional difference between unergative and unaccusative participles, namely, that unergatives, in contrast to unaccusatives, show no contradiction under sentential negation. This follows from their ambiguous status: the (verbal) temporal reading is not in conflict with the adjectival property reading:

30. a. #This burning candle isn't burning (now).
      b. #He watched a burning candle, but it wasn’t burning that night.
      c. #He waited for an arriving plane that never arrived.

31. a. Those crying children aren't crying (now).
      b. He watched the Singing Nuns, but they weren’t singing that night.
      c. This Snapping Turtle isn't snapping (at the moment).

Summarizing the discussion thus far, various kinds of evidence show that more unergative present participles may function as prenominal adjectives—and thus enter nominal compounds—whereas more unaccusative ones may not (unless they incorporate a separate Theme argument). Prima facie, this constraint is puzzling, not least because, as was noted earlier, adjectival past participles show precisely the opposite constraint: compare again the examples in (16) above, repeated here for convenience:

16. a. the frozen river/ a fallen leaf/ a broken spoke
b. *the run man/*a coughed patient/*a swum contestant

Under the traditional dichotomous view of the unergative-unaccusative distinction, this contrast between present and past participles is paradoxical since, if the explanation for the effects discussed here is a structural/thematic one—as I assume—it cannot simply be the standard explanation for adjectival past participles run backwards, that is, ‘before passivization’. This is because, as Haspelmath (1993) points out, most structural/thematic approaches account for the contrast between (16a) and (16b) above by claiming that only THEME arguments—alternatively, only the underlying objects of telic predicates—are accessible for this type of modification, with the sole arguments of unergatives being either of the wrong lexical type or projected too high in the thematic structure. If this explanation carried over to active participles, we would expect to see either the same thematic restrictions applying here—that is, incorrectly excluding unergatives—or conceivably no restriction, with unpassivized unergatives remaining low enough to be accessible for modification. Thus, the solution to the present participles problem also forces a reconsideration of previous analyses of the past participle alternation in (16).
By contrast, Travis’ tri-partite phrase-structure proposal in (15), supplemented by a number of additional assumptions, provides a solution to the opposing restrictions on both present and past participles that resolves this paradox whilst simultaneously tying the IC thematic relation directly to a syntactic position that is aspectual (in the most obvious sense of hosting aspectual morphology).
A basic assumption underlying the present analysis is that that the interpretive ambiguity between temporally-bound vs. dispositional readings for prenominal participles stems directly from a categorial structural ambiguity between pre-nominal verbal participles and prenominal bare adjectives. In the case of the (unrestricted) temporally bound reading, I assume that pre-nominal participles project exactly the same verbal structure as they do in predicative position; by contrast, the dispositional reading arises whenever participles are converted to and projected as bare adjectives (where this is permitted). Notice that I assume that this conversion process is a syntactic one, albeit covert and within the lexicon: in other words, it is a piece of l-syntax, in the sense of Hale & Keyser (1993).
To a first approximation, let us assume, following Reuland (1983), that the representation of verbal present participles involves a functional head containing the formal features of the –ing affix, as well as all the phrase structure governed by this head. Reuland’s original structure is diagrammed in (32a) below: for present purposes, ‘Infl’ may be re-interpreted as corresponding to Travis’ Outer Aspect (OAsp) projection, as in (32b).

As for the projection of bare attributive adjectives, I follow Higginbotham (1985), in which it is claimed that the representation of adjectival modifiers involve at an open argument position with which the modified head noun must be identified, as shown in (33)—see Higginbotham (1985: example [45]). Note that in contrast to (32), participles realized as bare adjectives project no functional structure. The claim is that unergative participles functioning as pre-nominal modifiers are structurally ambiguous between these two modes of projection (s-syntactic vs. l-syntactic projections, respectively):

Of course, much hangs here on the correct interpretation of the anachronistically labeled ‘VP’ node, an issue addressed directly below. Nevertheless, if the more general assumption is correct, then the right analytic question is why some participles may undergo conversion to adjectives, while others cannot. The answer I suggest is that the sole arguments of active unergatives are in the right structural position to undergo l-syntactic conversion, whereas those of “core unaccusatives” are not.
With the previous discussion of Vietnamese causatives in mind, assume now that a three-way distinction in argument projection is likewise implicated in the unergative-unaccusative split in English, such that in verbal projections:

(i) arguments of V1 are merged to [Spec,V1], interpreted as AGENTS
(ii) arguments of (Inner) Asp are merged to [Spec, Asp], interpreted as INADVERTENT CAUSE/KEY PARTICIPANTS
(iii) arguments of the root verb are merged as sisters to V2, interpreted as THEMES

As was the case in Vietnamese, suppose that for core unaccusatives, only the third type of projection is possible: by contrast, for “unergatives”, either of the former modes of projection are available: they may initially project either as canonical transitives (option 1) or as Inadvertent Causes (option 2), as in (34) cf. (15) above:

Given this structural representation, the various constraints on participial adjectives observed above follow fairly directly if one assumes the following lexical constraint on participle to adjective conversion:

35. Unique Mapping Constraint on Adjective Formation
The argument mapped to the argument position of the adjective template must be projected into the [Spec, Asp’] position of the participle at the point of lexical conversion.

Combining this constraint with the phrase-structure in (33) has the following consequences. In the first place we can immediately derive the core unaccusative-unergative contrasts in (17-20) above: unless there is some reason to raise ‘Theme’ arguments through [Spec, Asp]—such arguments will not occur in this position in l-syntax, and adjective formation will be blocked by the UMC. This is schematized in (36):

The two exceptional contexts where arguments of unaccusative predicates may be converted to adjectives are precisely those where there is evidence of some kind of argument raising: either the regular case of passivization—this is the case of adjectival past participles in (16)—or the (apparently more lexical) instances of Theme-incorporation, as in (24) above.
Taking the passive participles first, a possible derivation is given in (37) below. As should be clear, this is no more than a modification of the standard generative analysis of passive (Baker, Johnson, and Roberts 1989), such that the abstract passive/perfective -EN morpheme is initially associated with Inner Aspect rather than with V1/‘little v’, as is more commonly assumed:

With this revision, Baker, Johnson, and Roberts (1989)’s analysis of verbal passives extends to the analysis of prenominal participles: unergative predicates (16b) are correctly excluded—the ‘external’ theta-role normally being assigned to the argument in [Spec, ASP] is assigned to the passive morpheme, and thus unable to license any ‘external’ argument, also blocking the adjectival conversion; by contrast, unaccusative predicates are permitted in both their verbal and adjectival forms in virtue of covert raising to/through [Spec, Asp] in l-syntax. This verbal vs. adjectival contrast is exemplified in (38) and (39), respectively, where once again the two forms are disambiguated by their distribution with respect to nationality adjectives.

38. a. the frozen Norwegian lakes
b. the burnt French toast
c. the broken Japanese videocamera

39. a. the Norwegian frozen yogurt
b. the French burnt ochre is superior to the Spanish tint
c. the Japanese broken hearts club

Notice that this analysis reconciles two traditionally diametrically opposed perspectives on passivization: passive as a lexical vs. syntactic operation. On this analysis, passivization is lexical in the sense that it takes place in the lexicon, early enough to feed adjective conversion; at the same time, however, it is syntactic in the sense that it operates over the same structures and disposes of the same mechanisms that constitute the overt syntax of more isolating languages, such as Vietnamese (as we saw in section 2 above).
Turning to the examples illustrated in (24) above involving Theme incorporation, these are now reanalyzed as instances of overt (l-syntactic) raising, as in (40) (‘mind-bending drugs’):

Finally, this analysis explains why it is that those marginal cases where unaccusative predicates may function as prenominal adjectives involve transitivization of the predicate such that the head noun is interpreted as an IC of the process denoted by that predicate, rather than as the Theme: that is, for example, why a breaking saddle is one used for breaking (in) horses, not one that breaks:

Summarizing this section: the distribution and interpretation of English prenominal participles—especially, the opposing constraints applying to present vs. perfective participles—offers direct supports for the tri-partite structural representation proposed by Travis (op cit.), insofar as the availability in English of an intermediate specifier position within the extended VP offers a straightforward explanation for what would otherwise be a paradoxical flip in the possibilities for prenominal modification, depending on the aspectual properties of the predicate. The additional value of the English data is that the licensing properties of this projection are directly linked to an uncontroversially aspectual element, namely, the perfective morpheme –EN. Thus, the English data provide support not only for the existence of such a position, but also the justification of its syntactic label (Inner Aspect).
Before closing this section, one feature of the analysis requires some additional comment. Previously, in setting out Travis’ analysis of the Malagasy prefix ha-, it was noted that this morpheme was taken to be an exponent of the semantic feature [+telic]; subsequently, it was also observed in passing that other researchers of this have concluded that telicity is the determining feature of relevant alternations of this type.
The data presented here, however, cast doubt on this conclusion (assuming of course that the phenomena are to be handled by a parallel treatment). This is because the contrast analyzed here involves an ‘Anti-telicity’ effect: lexically, the participles that permit adjective formation are unergative, a class of predicate normally assumed to be atelic; by contrast, unaccusative predicates, which are generally classed as telic, resist adjective formation (unless passivized).
The force of this evidence is compounded by the fact that experiencer predicates display a similar contrast with respect to adjective formation: participles formed from Object Experiencer verbs, such as annoy, exciting, interest, and so forth, permit dispositional readings (42), whereas Subject Experiencer participles are grammatically unacceptable (43ab), unless—like unaccusatives—they are passivized or contain incorporated Theme arguments (43cd):

42. a. an interesting fact
      b. an amusing story
      c. a frightening incident
      d. an entertaining stunt

43. a. She is a *(god-)fearing woman (cf. fearful)
      b. *He was an envying man (cf. envious)
      c. *Loathing or hating people should be avoided if possible.
      d. an *(all)-knowing God

As discussed at greater length in Duffield (2005, esp. in prep), this contrast is not fully parallel to the unaccusative vs. unergative split outlined above, in that object experiencer modifiers are still restricted to the verbal (left-hand) side of nationality adjectives, and bare subject experiencer predicates are excluded entirely (by whatever constraint prevents stative predicates from combining with -ing in English). Nevertheless, the fact that two subclasses of lexically atelic predicates are implicated with the IAsP projection argues against the idea that telicity is the relevant semantic feature. Though more work is necessary to establish this, it is possible that a lexically more neutral feature, such as perfectivity, or ‘boundedness’, may be at work here (boundedness being an intrinsic feature of telicity, but not the other way around).

Conclusion
This article has focused attention on a less scrutinized causal relation, that of Inadvertent Cause (IC), and on its representation in phrase-structure. The investigations summarized here provide some independent empirical evidence in support of the specific phrasal architecture proposed in Travis (2000, 2010), involving an Inner Aspect projection below the position of intentional Cause (V1, v), suggesting that the conclusions previously arrived at on the basis of Western Malayo-Polynesian have quite general application. The data presented here also speak to the question of the unaccusative-unergative distinction, challenging the more standard assumption of an inherently lexical dichotomy between two kinds of predicate—for example, in terms of inherent telicity: see (Chierchia 1989), (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995), amongst others—replacing this binary with a tripartite structural account of unaccusativity, where thematic relations are read off syntactic representation; see also (Haertl 2003). Overall then, the article reaffirms the profitability of syntactic, as opposed to semantic or pragmatic, accounts of such thematic alternations: cf. Narasimhan, Di Tomaso, and Verspoor (2007).

References
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———. in press. On Unaccusativity in Vietnamese and the Representation of Inadvertent Cause. In Researching interfaces in linguistics, edited by R. Folli and C. Ulbrich. Oxford and Cambridge: Oxford University Press.
Embick, David. 2004. On the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35.
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Fujita, Koji. 1996. Double objects, causatives and derivational economy. Linguistic Inquiry 27 (1):146-173.
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Higginbotham, James. 1985. On Semantics. Linguistic Inquiry 16:547-593.
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———. 1998. Assertion and Finiteness. In Issues in the Theory of Language Acquisition. Essays in Honor of Jürgen Weissenborn, edited by N. Dittmar and Z. Penner. Bern: Lang.
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———. 1992. Deconstructing Morphology: word-formation in syntactic theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Notes
1. Such approaches to the representation of (intentional) CAUSE resurrect certain core aspects of the Generative Semantics tradition, as represented, for example, by (Lakoff 1965/1970; McCawley 1968). Following the demise of Generative Semantics, these ideas were taken up by semanticists, especially (Dowty 1979) and (Parsons 1990), then partially ‘re-imported’ into syntax by Pustejovsky (1991) amonst others: see Travis (2010) for a clear overview.
2. A reviewer draws attention to more recent work on the topic, of which I was unaware, including that of Kallulli (2006), Schäfer (2009) and Solstad (2009).
3. There are in fact two similar, but structurally distinct, analytic causative constructions in Vietnamese: ‘simple’ làm causatives on the one hand, and ‘complex’ causatives introduced by (làm) cho, on the other. The focus here is on the former type, which exhibit the thematic constraints predicted under the Inner Aspect analysis: in Duffield (in press, also in prep.), I provide evidence that the complex causatives implicate a fundamentally different, bi-clausal analysis, which explains their insensitivity to these thematic constraints (cf. (Kwon 2004)).
4. This also holds for Thai causatives, as discussed in (Vichit-Vadakan 1976).
5. As ever, matters are somewhat more complex than presented here. In particular, the present analysis does not directly explain the ‘indirect’ reading of Vietnamese causatives mentioned earlier. It also seems to exclude—falsely, as it turns out—làm causatives involving inadvertent DP1 subjects with ‘participant DP2 complements’ (the equivalent of ‘The wind blew the boy over’). Both of these issues are discussed at greater length in (Duffield in press).
6. BR = (temporally) Bound Reading, DR= Dispositional (adjectival) Reading. Discussion of the contrast is complicated by the fact that specific, especially definite, determiners introduce an additional (prior) Topic Time to which the event denoted by the verbal participle may be anchored: call this the INDEPENDENTLY BOUND reading (IB). For ease of exposition, therefore, I will ignore specific interpretations/contexts: indefinite determiners should be interpreted as non-specific.
7. For many speakers, collocations such as melting cheese are acceptable with a dispositional reading. However, the crucial point to observe is that this reading is only available with a ‘coerced causee’ reading: a melting cheese in this sense is one that can be melted, not one that is predisposed to melt (intransitively), whereas a squeaking chair is one that squeaks; see below.
8. Similar remarks apply to She loves the sound of breaking glass vs. She loves breaking glass: whereas the former sentence may have a generic reading since breaking glass simply modifies the noun sound, the latter sentence can only be interpreted either with a temporally-bound reading ‘She loves it (at the time) when glass is breaking,’ or (much preferred) with the coerced causative/Theme reading, where breaking is reanalyzed as a transitive.
9. The sampled set comprised the following predicates (non-italicized items from (Sorace 2000), italicized items added): come, arrive, leave, fall (non-agentive); rise, descend, ascend, become; wilt, bloom, decay, die; appear, emerge, disappear, happen, occur; stay, remain, last, survive, persist; exist, be, belong, sit, lie, seem, suffice, subsist, correspond, consist; tremble, waver, shiver, skid, weep; cough, sweat, sneeze, vomit; ring, resound, rumble, toll, tick, shin; run, roll, dance, swim; chat, work, blow, spit, snap; sleep: yield, surrender, triumph, prevail, join; break, melt, freeze, boil, burn, thaw.
10. Again, to the extent that a dispositional reading is possible for ‘sinking ship’, the available interpretation is the coerced causer reading: a destroyer, say, rather than a submarine. Note also that some speakers allow migrating bird with a dispositional reading; for others though, this participle is temporally bound; for these speakers only the alternative migratory is possible.
11. From the TV animation series Rocky and his Friends and The Bullwinkle Show: I am grateful to David Birdsong for this example.
12. I assume that the participial alternant, which is the only possible realisation for unaccusative predicates, projects ‘too much structure’ to permit compounding. In other words, the restriction is another reflex of a more general constraint on compounding: the NO PHRASE CONSTRAINT of Botha (1983); see also Lieber (1988, 1992), Spencer (1991): see below.
13. As a reviewer points out, this approach finds close similarities with work by Borer (Borer 1995), and especially with Embick (2004), a paper that I was previously unaware of.
14. To avert any misunderstanding, note that the assumption is that the perfective morpheme is associated with the Inner Aspect projection. As for the progressive morpheme ing, however, I assume that this is associated with a VP-external functional projection, that which Reuland (1983) labels ‘Infl’, and which Travis would term ‘Outer Aspect’: see (33) above.

Sapir-Whorf Complete

2011-02-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

Chinese Garden, Montreal Botanical Gardens

This paper is now complete, all bar the conclusion. As I do not plan any further revisions to the text up to that point, I have prepared a pdf file, which can be downloaded from here:

* Download the final draft

If you wish to comment on the paper, please do so here. If you wish to cite the paper, it should be cited as Duffield, Nigel. 2011. Sapir-Whorf Redux: What might be right about Linguistic Relativity. Manuscript, University of Sheffield.

Honesty and Wealth (cross posting)

2011-02-08T20:17:00.001-08:00

The path down from a small shrine on Rokko Mountain

In constructing the piece that will follow on the heels of this one—see, dogs already!—I was reminded of this quotation by Bertrand Russell:

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.

Poor, but honest?! Shouldn't that be the other way around? The truth conditions might be the same, but the implicatures are quite different. What was Bertie thinking of?!

Defining Goals (continued)

2011-01-09T02:54:00.000-08:00

[This is a draft excerpt from Chapter 2 of a proposed monograph on Vietnamese, in which I try to tackle some general theoretical problems. As ever, I really would appreciate comments, and will incorporate feedback in future drafts. Thank you. PS. If you wish to cite this, please reference it as Duffield, Nigel Particles and Projections in Vietnamese Syntax, draft ms., University of Sheffield.]

...Part of the difficulty here stems from an inconsistency within Chomsky’s own writings about the goals of generative theory. On the one hand, there is the notion of Explanatory Adequacy, which as just discussed asserts a direct inferential relationship between a particular analysis of some core properties of grammar and the ability of children to acquire their native language. I shall return to this notion presently. On the other hand, in separate passages (1981, 1985, 1988, etc.) Chomsky has explicitly and consistently distinguished questions about language knowledge from those of language acquisition, in terms that again should be very familiar. The following excerpt from Chomsky (1988) is representative:

(i) What is Knowledge of Language? What is in the mind/brain of the [adult native] speaker of English or Spanish or Japanese?; (ii) How does this system of knowledge arise in the mind/brain? How is this knowledge put to use in speech (and secondary systems such as writing)?; (iii) What are the physical mechanisms that serve as the material basis for this system of knowledge and for the use of this language? (Chomsky 1988: 3).

Chomsky’s “three questions”—which crucially are five—notionally distinguish epistemological from psychological or physiological concerns. As such, they have been used to demarcate separate disciplines: Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Neurolinguistics, respectively. If one takes the first of these questions (What is Knowledge of Language?) as a starting point, rather than the notion of Explanatory Adequacy, then not only does the generativist approach to theory construction become much more perspicuous, but the practice of neglecting acquisition data becomes markedly more understandable. Primarily, this is because the goal of linguistic theory can then be stated as the development of an abstract Theory of Linguistic Knowledge: a Level 1 (Computational) Theory, in the sense of Marr (1982).[i] By definition, such a theory is at least one step removed from questions of psychological representation or process, and several more steps removed from issues of neurophysiological implementation.[ii]

Notice, however, that Chomsky implicitly identifies a Level 1 question—What is Knowledge of Language?—with what is properly a Level 2 question—namely, What is in the mind/brain of the [adult native] speaker of English or Spanish or Japanese?—implicitly treating the second as a paraphrase of the first.[iii] For Chomsky and many mainstream generativists,[iv] the identification of these two questions is natural and unproblematic, and this is the crux of the difficulty: for reasons that I suppose are once again ultimately grounded in apriori commitment to innateness, Mainstream Minimalism assumes that essentially the same grammatical knowledge is in the mind/brain of the adult speaker of any language, be it English, Spanish, Japanese…or Vietnamese, and thus that there is no theoretically interesting variation in L from one language to the next. This is explicit in the following quote:

‘In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, assume languages to be uniform, with variety restricted to easily detectable properties of utterances. (Chomsky 2001:2)’

This assumption is licensed by the identification of L (a theory of the attained knowledge of a particular language) with FL (a theory of the initial state). The following quotation is instructive:

I understand L (for me, some variety of English) to be an attained state of a genetically-determined faculty of language FL... (Chomsky, cited in Stemmer 2009).

In fact, it is reasonable to conclude from much of Chomsky’s writing that the only theoretically relevant (or interesting) properties of L are those that also properties of FL. This strict identification of L with FL constitutes a theoretical watershed of sorts for many linguistic researchers: certainly, it is one of the clearest points of divergence between the perspective adopted in this monograph and that of Mainstream Minimalism, inasmuch as I am open to the idea that many of the interesting features (including universal properties) of L are emergent properties of particular grammatical systems).[v]

To ground this discussion—which has already become unduly abstract—the question that this monograph attempts to answer is the following more explicitly stated version of Chomsky’s second question (that is, “question (1b)”):

(Leaving aside Saussurean arbitrariness), what syntactic knowledge is in the mind/brain of the adult native speaker of Vietnamese, and how does this differ from that of the grammatical knowledge in the mind/brain of the adult native-speaker of Chinese or Thai or English?

Implicit here—contrary to Mainstream Minimalist assumptions—is the suggestion that there are significant, theoretically interesting differences between the attained state of L_Viet and (as it might be) the attained state of L_English, and also the assumption that a formal theory of L can and should describe and explain those differences: that is to say, that local variation arising from linguistic experience and interaction during language development is an intrinsic property of particular theories of L, not simply a contingent property of the interfaces between an invariant syntax and an arbitrary lexicon. Ideally, the same theory should also account for the structural commonalities between L_Viet and L_English, as well as for the absence of certain types of non-occurring L’s; see, for example, Pinker & Jackendoff (2009), for discussion of this point. Absent from this question, it should be noted, is any direct reference to FL (the theory of the initial state) either as an explanatory device or as a justification for empirical inquiry.[vi]

Of course, it may turn out that there are no interesting grammatical differences between L_Viet and L_English (‘beyond Saussurean arbitrariness’), and that the formal commonalities across languages are then best explained in terms of the initial state (FL): in other words, that Chomsky’s various identifications are justified. But given this construal of the goals of linguistic theory, these become entirely distinct empirical questions of fact, not apriori assumptions. And while there may be reasons to hope—at least to those favourably predisposed to the overall generativist programme—that there are universally shared properties of attained states, it is worth noting that the results of fifty years of research into (surface) language universals have led many to the conclusion that this hope is a vain one (Evans & Levinson 2009, and supportive commentaries). Nevertheless, as discussed in Duffield (2010) and further below, this may tell us very little about FL, where I believe there are more grounds for optimism.

An Aside: Taxi Drivers and the Initial State

In order to appreciate the difference in perspective that results from the dissociation of theories of the initial state (FL) from those of the attained grammatical knowledge of a particular language (L_English, L_Viet, etc), it is instructive to consider the development to steady state of other localized and specialized cognitive skills that also have a significant innate component.

One pertinent example is human spatial memory, as it applies to navigational skills. It is uncontroversial to claim that the capacity to record spatial information about one’s environment, and to use this stored knowledge to navigate through space in daily life, is in certain crucial respects innate: all arguments that might be adduced from Poverty of Stimulus, lack of negative evidence, absence of instruction, relatively uniform success in threshold acquisition, selective neuropsychological breakdown, and so forth, apply equally to the development of spatial memory as to language, such that it is appropriate to speak of a spatial memory faculty (‘FSM’). Moreover, there is general consensus about neural localization of spatial memory: in all mammals, the hippocampus is crucially implicated in the storage and processing of memories about spatial positioning and orientation; while in humans, there is also believed to be an asymmetric involvement of neocortical structures in spatial memory, with significantly greater right hemisphere involvement in processing spatial memory (see, for example, Nunn et al, 1999).

For reasons that seem to have little to do with the intrinsic properties of the phenomena themselves, and almost everything to do with folk psychology, people strongly, if erroneously, believe that they teach their children language, but don’t believe that they (need to) teach their children to remember where their bed is, or how to find the back yard. In other words, the initial state of the FSM is of little theoretical interest to Cognitive Psychology, since its innateness is uncontentious. By contrast, what is of central interest to psychological theories of spatial memory is the characterization of the attained steady states, developmental changes in spatial memory representations, and the extent to which interaction with the environment can produce adaptive changes in cognitive representation and processing.

A dramatic example of such adapation beyond the initial state is provided by the findings of Maguire et al. (2000), who studied the neurophysiological correlates of acquired spatial navigation skills in London taxi-drivers: the researchers found that the posterior regions of the hippocampi of taxi-drivers were significantly larger than those of a control group, that the anterior portions were significantly smaller; furthermore, that this physical asymmetry increased with years of taxi-driving experience. Results such as these provide striking evidence of adult adaptations in brain regions associated with spatial memory and navigation. The point of this example is that adequate theories of spatial memory, however concerned they may be with general, universal properties of this mental faculty, treat their object of inquiry as an adaptive, dynamic system of knowledge, whose character is partially determined by local environmental factors, and which is subject to theoretically interesting variation (even if this variation is ultimately constrained by biology). An adequate theory will accommodate and explain this emergent variation and identify as precisely as possible which properties of the input are able to induce adaptation in the internalized system of knowledge. A theory of spatial memory that restricted attention only to apriori or initial state knowledge, and which dismissed all subsequent development or relegated such variation to ‘legibility conditions at the interface’ would hardly be considered ‘explanatorily adequate’.[vii]

Returning to language, my judgment is that the Innateness question has led many Minimalists to a near obsessive concern with the initial state of the language faculty (FL). This obsession has antagonized, and continues to provoke, a significant segment of the Cognitive Science community. More importantly however, it has distracted attention from arguably more interesting questions about attained states and the constraints on variation in adult grammars (L). Whether one accepts the innateness and domain-specificty of the capacity for language creation linguistic—as I do—or rejects it (as do many others), should be largely irrelevant to understanding and developing theories of steady state knowledge (just as, for the most part, theories of human genetics and embryology have been irrelevant to cognitive theories of spatial memory). Dissociating FL from L, as is proposed here, and focussing attention on the latter allows one to ask much more dispassionate questions about observed commonalities and differences across I-languages, and about the design properties of theories of L, without the distraction of a set of particular ideological commitments (and the concomitant impulse to trivialize variation while accentuating apparent similarities).

[to be continued]

[i] It should be noted that Chomsky himself directly rejects the relevance of Marr’s levels for linguistic inquiry:

“As for Marr's famous three levels of analysis, he was concerned with input-output systems (e.g., the mapping of retinal images to internal representations). Language is not an input-output system. Accordingly, Marr's levels do not apply to the study of language, though one could adapt them to the very different problem of characterizing cognitive systems accessed in processing and production (Chomsky, cited in Stemmer 2009).”

There is much that one might take issue with here, but this is not an appropriate place for such a debate.

[ii] It is at least debatable whether Linguistic Theory—or Cognitive Psychology more generally—really has, or should aspire to, this “Level 1 status”: see Peacocke (1986a, 1986b) and commentaries, cf. Laurence (2003), Soames (2008), for discussion, or indeed, whether such a classification is relevant to linguistics at all (Chomsky denies this: see previous note). But if one assumes this to be the case, then the generative perspective on questions concerning “lower level” theories becomes much more understandable: it would seem absurd to deny that if Knowledge of Language (KOL) is mentally represented that it should not be put to use in language comprehension and production, or that it should be physiologically represented in any other part of the body than in areas of the brain associated with higher cognition: the job of the psycholinguist and neurolinguist, respectively, then comes to be to determine precisely how KOL is put to use in processing language, how it is acquired, and how it is neurophysiologically realized (i.e, Questions “two” and “three” (really, three and five)).

[iii] This move immediately recalls a different, though equally unhelpful case of “systematic ambiguity”, namely, that concerning grammar:

Using the term ‘grammar’ with a systematic ambiguity to refer, first, to the native speaker’s internally represented ‘theory of his language’ and, second, to the linguist’s account of this, we can say that the child has developed and internally represented a generative grammar in the sense described. […] we are again using the term ‘theory’ — in this case ‘theory of language’ rather than ‘theory of a particular language’ — with a systematic ambiguity to refer both to the child’s innate pre-disposition to learn a language of a certain type and to the linguist’s account of this (Chomsky 1965: 25).

[iv] Notwithstanding the prior quote from Chomsky (1975) above.

[v] An imperfect, but passable analogy here might be to theories of automobile construction in a world where car engines were sealed at the factory door: the Mainstream Minimalist assumption would be that all cars (Ferraris or Fords) are powered by precisely the same engine—whatever is built up around this core represents only superficial difference. The alternative Minimalist view assumes certain fixed and abstract initial conditions—for example, all engines might be assumed derive power through internal combustion, or to transmit power to the driveline via a transmission system: beyond these abstract design properties, the alternative Minimalist view would admit a large range of ‘locally optimal’ solutions to the problem/fact of ground propulsion. (The principal imperfections of this analogy are of course that the car engine, unlike the language faculty, is an inorganic, manufactured construct, whose theory is largely defined by its function: as a consequence, it is physically and functionally separable from the rest of the system in which it is embedded, and shows no positive development or growth from the point of initial manufacture to ultimate scrappage. Only the most extreme nativist would claim that the latter characteristics are properties of the language faculty.)

[vi] It should be stressed that I do not consider questions about the initial state FL to be irrelevant to present concerns. On the contrary: the following stages of this discussion are intimately and directly concerned with such issues. However, the point is that I assume that there can be very different answers to the questions—What is L?, What is FL?—respectively (especially where L = L_English, arguably less so where L = L_Viet); also, that cross-linguistic grammatical differences are theoretically at least as interesting as cross-linguistic universals.

[vii] Similar remarks apply to theories of musical competence; see Duffield (2011c).

Defining Goals: Minimalist Angst (II)

2010-12-23T15:13:00.000-08:00

What is the goal of Linguistic Theory?

To begin, it is appropriate to consider how different linguists view the bigger picture: the overarching goals of grammatical theory. In a recent review article,[i] Cedric Boeckx, a leading advocate and practitioner of Mainstream Minimalism, responds to (frequently levied) criticisms that the framework is imprecisely formalized and hence inadequate for grammatical description, as follows:

…the goal of the generative enterprise in linguistic theory is not to decide whether natural languages can be studied in terms of sets, proofs or models. The idea expressed in Chomsky (1957) that it is possible to bifurcate the set of sentences into the grammatical and ungrammatical and define theoretical adequacy on the basis of that distinction was quickly abandoned.[ii] Instead, as is made extremely clear in the first chapter of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965), the goal of linguistic theory, once firmly placed in a cognitive, and ultimately biological, setting, is to give an account of how children are able to acquire their native languages. In such a setting, talk of models, proofs or sets is largely irrelevant (Boeckx 2006, [emphasis mine]).

To anyone familiar—and in agreement—with Chomsky’s more general writing on linguistics over the past 30 years, this response may appear unexceptionable: it is certainly a predictable reiteration of the ‘party line’ on Explanatory Adequacy. Undeniably, these comments highlight the valid point that a scientifically interesting theory of language should have more ambitious goals than to provide a formally precise description of the grammatical structures of a particular language (even though this is a formidable—and some would claim, largely unanswered—challenge: see amongst others, Johnson & Lappin 1999, Seuren 2004, Blevins 2009). No-one could claim that the Chomskyan programme, from Aspects through GB to current Minimalism, has been short on ambition: there can be few more exciting or complex scientific projects than to understand the nature of the human language faculty or to explain children’s capacity to acquire their native language: what Pinker (1994: Chapter 1) terms ‘an instinct to acquire an art.’

Nevertheless, what is remarkable about the way in which the generative notion of Explanatory Adequacy has come to be defined, at least to sceptics of the generative enterprise—and especially to researchers involved in child language development—is the obvious disconnect between the rhetoric and stated rationale of mainstream generativism on the one hand, and its empirical concerns, on the other. If “the goal of linguistic theory…is [in fact] to give an account of how children are able to acquire their native languages…” then the naïve observer might expect the core research agenda of Minimalism to be devoted to empirical issues in language acquisition research: for example, to determining what all children end up knowing about their language, and when they come to know it; to investigating the extent of true convergence on common grammatical principles (something that is assumed, but rarely tested); to explaining and reconciling the tension between the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition—how it is that children project beyond the variable input to which they exposed to achieve relatively uniform and highly sophisticated grammatical knowledge—and the Developmental Problem—giving an account of how and why children’s early comprehension and production diverges from that of adults (see Atkinson 1990, cf. O’Grady 1995); to understanding the relationship between grammatical knowledge and language processing in language development, and so forth.

There are, of course, researchers both within and outside the generativist camp whose empirical work addresses precisely these kinds of questions: leading advocates of a generativist approach to language acquisition include Barbara Lust, Stephen Crain, Nina Hyams, Colin Philipps, Tom Roeper, William Snyder, Kenneth Wexler and their students and co-workers; significant alternative perspectives have been also offered by Elizabeth Bates, Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Elena Lieven, William O’Grady, Mark Seidenberg, Dan Slobin and Michael Tomasello, amongst many others. However, the point is that acquisition research, far from driving developments in Minimalist theorizing, is usually regarded as (at best) being tangential to theoretical concerns.[iii] Perhaps the clearest indication of this neglect is the dearth of reference to (or use of) any empirical data from language acquisition in almost all of the core technical literature (e.g., Chomsky 1993, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002): where acquisition data are advanced, it is generally only in the service of rhetorical theoretical arguments about the utility of negative evidence and/or Poverty of the Stimulus.

From one perspective, of course, this neglect is unsurprising: if one takes the innateness of language (I-language) to be a fact apriori, there is no logical reason to be concerned with the vagaries of E-language development. Moreover, it follows from innateness that there is little reason to investigate individual differences in development or grammar attainment (aside from pathological ones) nor, indeed, to be greatly concerned with cross-linguistic differences in language structure: from a Mainstream Minimalist perspective, innateness implies universality, hence surface structural differences are treated as peripheral to I-language, as “interface properties” at best, or as E-language properties.[iv] To draw on a frequently used analogy: if one is interested in understanding the genetic basis of avian flight, the developmental and cross-species differences between humming-birds, sparrows and eagles are probably of limited interest, fascinating though they may be to amateur birders, ethologists, or veterinary surgeons: see Marr (1982).[v]

Upon reflection though, there are significant difficulties with this line of argument. The of these is the obvious point that not everyone accepts claims of apriori Knowledge of Language (and the concomitant notion of instantaneous acquisition; see Chomsky 1975, Dresher 1999, cf. Weinberg 1990, Penner & Roeper 1998):[vi] even those, like myself, who are willing to entertain innateness as an hypothesis, generally prefer to use the theory to generate and test relevant empirical predictions against a representative sample of language data—for example, using syntactic theory to try to uncover contentful (see below) formal universals, or to probe the relationship between proposed parameters of grammatical variation and the steady-state grammars of particular languages, or, within the field of first language acquisition, to explore the independence of grammatical knowledge from uncontroversially learned properties of lexical knowledge (cf. Bates & Goodman 1987)—rather than to take innateness as a starting point for empirical inquiry.

A significant problem here is that the standard characterization of explanatory adequacy conflates two quite separate research questions, viz. (i), determining the nature of the human language faculty (FL), and (ii), explaining children’s capacity to acquire their native languages (instances of L). Though these are intimately related—and though it may be reasonable to suppose under a particular presentation of the argument that understanding the first question is prerequisite for progress with the second—the issues are logically and empirically separable.[vii] This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that it is possible to hold contrary positions with respect to the innateness of the two capacities—indeed, for there to be distinct empirical ‘facts of the matter’. For example, it may turn out that Knowledge of Language is part of our biological endowment, but that the capacity to deploy this knowledge to acquire a particular grammar is not—or rather, is not domain-specific, as generative theory generally insists: see e.g., Anderson & Lightfoot (2002). Alternatively, it could be that the capacity to acquire language is innately given and domain-specific,[viii] but that the steady-state grammatical systems that are actually acquired (L_English, L_french, L_chichewa, etc.) are externally determined, internalized theories of linguistic behavior, which are partly—or even largely—unconstrained by biological or domain-specific cognitive factors. Indeed, Chomsky (1975) considers such an idea quite plausible:

I have been assuming that UG suffices to determine particular grammars (where again, a grammar is a system of rules and principles that generates an infinite class of sentences with their formal and semantic properties). But this might not be the case. It is a coherent and perhaps correct proposal that the language faculty constructs a grammar only in conjunction with other faculties of mind. If so, the language faculty itself provides only an abstract framework, an idealization that does not suffice to determine a grammar (Chomsky 1975: 41) [emphasis mine: NGD].

This latter conception of grammar acquisition is one to which many might subscribe, even beyond the generativist camp. It will also be clear that these two options do not exhaust the possibilities; many other conceptions are possible. Whatever the truth of the matter however, these are logically distinct research questions; hence, it is distracting to use one as the rationale for the other, as most mainstream generative syntacticians seem to have done recently, including Boeckx.[ix]

[i] Review of Postal (2003) Sceptical Linguistic Essays. Oxford: OUP. For a more positive assessment of Boeckx’ commentary, see Collins (2009).

[ii] Boeckx accurately represents Chomsky’s assertion that the basis of grammatical well-formedness of sentences is not the object of inquiry, something that is explicit in the following quote:

The class [of well-formed (grammatical) expressions of L] has no significance. The concepts ‘well-formed’ and ‘grammatical’ remain without characterization or known empirical justification; they played virtually no role in early work on generative grammar except in informal exposition, or since (Chomsky 1993: 44-45).

Several authors have questioned whether this remark—the last clause especially—has any basis in fact. As Geoff Pullum observes, uncompromisingly:

The concept of grammaticality not only played a role in early generative grammar, but the role it played was that of being the only data considered relevant in linguistics…the claim that the concept of grammaticality played no role in early generative grammar is certainly an untruth (Pullum 2006: 139 [Emphasis mine]).

In fact, both quotations contain independently valid statements. Pullum is surely correct to say that the concept of grammaticality has always played a crucial role in generative theory construction and practice, from Aspects to the present day (however poorly the notion may be understood (Chomsky 1977, Allen & Seidenberg 1999). At the same time, Chomsky’s (and Boeckx’s) assertion is correct—in a very narrow, almost legalistic, sense—to the extent that grammaticality is taken to refer to classes or extensional sets of well-formed vs. ill-formed sentences: at least since Chomsky (1981), it has been clear that such sets of sentences belong to ‘E-language’, which Chomsky rejects as a legitimate, or even coherent, object of inquiry. Nevertheless, what is important is the set of mental states (Knowledge of Language) that occasions grammaticality, or rather, underlies the capacity to give “grammaticality judgments” about core data: it seems perverse to deny that this capacity has always been central to generative theorizing or practice (or indeed that to think that it should not be).

[iii] (It should be) needless to say that there is nothing original about this observation: since the beginning of generative theory, not only psycholinguistics, psychologists and developmentalists and typologists, but also dissenting voices within the generativist camp have repeatedly criticized the failure to incorporate—or even acknowledge—the results of empirical investigations of grammatical phenomena from other sources: see Eysenck (1984), Cutler (2005), or the following well-known quote from Tom Roeper, cited in Newmeyer (1983), Featherston (2007):

‘when psychological evidence has failed to conform to linguistic theory, psychologists have concluded that linguistic theory was wrong, while linguists have concluded that psychological theory was irrelevant (Roeper 1982).’

[iv] As discussed below, the change from GB to Minimalism marks a significant change in imperviousness of core syntax to external language-particular factors, including word order.

[v] From this perspective, one might as well conclude that penguins and chickens ‘know’ how to fly (“I-flight”), or that whales know how to walk (“I-walk”), even though subsequent evolutionary changes have left them unable to implement this knowledge (“E-locomotion”). Though such a conclusion may seem absurd to many, it is a logically consistent and rational one, reflecting an attitude that is, I think, not so distant from many syntacticians’ views on grammatical competence.

[vi] For example, Dresher (1999) writes:

‘The early stages of acquisition, during which the grammars of language learners are most idiosyncratic and most different from the target adult language, have no effect upon the grammar eventually acquired. As far as the final result goes, these stages can be ignored for purposes of the logical problem of language acquisition, and acquisition is as if it were instantaneous.’

Contrast this with Weinberg (1990: 165):

‘As is well known, current work in generative grammar makes the major idealization of instantaneous acquisition, the assumption that there is no ordering relationship between pieces of linguistic knowledge. This assumption is assuredly false.’ See Ayoun (2005) for alternative discussion.

[vii] Not everyone accepts this logical priority, of course: see, for example, Seidenberg & MacDonald (1999):

Instead of asking how the child acquires competence grammar, we view acquisition in terms of how the child converges on adult-like performance in comprehending and producing utterances. This performance orientation changes the picture considerably with respect to classic issues about language learnability, and provides a unified approach to studying acquisition and processing (Seidenberg & MacDonald 1999: 570).

[viii] A capacity variously labeled Language Acquisition Device (LAD), the “language organ”, Faculty of Language (FL) etc.: see below.

[ix] To use a social science analogy, to claim that the goal of linguistic theory is to explain child language acquisition is not unlike claiming that the goal of economic theory is to explain the poverty gap in capitalist societies: whether intentional or not, the rhetorical significance of referencing a vulnerable social group (young children, the poor, respectively) should not be underestimated.

The Kids Are Alright...aren't they?

2010-12-16T06:32:00.000-08:00

[This is the pre-print version of a commentary article which appeared last year in Second Language Research. If you wish to formally respond to this article, it should be cited as Duffield, Nigel. 2009. The Kids Are Alright…aren’t they?: Commentary on Lardiere. Second Language Research 25, 269-278.]

Lardiere’s reflections on Minimalist mechanisms of second language acquisition are as timely as they are thought-provoking. As is perhaps inevitable, empirical work in acquisition tends to lag behind the theory that drives it, and such articles are invaluable in helping to “reset default values” in our theorizing. Of course, there is some irony—and possibly more than coincidence—in the distinctively retro flavour of both revisions: just as the move from GB to Minimalism rehabilitates an earlier phase of generative theory (Chomsky 1957,1964, 1965), so Lardiere steps back to the future in drawing out the valuable aspects of Lado’s (1957) proposals (while ‘putting aside the “behaviorist” baggage of contrastive analysis…(ms. p 49’)). Whether such retrospection is to be welcomed as a belated appreciation of past scholarship, or lamented as a failure of imagination, is something I cannot clearly decide on: either way, the sixties are clearly in again, and reflected the anachronistic title of this note (with thanks to The Who).[1]

Lardiere’s paper raises (reawakens?) at least three concerns one might have about the assumptions underlying this type of approach to second language acquisition. Here, I shall briefly mention the first—which may be better addressed by other commentators—and elaborate further on the latter two, where my knowledge is somewhat more secure.

1. What does formalization buy us?

The first concern has to do with the implicit assumption that formalization of the problem of second language acquisition necessarily moves us closer to an explanation or deeper understanding. More specifically, the question is whether translation of pre-theoretical notions such as plurality, collectivity, specificity or definiteness into a calculus of feature values advances our understanding of acquisitional mechanisms. Note that this is not the more dog-eared question of whether or not formalization is desirable in general: there are good arguments going back to Suppes (1968) suggesting that in certain domains—including grammatical theory—this is the case. Rather, the question is whether formalization of this particular kind benefits either the SLA researcher in understanding language acquisition, or the second language learner in implementing it.[2] Concretely, when Lardiere asserts (ms. p. 27) that:

‘[Patty]…has acquired knowledge that English plural marking can co-occur with non-human, quantified, and indefinite nouns, and in this sense, she has successfully “reassembled” the features associated with English plural marking from the way they are organized in Chinese,’

it is reasonable to ask whether the second half of this sentence adds anything to our knowledge of Patty’s competence. It may be that it does, but it is not self-evident.

2. Do native speakers converge?

The second assumption necessary for Lardiere’s project to get off the ground is that naïve adult native-speakers show clear evidence of strong convergence on the same set of feature-values, as demonstrated through production and judgment data. By naïve speakers, I mean non-linguists from a variety of social and educational backgrounds; by strong convergence is intended something more stringent than the kind of ‘threshold convergence’ typically observed in generative SLA experiments, where the need to make stimuli accessible to beginning and intermediate language learners results in ceiling effects for native-speaker controls (who may or may not converge under a more fine-grained analysis).

There are actually two causes for concern here—or perhaps two aspects of the same worry, it’s difficult to be sure. The first is prompted by work showing that university-educated second language learners reliably outperform less-educated native-speakers in relatively straightforward judgment and comprehension tasks. For example, in experiments conducted by Dabrowska & Street (2006)—see also Dabrowska (1997)—less-educated native-speakers actually performed below chance (36% correct), when asked to identify the “doer” in implausible passive sentences such as The cat was chased by the mouse: this result compared with above-90% performance by two groups of non-native speakers in the same condition of the study. Now, one response to results such as these may be to adopt the position of Gleitman & Gleitman (1979), who, when faced with a very similar discrepancy between different groups of native-speakers,[3] concluded that:

‘Language-judgment functions [across native-speakers are] orthogonal to language functions…We suppose that individual differences in language behavior occur more severely at the judgmental level than at the speech and comprehension level...That is, we claim the differences in tacit knowledge are small in comparison to differences in the ability to make such knowledge explicit…(Gleitman & Gleitman, 1979:123)’,

In other words, substantial variability in native-speaker proficiency—that is to say, task-specific performance relative to some presumed target behaviour—need not necessarily reflect any difference in underlying competence.

Whatever one’s opinion of the validity of this ploy, it raises some awkward questions for second language research. On the one hand, if one wants to maintain that less-educated native-speakers are just as competent as more-educated speakers in spite of the behavioral evidence to the contrary, then that same kind of evidence cannot be used to draw any inferences about the underlying competence of second language learners (one way or the other). This then is a perfectly legitimate move, but it does sharply narrow the empirical base. Conversely, if one concludes that such tasks only tell us about language proficiency—but if proficiency rather than competence is the really important thing, and a property that distinguishes among native-speakers also—then we should perhaps worry less about abstract features, and more about the acquisition of whatever it is that allows (first or second) language learners to achieve successful levels of performance in that language. At the very least, results like these should give us pause: if less-educated native-speakers cannot reliably interpret implausible passive sentences in a straightforward comprehension task, the prospects of their successfully distinguishing between, say, plural and collective readings, or direct vs. inverse scope interpretations in sentences with multiple quantifiers, using standard methods of elicitation, are doubtful at best.[4]

The other worry is that there may be no strong convergence—even among educated native-speakers—with respect to the sorts of subtle interpretive effects that Lardiere wishes to attribute to particular arrangements of underlying feature-values. To put it bluntly, we need to be sure that the intuitive judgments of individual linguists on core data are shared, at least by other educated speakers: if this is not the case, it is unreasonable to expect as much of second language learners. [5],[6] Once again, the available evidence is often less than secure. Two examples serve to illustrate the problem. The first comes from Lardiere’s own detailed discussion of the distribution and interpretation of various kinds of ‘plural’ markers in Korean, in which in passing, she refers to E. Suh’s (2007) observation about a possible interaction with animacy:

Although E. Suh (2007) mentions that pluralization is dispreferred on nonhuman nouns, her own Korean L2 acquisition study apparently showed no significant difference among native Korean-speaking controls in producing plurals on animals vs. humans, and C.-S. Suh (1996) states that ‑tul can be attached to both animate and inanimate nouns (ms. p. 32).

The clear implication here is that E. Suh was mistaken in her initial judgment, and that Korean speakers’ use of -tul is unconstrained by animacy restrictions. But it could very easily have been otherwise: had not Suh carried out an acquisition study, or had the study confirmed her intuition, we might well be asking how second language learners come to reorganise their set of nominal features so as to respect this distinction.

This problem calls to mind the second example, which has to do with scope interactions in sentences containing multiple quantifiers. This is a phenomenon that has received a good deal of attention in generative SLA—see e.g. Miyamoto & Yamane (1996), Miyamoto & Takata (1998)—because it seems to neatly exemplify a subtle interpretive contrast at once underdetermined by the input, and at the same time parameterized. In the theoretical literature, it has been claimed that languages vary parametrically according to whether they observe scope rigidity effects, such that the surface word-order strictly determines the relative scope of quantifiers: see for example, May (1985), Aoun & Li (1993). Within the type of feature-based theory espoused by Lardiere, the difference between languages that exhibit scope rigidity and those that do not is cashed out in terms of different valuations of (uninterpretable) features. The problem, though, is that linguists who should know strongly disagree on the facts of the matter. The following excerpts from Kuno, Takami & Wu (2001) reveal the extent of the controversy:

In Kuno et al 1999 we pointed out that (i) there are ambiguous sentences that Aoun & Li 1993 predicts to be unambiguous, and (ii) there are unambiguous sentences that their analysis predicts to be ambiguous. Examples 18 and 19 illustrate the first point, and 20 the second [examples not shown]…Referring to other ambiguous examples in Kuno et al 1999, Aoun and Li say that there is a disagreement about the data discussed’ (200: 140). For example, taking up the Japanese sentence in 22 [not shown]…they write that ‘we...relied on Hoji (1985), which indicates sentences such as (22) are unambiguous’ (2000: 140). However it is important to note that the example Aoun & Li 1993 provides, attributed to Hoji, is not 22, but the following [23: not shown]…Sentence 23 is indeed unambiguous, but 22 is ambiguous for many speakers of Japanese. We attribute this difference in scope to pragmatic factors… (Kuno et al, 2001: 140).

The implications for SLA of such disagreements should be obvious: if theoreticians cannot agree on such relatively well-studied phenomena as scope interactions, the success (or otherwise) of second language learners in converging on subtle judgments may be relatively uninstructive. At a minimum, such disputes should force us to be much more circumspect about the assertions made in any single study—however well-regarded—than Lardiere appears to be, for instance, about the work of Kwon & Zribi-Hertz (2001). As Kuno et al (2001) state:

We cannot overemphasize the danger of building syntactic generalizations on the basis of a few unambiguous/unacceptable sentences that first come to mind. Some or all of these sentences may be unambiguous/unacceptable for nonsyntactic reasons, and sentences of the same pattern might be ambiguous/acceptable if they were free from the nonsyntactic factors that made the initial set unambiguous/ unacceptable (p. 142).

In short, the empirical base of feature-based acquisition theory is much less secure—and possibly more restricted—than is generally acknowledged: this must have significant consequences for acquisition theory.

3. What about the children?

Finally, I wish to consider one other assumption that underlies Lardiere’s proposal, and which seems to be crucial for her project. This is the assumption that monolingual children are fully competent with respect to the featural properties of the lexical items they know and use: that whatever the shortcomings of adult second language learners in studies of ultimate attainment, children acquiring their first language get it right…and get it early. That Lardiere subscribes to this view is reasonably clear from the following quotes:

In part because languages vary and because any normal child exposed over a few years in early childhood to any human natural language will acquire it equally well, it has been argued that there is a universal set or inventory of linguistic features available to the child as part of the human genetic endowment, along with a species-uniform computational mechanism that combines and interprets the relevant features in a highly constrained way (ms., p2)…‘Since relative or comparative ease of learning is not an issue in L1 acquisition—that is, young children learn the language of their community, whatever it is, equally “easily”… (ms., p 16).

Of course, the idea that children acquire the grammar of their language perfectly, effortlessly, and early is by no means restricted to Lardiere: the following quotations from Hawkins (2001) and White (2003) are representative of the mainstream view in generative second language research:

‘Children typically acquire all the major structures of their language by the age of three-and-a-half, and by the age of five their understanding of complex and subtle structural distinctions is effectively adult-like (Hawkins 2001: 6)’

‘The arguments for some sort of biological basis to L1 acquisition are well-known …the ability to acquire language is independent of intelligence; the pattern of acquisition is relatively uniform across different children, different languages and different cultures; language is acquired with relative ease and rapidity and without the benefit of instruction; children show creativity which goes beyond the input that they are exposed to. All of these observations point to an innate component to language acquisition (White 2003).’

No doubt, much hangs on the hedges in these statements (“effectively”, “typically”; “relatively”), but the implication is clear: young children have it all worked out by around five years of age. As someone who spends the greater part of his time in first language research, I am continually struck by the optimism displayed by second language researchers about young children’s language abilities. For the fact is that—barring a very few precocious exceptions—children do not perform like little adults either in terms of spoken language comprehension and production, or with respect to their performance in judgment tasks. Instead, they behave (unsurprisingly!) like children, deviating in a variety of interesting and systematic ways from the adults around them. Pace Hawkins, there is simply no empirical evidence for the claim that ‘children…acquire all the major structures of their language by the age of three-and-a –half [my emphasis: NGD]’; nor am I aware of any first language researcher who has advanced such a claim. There is of course evidence supporting the view that children show sensitivity to subtle abstract constraints of the adult target grammar considerably in advance of their own productive capacities, and that they project far beyond the input in ways that are consistent with nativist explanations, but those are entirely different matters.

Indeed, there is some irony in the fact that whereas second language researchers assume that children converge early on adult grammar specifications, the leading proponents of nativism in first language acquisition, namely, Crain & Pietroski (2001), make their most compelling case for innateness on the strength of empirical work showing divergence between child and adult grammars, precisely in the area of (abstract) feature-values. As Crain & Pietroski write (2001:2):

‘Children in monolingual English environments acquire English, and not Italian or Chinese. But nativists should not be surprised if such children exhibit some German or Romance or East Asian constructions, absent any evidence for these constructions in the primary linguistic data. Indeed, theory-driven mismatches between child and adult language may be the strongest argument for a universal grammar, and against models according to which children construct hypotheses based on linguistic experience…[my emphasis: NGD].’

This leaves SLA research in something of a quandary: if young monolingual children take their time in arriving at the correct set of feature-values—and this sets aside the two concerns discussed earlier—it becomes much less clear what the standard of comparison should be for second language learners. But things may be worse still, for it appears that even teenagers may not have acquired adult-like knowledge of grammatical feature-values. For reasons too involved to elaborate on here, there is a dearth of available data on the fine-grained syntactic knowledge of 9-18 year olds, but the studies that do exist reveal that development continues up at least up to late adolescence. One particularly telling result comes from a recent (unpublished) dissertation by Tihana Kras (Kras 2008), investigating L2 acquisition of narrow syntax by child and adult Croatian learners of Italian. The specific phenomenon of interest is sensitivity to constraints on clitic-climbing and auxiliary selection in Italian restructuring constructions, with respect to which—in two separate judgment tasks—the judgments of14-year old Italian native-speakers were significantly less target-like than those of adult L2 learners. This phenomenon (obligatory clitic-climbing) is one that is directly accounted for in Minimalism in feature-based terms, yet it is reasonably clear that 14-year old native-speakers know the lexical items, without (yet) knowing the associated features. Kras herself explains this discrepancy in terms of experience and exposure, and in the final analysis is forced to restrict the scope of her Interface Hypothesis to “phenomena that are highly represented in the input, as phenomena which occur rarely in the input might not be acquired for reasons independent of the type of knowledge they involve [my emphasis: NGD] (Kras 2008: 194).’

Once again, the implications of results like these for SLA in general, and for Lardiere’s project in particular, should be clear: the road to ultimate attainment may be a long one, even for native-speakers.

Summary
In summary, Lardiere’s ‘Thoughts’ are informed and inspiring, and certainly help to move the debate forward into the Minimalist age. At the same time however, we need to bear in mind just how difficult second language research really is: as I have tried to suggest here, at each remove from pure theory, matters become more and more complicated. It’s the theoreticians who have it easy!

References

Aoun, Joseph; and Li, Y-H. Audrey (1993). The Syntax of Scope.vol. 21: Linguistic Inquiry Monograph. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic structures: Janua linguarum, nr. 4. s -Gravenhage,: Mouton.

— (1964). Current issues in linguistic theory: Janua linguarum. Series minor, nr. 38. The Hague,: Mouton.

— (1965). Aspects of The Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Crain, Stephen; and Pietroski, Paul (2001). Nature, Nurture and Universal Grammar. Linguistics and Philosophy 24, 139-186.

Dabrowska, Ewa (1997). The LAD goes to school: a cautionary tale for nativists. Linguistics 35 (735-766),

Dabrowska, Ewa; and Street, James (2006). Individual differences in language attainment: Comprehension of passive sentences by native and non-native English speakers. Language Sciences 28, 604-615.

Duffield, Nigel (2003). Measures of Competent Gradience. In The Lexicon-Syntax Interface in Second Language Acquisition, Van Hout;Hulk;Kuiken; and Towell (eds.), 97-127. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Gleitman, Henry; and Gleitman, Lila R (1979). Language use and language judgment. In Individual differences in language ability and language behavior, Fillmore;Kempler; and Wang (eds.), 103-126. New York: Academic Press.

Hawkins, Roger (2001). Second Language Syntax: Blackwell.

Kuno, Susumo;Takami, Ken-Ichi; and Wu, Yuru (2001). Response to Aoun and Li. Language 77 (1), 134-143.

Kras, Tihana (2008) L2 acquisition of the lexicon-syntax interface and narrow syntax by child and adult Croatian learners of Italian. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.

May, Robert (1985). Logical Form: its structure and derivation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Miyamoto, Yoichi; and Yamane, Maki (1996). L2 Rigidity: the Scope Principle in L2 Grammar. In Proceedings of the 20th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Stringfellow;Cahana-Amitay;Hughes; and Zukowski (eds.), 494-505. Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press.

Miyamoto, Yoichi; and Takata, Yasuko (1998). Rigidity effects and the strong/weak features in SLA. In Proceedings of the 22nd Boston University Conference on Languag3 Development, Greenhill;Hughes;Littlefield; and Walsh (eds.), 511-522. Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press.

Suppes, Patrick (1968). The Desirability of Formalization in Science. The Journal of Philosophy 65 (20), 651-664.

White, Lydia (2003). Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes

[1] The eponymous movie and compilation album were released in 1979: however, the best-known tracks—My Generation, I Can See for Miles, Pinball Wizard etc—were all originally recorded in the nineteen sixties.

[2] To her great credit, Lardiere clearly distinguishes throughout the paper between “theory-as-linguist’s-construct” and “theory-as-learner’s-mental-state”, in particular, where she observes that the predictive value of a feature-based theory may be quite different for researchers vs. language learners. (See, for example, the discussion on: ms, p. 21 ‘For the researcher…For the second language learner, on the other hand, …). In so doing, she avoids the “systematic ambiguity” first introduced to linguistic theory in Chomsky (1965), which—it may be argued—has had at least as many negative as positive consequences for understanding language acquisition (whatever its value may be for pure theory):

Using the term ‘grammar’ with a systematic ambiguity to refer, first, to the native speaker’s internally represented ‘theory of his language’ and, second, to the linguist’s account of this, we can say that the child has developed and internally represented a generative grammar in the sense described. […] we are again using the term ‘theory’ — in this case ‘theory of language’ rather than ‘theory of a particular language’ — with a systematic ambiguity to refer both to the child’s innate predisposition to learn a language of a certain type and to the linguist’s account of this (Chomsky 1965: 25).

[3] ‘…When taxed, the average group focused on meaning and plausibility, while the highly educated group focused on the syntax even when meaningfulness was thereby obscured…(Gleitman & Gleitman 1979: 125).’

[4] Once again, it is entirely possible that all native-speakers do in fact make such distinctions (‘correctly’) unconsciously: as a card-carrying generativist, I remain optimistic that this is the case. However, the point here is that if a significant group of native-speakers cannot adequately demonstrate this ability, it becomes unreasonable to expect any more of second language learners.

[5] This becomes particularly difficult to assess in the case of less familiar languages, where one is heavily reliant on the judgments of bi-lingual native-speaker linguists, whose formal training has been through English.

[6] Though such situations do arise, as discussed in Duffield (2003).

Do Asians really think differently from Westerners?

2010-12-13T19:34:00.000-08:00

[This is a version of an article in submission to Cognitive Linguistics. Note that it has not yet been accepted for publication. If you would like to formally respond to it, the article should be cited as Tajima & Duffield (submitted), ms. Keio University/University of Sheffield.]

Japanese Versus Chinese Differences in Picture Description and Recall: Implications for the Geography of Thought
Yayoi Tajima and Nigel Duffield
Keio University and University of Sheffield

Authors’ Note
This research was supported in part by grants from the Mori Foundation. We would like to thank Mutsumi Imai, Yichun Ryo, Gary Wood and Samir Zarqane for their assistance in conducting this study.

Abstract
This study examined whether the grammatical structure of particular languages predisposes speakers to particular attentional patterns. We hypothesized that the holistic attentional bias of Japanese participants in a previous study (Masuda & Nisbett’s (2001), attributed to pan-Asian cultural factors, is better interpreted as a consequence of specific linguistic properties: Japanese speakers’ bottom-up discourse strategy. In experiments involving Japanese, English, and Chinese native speakers, it was found that Japanese participants reported more contextual information before explaining the main point, mentioned more background details overall, and recalled background elements significantly more accurately than either English or Chinese participants. The ‘Asian response’ was thus split, as predicted by the Linguistic Relativity hypothesis, but contrary to the expectations of a Cultural Relativity account.

Keywords: field dependency, attention, linguistic relativity, head directionality

Japanese Versus Chinese Differences in Picture Description and Recall:
Implications for the Geography of Thought

The general aim of the present study1 is to contribute to the ongoing debate concerning the extent to which culture and/or language is able to penetrate core areas of cognition—especially visual attention and recall—that were previously viewed as largely impervious to social or linguistic experience. The theoretical impetus for this research is provided by work by Richard Nisbett and his colleagues (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001; Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005, inter alia), in which Asians2 and Westerners (specifically, European Americans) are claimed to exhibit distinct cognitive styles—holistic versus analytic attention—this difference being reflected in markedly contrasting levels of field-dependence across a variety of experimental tasks. Nisbett and his colleagues argue that this inter-group difference is due to deep-seated cultural attitudes, beliefs and traditions: In the case of Asian groups, their holistic style is explained by reference to a collectivist, inter-dependent tradition and outlook, informed by Confucianism and relative subservience to societal institutions; by contrast, Westerners’ (Midwestern Americans, in the typical case) analytic style is an expression of a more individualistic impulse, informed by traditions of logical thought and self-determination having their origins in classical Athenian culture.

There are numerous prima facie objections to such claims. There is the observation, for instance, that these arguments gloss over any number of intermediate cases—what about, say, the attentional patterns of more collectivized, interdependent Western European groups, for example, contemporary Athenian citizens?, or highly individualistic Taiwanese MBAs? Or that they seem to grossly overstate the degree of intra-group homogeneity on either side of the Pacific. The most significant objection, however, is that in the final analysis they amount to little more than unexplained correlations (nowhere, for example, is it articulated what causal relationship there might be between a preference for syllogistic reasoning and a decrease in field dependence, or how cultural beliefs should effect changes in brain mechanisms implicated in spatial memory). In spite of this, Nisbett’s arguments appear to have gained some traction amongst cognitive anthropologists and psychologists, and for this reason they deserve serious consideration.

To ‘professional outsiders’ such as ourselves, coming from theoretical and applied linguistics, the appeal of Nisbett’s explanation is less obvious. However, it should be noted immediately that our purpose is not to challenge the data, but rather to question the interpretation in terms of immanent culture.

It should also be clear that it is impossible to tackle every part of Nisbett’s thesis at once: There are simply too many potentially related variables to control for. Instead, this paper focuses attention on the specific issues raised by a study reported in Masuda & Nisbett (2001), in which observed contrasts in field-dependence between Japanese and American participants are interpreted in terms of the culturally embedded attitudes and beliefs outlined above, rather than—as suggested below—in terms of formal grammatical differences between the languages spoken by the two participant groups. In brief, our claim will be that Japanese participants behave as they do in visual description and recall tasks primarily in virtue of being speakers of Japanese, rather than in virtue of any pan-Asian cultural affiliation. We shall support this contention by showing that, in three tasks very similar to those presented in Masuda & Nisbett (2001), the ‘Asian Response’ is split apart, with Chinese participants’ responses either patterning with those of the English group, rather than with the Japanese, or else revealing an intermediate response predicted by the linguistic typology articulated below.

Before presenting the study, something needs to be said about language and culture in the present context, since both terms are open to construals that limit—or even negate—the possibilities for empirical research aimed at teasing these factors apart. On the one hand, it is obvious that many substantive properties of language are dependent on the culture of their speakers. For instance, languages whose speakers live in social groups without governmental or religious institutions will not contain words for position-holders within those institutions, fishermen typically have a richer vocabulary of marine life than mountain herders, and so forth. It is plausible, though not yet conclusively demonstrated, that such cultural differences not only impact upon variation in lexical knowledge, but also upon perceptual and discrimination abilities: This is indeed what is claimed in more recent work by Nisbett and his colleagues (Uskul, Kitayama, & Nisbett, 2008).
Related to this issue is the Sapir-Whorf question, whether particular aspects of languages themselves exercise any determining influence on the non-linguistic cognitive capacities of their speakers. This is considerably more contentious, with proponents of stronger versions of the thesis—such as Boroditsky (2001), Bowerman (1996), Pedersen et al. (1998)—opposed to those offering more universalist interpretations of similar data, including Malt, Sloman, Gennari, Shi, & Wang (1999), Li & Gleitman (2002); see Boroditsky (2003), for an overview. What this brief discussion highlights is the importance of identifying formal linguistic factors that can clearly be demonstrated to be orthogonal to cultural ones: In this paper, we propose one such variable (namely, Head-Directionality in phrase-structure).

A different set of problems surround the term culture. One major problem is that it can easily become weakened to the point at which any contingent property distinguishing two groups, however superficial or ephemeral, can be deemed “cultural”. It may seem to be one thing to use the term to refer to a group sharing a common set of distinctive familial, political and religious practices bound by agreed social norms, and whose distinct conventions and traditions are passed on from one generation to the next, and quite another to speak of groups bound by their contingent employment situation or geographical context—the “culture” of first year international students, for example, or of the 1960s, of high-density living, of fast-food workers in suburban strip-malls, of tabloid readers, and so forth. In practice, however, it proves problematic to decide when culture shades into community of practice, or something even less theoretically significant.3

In addition to this, there seems to be a lack of consensus among psychologists, anthropologists, and social scientists about the necessary or sufficient conditions for belonging to a culture, or acculturation. If an individual can be deemed to be influenced by a particular culture after only months, or even weeks, of contact, it again becomes very hard to tease apart the alleged effects of culture from other superficial contextual properties. This suggests that if one wishes to make interesting theoretical claims about the effects of culture on cognition, then the cultural factors called on should have some reasonable permanence and persistence in the life of the individual: Ideally, these should be attributes acquired in early childhood and shared by all eligible members of the cultural group in question.
Unless definitions are restricted in this way, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between the effects of environmental and/or occupational factors on attentional mechanisms—effects that are remarkable but not deeply surprising, where they are found—versus the effects of immanent culture. Consider, for example, the finding reported in Maguire et al. (2000), that the posterior hippocampus regions of London taxi-drivers were significantly larger than those of a control group, that the anterior portions were significantly smaller, and that this asymmetry increased with years of taxi-driving experience. Such results provide striking evidence of adult adaptations in brain regions that are associated with spatial memory and navigation. It seems entirely plausible—though this was not tested—that such physiological adaptation is also reflected in increased sensitivity to contextual factors, which in turn could be interpreted as more holistic/field-dependent cognitive style. But it would be wholly misleading to attribute this occupationally actuated change to cultural factors—say, “the culture of taxi-drivers”.

The Original Study
Masuda & Nisbett (2001) conducted an experiment with Japanese and American participants, in which they first presented underwater scenes (termed ‘animated vignettes’) of 20 seconds’ duration, featuring a salient focal fish as well as other smaller objects such as smaller fish, bubbles, shells and rocks (see Figure 1).

Participants were first asked to describe what they had seen. Subsequently, they were presented with different set of object scenes and were asked to judge whether or not the elements depicted in these new scenes were identical to those featured in the original vignette. Figure 2 provides an example of the Figure condition (in which the focal fish was held constant). Some objects were presented with the original background, and others were presented with a neutral or novel background.

The results showed that, with respect to basic description, the Japanese group made about 50% more statements concerning background information and around 70% more statements about inert objects than the American group. While American participants invariably began their descriptions with the salient (focal) object, Japanese participants were much more likely to begin their statements by mentioning background elements (e.g., “There was a pond, and . . . ”). In addition, Japanese participants’ performance in identifying the focal fish was more (adversely) affected by the change of backgrounds; conversely, the Japanese participants reliably outperformed Americans in correctly identifying Ground features of the original scene.

Masuda & Nisbett (2001), Nisbett & Masuda (2003) interpret these results in terms of the aforementioned cultural dichotomy: It is the persisting social and philosophical values of ancient China that predispose Japanese perceivers to holistic attention. However, it is equally possible to interpret these particular findings as due to linguistic, rather than cultural factors, since in this instance there is a confound between language and culture: As we shall show directly, the grammatical and discourse structure of Japanese (i.e., the Japanese language) differs from that of English at least as much as pan-Asian culture differs from that of European Americans.

Towards an Alternative Interpretation: Thinking for Speaking
Dan Slobin’s Thinking For Speaking hypothesis is especially relevant to the present discussion. In a series of papers (Slobin, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003), Slobin develops the idea that there exists a process of ‘thinking for speaking’, apart from general cognition. He argues that:

The activity of thinking assumes a distinct character when it takes place for speaking, because, in the process of speaking, one needs to adjust one’s thought to immediately available linguistic forms. Each language provides many, but a finite number, of particular words and grammatical constructions to encode reality. In consequence, when one thinks for speaking, one unconsciously focuses on those aspects of objects and events that are most readily encodable in one’s particular language. (Slobin, 2003, p. 157)

The paradigm case of a cross-linguistic difference in event construal concerns the encoding of motion events, and involves the semantic components of path and manner of motion. In research stemming from seminal work by Talmy (1975), see also Talmy (1985, 2000), it has been repeatedly observed that languages may be classified into two types—Verb-framed versus satellite-framed—according to how these two semantic components are lexically encoded. In verb-framed languages (V-languages), such as Spanish and Japanese, path is obligatorily expressed as a component of the verb, while manner of motion is (optionally) expressed as an adjunct phrase; by contrast, in predominantly satellite-framed languages (S-languages), such as English or Dutch, manner of motion is directly encoded on the verb, while path is expressed as a separate preposition (or particle). This contrast is illustrated in (1) and (2) below: In English and Dutch, path is expressed by the satellite element (across, over), while in French and Japanese, the same semantic notion is encoded in the main verb (traverse, wataru), with the manner component expressed as an (optional) adjunct phrase (en nageant, oyoi-de):

(1) a. He is swimming across the river. (English)

b. Hij zwemt de rivier over. (Dutch)
he swim-PRES the river over
‘He swims over the river.’

(2) a. Il traverse le fleuve en nageant. (French)
He cross-PRES the river in swim-GERUND
‘He crosses the river, swimming.’

b. 泳いで川を渡る (Japanese)
oyoi-de kawa-o wataru.
swim-BY river-ACC cross-PRES
‘Swimming, (He) crosses the river.’

The crucial point to observe about these examples is that this linguistic typology is orthogonal to broad-scale cultural, geographic, or indeed, genetic affiliation4: In this case, French and Japanese pattern together, in contrast to English or Dutch.

Slobin points out that this formal difference in language structure has important consequences for many aspects of language use, including—most relevantly—for narrative descriptions. For example, it is shown that S-language speakers use manner verbs significantly more often than V-language speakers when describing the same events (see Hsiao, 1999; Özçalışkan & Slobin, 1999); that S-language novels have greater type and token frequencies in situations in which human movement is described; S-language writers, overall, give their readers significantly more information—explicit and inferential—about the manners in which their protagonists move about (Özçalışkan & Slobin, 2000) than do V-language writers. Such observations suggest, at the very least, that one should be circumspect about ascribing differences in narrative description to cultural factors, since these typological groupings, which cross-cut cultural spheres of influence, also show clear correlations with narrative style.
The S-language/V-language parameter is not, of course, the only typological distinction to cross-cut genetic boundaries, nor—although it nicely illustrates our general point—is it the parameter that we consider best explains the Japanese-English contrast obtained in Masuda and Nibett’s (2001) study. Instead, the typological linguistic variable that we believe to be at work here is the Head or Head-Directionality Parameter.

The Head Parameter: Overview
One of the most obvious ways in which languages vary syntactically is with respect to clausal word order—the position of phrasal constituents relative to one another. This type of variation at the clausal level results directly from the Head Parameter: Whether the head element of the phrases that make up a sentence appears to the left or right of its respective complement. In a consistently head-initial language, such as English or French, the verb precedes the direct object in the verb phrase, (temporal and modal) auxiliaries precede the verb phrase, clausal complementizers precede the embedded clause they introduce, and the language has prepositions, rather than postpositions. This is illustrated for English in (3), where in each example the relevant head(s) is/are indicated in bold, their complement phrases in italics:
(3) a. John [VP brokeV the vase ].
b. John [ModalP shouldM [NEGP notNEG [ASPP have [VP broken the vase]]]].
c. John said [CompP thatCOMP [S he hadn’tT brokenV the vase ]].
d. John danced [PP aroundP [NP the room [ inP [NP the palace]]]].

Exactly the opposite order is observed in a head-final language such as Japanese, Korean or Turkish: The verb follows its object; tense and mood affixes are invariably expressed as verbal suffixes (where these appear as auxiliaries, they follow the verb-phrase); complementizers appear to the right of complement clauses; the language is postpositional:5

(4) a. John-ga [VP kabin-o wattaV ].
John-NOM vase-ACC break-PAST
‘John broke the vase.’

b. [TP John-wa [[[VP kabin-o waruV ] bekide-waT ] na-NEG ] kattaT ].
John-NOM vase-ACC break should-NOM not-PAST
‘John should not have broken the vase.’

c. John-wa [ [ kabin-o watteV nai S] toCOMP CP] ittav.
John-NOM vase-ACC broke not COMP say-HAVE
‘John said that he hadn’t broken the vase.’

d. John-wa [[[[ kyuden NP] no P PP] hiroma NP] deP PP] odottav.6
John-NOM palace of room in dance-PAST
‘John danced around the room in the palace.’

In generative theory (e.g., Chomsky, 1981, 1995), only head-complement order is relevant to determining the head-parameter for a given phrase; see, in particular, Travis (1984). In other approaches, however—and especially within the typological framework initiated by Greenberg (1978)—all head-modifier relations are potentially relevant to determining the head-initial or head-final status of the language. Thus, the position of attributive adjectives, relative clauses, possessor phrases, and subordinate adjunct clauses are also taken into account. By all of these measures also, Japanese is consistently head-final.

Not all languages display such consistent cross-categorical harmony in head-modifier order.7 Some languages, for example, project right-headed phrases for one syntactic category and left-headed phrases for another, so that it becomes harder to classify the language overall in terms of a single binary parameter. (Mandarin) Chinese is a case in point.

Huang (1994) provides a useful discussion of Chinese word order. The core facts are illustrated by the examples below, which reveal that Chinese is normally head-initial with respect to verbs and TAM auxiliaries (5a)/(5b)—including the position of clausal complements (5b)—and with respect to prepositional phrase (6), but head-final with respect to lexical noun phrases: Both nominal complements (7a) and nominal adjuncts precede the head-noun; relative clauses are internally headed by a right-peripheral head (7b).8 Once again, in each example the relevant head element is indicated in bold, the complement or modifier in italics:

(5) a. Zhangsan meiyou [VP kanjianV [NP Lisi]].
Zhangsan not-HAVE see Lisi
‘Zhangsan did not see Lisi.’

b. Zhangsan [VP zhidaoV [S Lisi [NEGP buNEG [AP chengshi]]]].
Zhangsan know Lisi not honest
‘Zhangsan knows that Lisi is not honest.’

(6) a. Zhangsan [VP zhuV [PP zaiP [NP Meiguo]]].
Zhangsan live at America
‘Zhangsan lives in the US.’

b. Zhangsan fang-le yi-ben shu [PP zaiP [NP zhuozi-shang]].
Zhangsan put- PERF one- CL book at table-top
‘Zhangsan put a book on the table.’

(7) a. [[[ yuyanxue NP] deP PP] yanjiuN NP]
linguistics DE research
‘the study of linguistics’

b. [[[ni zui xihuan S] deP PP] nei-ben shuN NP] mai-wan le.
you most like DE that-CL book sell-out PERF
‘The book that you like most has been sold out.’

Hence, with respect to purely syntactic properties, English and Japanese represent two ends of a grammatical continuum, with Chinese somewhere in the middle (though much more like English in terms of token frequency, and crucially, with respect to verbal projections).

The question that arises at this point is how this typological contrast—however interesting it may be from a linguistic perspective—should explain the attentional patterns observed in Masuda & Nisbett’s (2001) study: Why should head-finality predispose Japanese speakers to greater holistic attention or field-dependence? There are two responses to this question, the first relatively superficial, with few consequences for linguistic relativism, the second rather more complex, but with more interesting implications for the relationship between language and visual cognition.

Taking the superficial relationship first, notice that one of the dependent measures in the Masuda & Nisbett (2001) study was order of mention: Whether participants first mentioned the focal fish (Figure) or the background context (Ground) in their verbal descriptions. Masuda and Nisbett interpret the elements first mentioned as ‘more salient’ and conclude from the fact that Japanese participants consistently mentioned contextual information ahead of focal information that Japanese group paid greater attention to the field than their American counterparts. Yet, as we have just seen, the grammatical and discourse structure of Japanese virtually guarantees this result: If contextual information is to be mentioned at all, it must be mentioned first, since the main predicate is canonically the final sentential constituent; conversely, the discourse structure of English affords American participants more opportunity to mention focal elements first in their verbal descriptions— wholly irrespective of the relative salience of Figure and Ground in their conceptual representations of the event.

If this observation is valid, then it follows that group differences in order of mention effects do not necessarily speak to the issue of holistic versus analytic attention. More importantly, this observation allows us to formulate clear predictions for a new study involving Japanese, English, and Chinese participants: If grammatical and discourse structure determine order of mention in visual descriptions, then the verbal reports of Chinese participants should be intermediate between the other two groups, patterning more with those of English speakers, significantly more in the Figure-to-Ground order (from head to modifier) than in the case of the Japanese group, who are expected to make descriptions (almost exclusively) in the Ground-to-Figure order (from modifier to head). If, on the other hand, order of mention is determined by cognitive styles that are associated with cultural affiliation, then the Chinese and Japanese groups should pattern with each other more similarly than either does to English. These predictions are explored in the first of the studies reported below.

A more interesting question, however, is whether it is possible to connect this typological difference to the other dependent measures in the Masuda & Nisbett (2001) study (besides order of mention). It will be recalled that order of mention was only one of three measures that distinguished Japanese from American participants. The other two were the number of contextual (Ground) features mentioned by each participant for each description, and—most interestingly still—the number of contextual features correctly recalled in representation of still fragments: Japanese participants not only mentioned significantly more background details, they also remembered better which elements they had previously observed. This last measure, in particular, is not obviously related to linguistic typology.
And yet it might be. What is distinctive about Slobin’s (2003) thinking for speaking hypothesis is the extent to which linguistic structures are assumed to penetrate cognition in various ways. In contrast, for example, to Levelt (1989), who also entertains a form of the thinking for speaking hypothesis, but who supposes that effects of language are restricted to the time of utterance—that is, it is only when one prepares to speak that language affects conceptualization—Slobin (2003) speculates that thinking for speaking effects could extend beyond speech time and may induce speakers to form specific attentional patterns, even in the absence of language. In support of this speculation, Slobin cites the work of Pederson, Levinson et al. (1998):

Far more than developing simple habituation, use of the linguistic system, we suggest, actually forces the speaker to make computations he or she might otherwise not make. . . . That is, the linguistic system is far more than just an available pattern for creating internal representations: to learn to speak a language successfully requires speakers to develop an appropriate mental representation which is then available for non-linguistic purposes. (Pederson, Levinson et al., 1998, p. 586 [emphasis in original])

Thus for example, when we speak English, we are forced to pay attention to gender of third parties, because the language requires gender specification of (singular) pronouns. On the other hand, when we speak Japanese, we are forced to direct our attention to the asymmetric relationships between individuals: elder/younger, senior/junior, or close/remote, because of the language’s honorific systems. As a consequence, English speakers form a habit of attending to gender and Japanese speakers develop a habit of attending to human relations in non-linguistic contexts also. Slobin thus assumes that thinking for speaking effects induce language-specific attentional preferences beyond the linguistic domain.

In the present case, let us assume that the grammatical and discourse structure of Japanese, which is known have effects on syntactic processing and production, leading to bottom-up parsing routines—as opposed to the top-down strategies of English parsing mechanisms (see Fodor & Inoue, 1994; Nakayama, 1999, for discussion), also impacts on conceptual structures. Suppose that, as is the case for syntactic constituents, final conceptual representations (including representations of causality) are constructed—as they are reported—“from the bottom up”, from background context to focal elements/main arguments, as schematized in Figure 3.

Our conjecture, then—extending the Thinking for Speaking hypothesis—that the (top-down vs. bottom-up) parsing mechanisms that implement different (head-initial vs. head-final) grammatical settings are reflected in the speakers’ discourse strategies, which in turn influences their attentional patterns. Japanese speakers build up phrase structure from complements and/or modifiers to heads; in other words, from semantically and syntactically peripheral elements to core elements, in a bottom-up fashion. It plausibly follows from this that Japanese speakers are predisposed to plan and interpret discourse by placing peripheral elements ahead of the main point. This notion is supported by anecdotal observation: When describing, explaining, excusing, arguing, or persuading, Japanese speakers tend to begin their statements with peripheral elements (reasons, situations, and contexts), before referring to the main points (effects, intentions, and conclusions). As a consequence, they may have developed a perceptual habit of attending to the entire field.

In short, our hypothesis is that Japanese speakers are more likely to attend to contextual information primarily because the grammatical and discourse structure of the language requires speakers to mention contextual information ahead of focal information.

As strained as it may appear at first, this hypothesis nevertheless generates rather clear predictions concerning the behavior of Chinese participants in the present study, with respect to the other two dependent variables at stake (viz., number of mentions of background elements/correct identification of background elements in subsequent presentation). If the head-directionality parameter plays a significant role accounting for the differences between Japanese and American participants in Masuda & Nisbett’s (2001) original study, then Chinese participants are expected to pattern with English participants with respect to these dependent measures, splitting the Asian response. It will be clear that Masuda & Nisbett’s cultural explanation predicts a quite different split.

General Method
In order to test the hypothesis outlined above, we constructed two linguistic tasks to compare the verbal descriptions of Japanese, English, and Chinese speakers with respect to foregrounded and backgrounded information. The first task (story-telling) involved explaining the events depicted in a pivotal scene in well-known children’s story books (Anno, 1977; Donaldson & Scheffier, 2007; Ungerer, 1975); the second (picture description) task involved more straightforward description of unfamiliar photographs. Subsequently, as in the Masuda & Nisbett (2001) experiment, fragments of the images previously shown were presented to participants for identification (fragments identification test); the participants were also asked information questions about the photographs they had seen (information recall test).

Participants
The same 120 participants took part in all of the experiments: 43 Japanese native speakers (21 women, 22 men) were recruited from the University of Keio, Japan, 33 English native speakers (23 women, 10 men) from the University of Sheffield, UK, and 44 Chinese native speakers (25 women, 21 men) from the International Study Institute Chukyo, Japan. All of the participants were undergraduate or postgraduate university students, or attended language school students preparing for university entrance, aged 18-30 years old. The Japanese and Chinese participants were tested in Japan, and English participants were tested in UK. All associated language materials were translated, and presented to each group in their own language, by native-speaker experimenters.

Experiment 1
We first conducted a story-telling task to examine the discourse preferences of Japanese, English, and Chinese speakers: Whether contextual information was mentioned before the main point or vice-versa. Given our hypotheses outlined above, it was predicted that the responses of the Japanese group should diverge significantly from those of the other two groups.

Procedure
Participants were presented with illustrations extracted from three well-known picture books for children (Anno, 1977; Donaldson & Scheffier, 2007; Ungerer, 1975) and asked to provide a written description of each of these in their native language, by clarifying when, where, and why the depicted events and situations were taking place. The responses were then coded in terms of the kinds of information included in each description, according to the following descriptors.

1. Main events and situations: description of the main story, explaining what main characters are doing in each scene.

2. Peripheral events and situations: description of the field, explaining what is shown in each scene but is not explicitly related to the main story or the main characters; for example, the moon is shining, the woods are covered with snow.

3. Time: description of the time, explaining when the depicted events and situations were taking place, such as at night, in the daytime, in winter, during summer, and so on.

4. Place: description of the place, explaining where the depicted events and situations were taking place, such as at beach, in the woodland, in a small village.

5. Cause: description of the reason, explaining what had caused the depicted events and situations to occur. Note that only constituents that were explicitly mentioned with markers for causal relations are included in this category, such as because, as, since, therefore, accordingly, so, and so forth.

6. Inferred antecedent events and situations: description of the events and situations that were not shown in each scene but were inferred to have happened before the depicted events and situations occur.

An example of the responses for Mouse-Shadow picture (see Figure 4) is as follows:
There is a full moon (2. peripheral events and situations)
at night. (3. time)
In a forest, (4. place)
a rabbit is scared (1. main events and situations)
because it sees the enlarged shadow of the mouse reflected in the moonlight against the snow. (5. cause) The mouse might have been trying to retaliate on the rabbit, who has always bullied him. (6. inferred antecedent events and situations)

This sample response was thus coded as 234156. In this way, all of the responses were coded into these six categories and labeled with such serial numbers. The overall measure of interest was the average number of times (out of possible total of three descriptions—one for each picture) that some type of contextual information (2-6) was mentioned ahead of the main point (1), for each language group (Measure 1). We also determined the quantity of contextual information mentioned before the main point; that is, how many contextual descriptions indicating time, place, cause, the field, or inferred antecedent events were made before mentioning the main events and situations across each language group (Measure 2) as well as the relative numbers of different contextual elements overall, in any order of mention (Measure 3).

Results and Discussion
All three measures revealed clear and reliable differences among the three language groups. First, Figure 5 shows the average number of times that some kind of contextual information (2-6) was mentioned ahead of the main point (Measure 1), out of total of three responses (one per picture).

As predicted, the Japanese group were considerably more likely to begin their descriptions with contextual information (M = 2.86) than the Chinese (M = 2.33) and the English group (M = 1.55). An analysis of variance revealed a reliable main effect of Language (F(2, 118) = 21.357, p < .01), with post-hoc comparisons (Bonferroni) showing significant differences between the English and Japanese group and between the English and Chinese group at the p < .01 level, and between the Japanese and Chinese group at the p < .05 level.

We then investigated the quantity of contextual information mentioned ahead of the main point (Measure 2). Figure 6 shows how many contextual descriptions were made before mentioning the main events and situations by English, Chinese and Japanese participants. Again as predicted, the Japanese group reported the highest number of contextual descriptions before the main events (M = 2.87), followed by the Chinese (M = 2.09) and the English group (M = 1.19). The data were entered into a repeated measures ANOVA with Native Language (3 levels: English, Chinese, Japanese) as the between-subjects variable, and Picture (3 levels: Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3) as within-subjects variables, the dependent variable being the number of contextual information reported before the main events and situations. The analysis revealed a reliable main effect of Native Language, F(2, 110) = 19.019, p < .01, with no interaction found between Native Language and Picture. Post hoc tests (Bonferroni) revealed significant differences between the Japanese and English participants and between the Chinese and English participants at the p < .01 level, and also between the Chinese and Japanese participants at the p < .05 level.

Further analysis revealed that the Japanese participants' tendency to report more contextual information before the main events and situations was especially pronounced in these three areas: Time-, Place-, and Field-related information. Figure 7 shows each percentage of responses where time-, place-, inferred antecedent event-, or the field-related information was mentioned ahead of the main events and situations within each language group. Time-related information was reported ahead of the main point in 79.1% of the Japanese, 59.8% of the Chinese, and 42.9% of the English responses across all the three pictures: Statistically significant differences were found only between the Japanese and English participants,χ2 (4) = 40.187, p < .01. Place-related information was reported ahead of the main events in 82.2 % of the Japanese, 51.2% of the Chinese, and 43.9% of the English responses, with significant differences being found between the two contrasts: English versus Japanese, Chinese versus Japanese, χ2 (4) = 57.333, p < .01. Field-related information appeared prior to the mention of main events in 39.5% of the Japanese, 25.2% of the Chinese, and 11.2% of the English responses, with significant differences only being found between English and Japanese participants,χ2 (4) = 34.844, p < .01. Concerning inferred antecedent events mentioned ahead of the main events, the obtained data were too few to be entered into statistical analysis.

In addition, Figure 8 shows relative percentage of the cause-effect order in the descriptions including causal relations. As can be seen, both Japanese and Chinese participants showed tendency to mention cause ahead of its effect in explaining causal relations, while English participants clearly preferred to mention effect prior to its cause, χ2 (4) = 54.072, p < .01.

Finally, Figure 9 shows the overall numbers of different contextual elements reported in participants’ responses, in any order of mention (Measure 3). The results also revealed Japanese participants’ context dependency, with the highest number of contextual elements reported across the three pictures. The data were entered into a repeated measures ANOVA with Native Language (3 levels: English, Chinese, Japanese) as the between-subjects variables, and Picture (3 levels: Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3) as within-subjects variables. The analysis revealed a reliable main effect of Native Language, F(2, 110) = 13.579, p < .01, as well as a significant interaction between Native Language and Picture, F(4, 220) = 3.216, p < .05. Post hoc tests (Bonferroni) revealed significant differences between the Japanese and English participants in Picture 1 and 2 at the p < .01 level, and between the Japanese and Chinese groups in Picture 2 and 3 at the p < .01 level, but none between English and Chinese participants in any condition.

Taken together, these results at once confirm the findings of the Masuda & Nisbett (2001) study—that is, that Japanese speakers clearly prefer to mention more peripheral elements, and earlier in their descriptions, than do English speakers—but they also challenge the previous interpretation—namely, that this difference is the result of some pan-Asian cultural predisposition. The reason, clearly, that these results pose a challenge is that the Chinese group—as predicted by their linguistic typology—exhibit an intermediate behaviour, sometimes patterning with the Japanese participants, for example, with respect to mention of Cause before Effect (Figure 8), sometimes like the English group (e.g., with respect to the total numbers of peripheral items mentioned, shown in Figure 9). In other words, the results show that the bottom-up parsers (Japanese speakers) prefer the bottom-up discourse style and the top-down parsers (English speakers) employ the top-down discourse style, with Chinese speakers located intermediate between the two language groups, as predicted by its grammatical typology.

The following sample illustrates a typical response of Japanese participants for Mouse-Shadow picture (Figure 4), with abundant contextual information mentioned before the main events and situations:
‘It is at night with a full moon shining. In a snowy forest, an animal is walking with a stick searching for food. Then, a little mouse standing on a tree branch, who has been bullied by the bigger animal, hit upon a good idea. With the use of the moonlight, he enlarged his own shadow and casted it onto the ground. The animal, seeing the enlarged shadow, thinks it is a monster and is scared.’

At the very least, the results of this first experiment lend support to the idea that culture may not be the sole, or even key, determinant of the differences observed in the earlier study. As we shall see directly, the next two tasks offer even clearer reasons for scepticism: Not only do Chinese and Japanese participants behave differently, but the ‘Asian response’ is actually split.

Experiment 2
In the second experiment, we conducted two related tasks to determine whether there was any difference in attentional patterns toward the field when making visual descriptions. Our hypothesis was that top-down versus bottom-up parsing patterns embedded in participants’ discourse styles would exercise a larger effect on responses than any cultural affiliation. That is to say, it was anticipated that, as bottom-up parsers (Japanese speakers) need to refer to context first in their discourse, they should attend more to the field than would top-down parsers (English and Chinese speakers); as a consequence, Japanese speakers should mention disproportionately more peripheral elements than central elements—and may recall these better—than either English or Chinese speakers.
The second experiment comprised two tasks, each with its own dependent measures: a picture description task and a visual recall task. In the picture description task, we presented participants with a set of three color photographs and asked for a written description. The description task served two purposes: first, to discover which visual features of shared scenes participants mention in written reporting; second, simply to show participants the photographs for subsequent recall. Participants were not aware that some parts of the photographs would be extracted and presented again in another set of pictures in the visual recall phase. In the subsequent visual recall task, participants were shown those extracted portions of photographs and asked to judge whether these formed parts of the pictures that they had already seen.

Experiment 2, Phase 1: Picture Description

Procedure
The participants saw three photographs in turn and provided a written description for each of these. The photographs selected for description included both salient focal objects and smaller peripheral objects (see Figures 10, 11, and 12). Participants’ responses were then analyzed to determine which aspects of the photographs were more attended to: central objects or peripheral objects.9

Results and Discussion
The participants’ responses are charted in Figure 13. Notice that, as expected, the largest differences are observed in the mean number of peripheral items mentioned by each participant across groups. Here, the Japanese behave once again as predicted, with significantly higher mentions of peripheral items (M = 15.05) than the English group (M = 7.48). Notice in particular that this preference for peripheral items is not shared by Chinese participants, who actually mentioned fewer peripheral elements than even the English group (M = 3.43). The description data were entered into a repeated measures ANOVA with Native Language (3 levels: English, Chinese, Japanese) as the between-subjects variable, and Item Location (2 levels: Central, Peripheral) and Picture as within-subjects variables, the dependent variable being the number of items mentioned. The analysis revealed a reliable main effect of Native Language, F(2, 119) = 50.844, p < .01, as well as a significant interaction between Native Language and Location, F(2, 119) = 32.547, p < .01. The source of this interaction is clearly suggested by the plot in Figure 13.

Post hoc tests (Bonferroni) revealed significant differences between the Chinese and Japanese participants and between the English and Japanese participants with respect to peripheral items mentioned at the p < .01 level, and also between the Chinese and English participants at the p < .05 level.

However, the Chinese group's relatively low number of descriptions of the peripheral items might be attributed to the fact that Chinese participants’ total number of descriptions for each photograph was much smaller than the other two groups overall. Therefore, it was also examined whether there was any difference among the three language groups in the ratio of peripheral items to central items mentioned within each language group. The results showed that the ratio of peripheral items to central items mentioned within each language group was 83% (Chinese), 112% (English), and 213% (Japanese), respectively. The results were entered into a repeated measures ANOVA with Native Language as the between-subjects variable, Picture as a within-subjects variable, and the ratio of peripheral items to central items mentioned in each response of each participant as the dependent variable. The analysis again revealed a reliable main effect of Native Language, F(2, 106) = 25.168, p < .01, without any interaction with Picture. Post hoc tests (Bonferroni) revealed significant differences between the Chinese and Japanese participants and between the English and Japanese participants both at the p < .01 level, but none between English and Chinese participants.

It will be recalled that the focus of Masuda & Nisbett’s (2001) study was on differences between Japanese and English mention of peripheral items (the result, it was claimed, of East Asians’ superior attention to Ground over Figure). In the present study, however, the Chinese group mentioned the lowest number of peripheral items, both in absolute and relative terms. Statistically, the largest differences that were observed distinguished Chinese and Japanese participants, with no statistically significant difference found between Chinese and English participants. The Asian response was thus effectively split, divided by the responses of the English group. Whatever explains this pattern cannot plausibly be related to cultural affiliation.

Experiment 2, Phase 2: Visual Recall Task
The final task compared the three groups with respect to visual recall by testing participants’ accuracy in identifying peripheral fragments and recalling information about Ground details. Once again, our hypothesis predicted a split in the Asian response, whereas Masuda & Nisbett’s (2001) cultural interpretation predicted a pan-Asian advantage over the English participant group.

Procedure
To construct the visual recall task, peripheral portions were extracted from each of the three photographs shown in the picture description task and from one of the pictures used in the first story-telling task, five portions from each. These extracted fragments (n = 20) were combined with another 20 fragments extracted from novel pictures to create a set of 40 small pictures (2.5 × 2.5 cm): see Figure 14.

Participants were presented with this set of extracted portions and asked to identify the parts of the pictures that they had already seen in the previous tasks. Each participant’s score was counted according to the number of correctly identified portions: one point for correct identification and equally one point for correct rejection, 40 points in all. Following this identification test, participants were also presented with a forced choice memory test, including questions of the following kind: “In the beach picture, is the balloon yellow or red?” or “In the windmill picture, was the man behind the boy wearing shorts or long trousers?” and so on. There were twelve such questions in all: three questions relating to each of the four pictures used in the identification phase. Thus, this part of the experiment had two dependent measures: (i) number of correctly identified or rejected fragments; (ii) number of correctly answered information questions.

Results and Discussion

Figure 15 displays the picture fragments identification scores for the three language groups. As predicted, the Japanese group recorded the highest average score (M = 31.40); this was followed by the English (M = 26.79) and then the Chinese group (M = 22.07). An analysis of variance revealed reliable main effect of Language (F(2,118) = 45.164, p < .01): Post-hoc comparisons (Bonferroni) showed significant differences between the three language pairs, all ps < .01.

The results for the subsequent forced-choice memory test were also along the same lines (see Figure 16). The Japanese group obtained the highest score (M = 8.02), followed by the Chinese (M = 6.18) and the English group (M = 5.70). Again, a reliable main effect of language was found, F(2,118) = 14.952, p < .01, and again, post-hoc tests (Bonferroni) showed significant differences between the scores for the Chinese and Japanese groups, and the English and Japanese groups both at the p < .01 level, but no difference between the Chinese and English groups.10

These findings thus clearly demonstrate that there is no common Asian response in the visual recall task: Instead, the Chinese participants pattern to a large degree with the English group, separately from the Japanese group.

General Discussion
The experiments reported here examined the attentional biases of Japanese, English, and Chinese speakers across a range of linguistic and non-verbal tasks. Our hypothesis was that top-down versus bottom-up parsing mechanisms would be reflected in the speakers’ discourse strategies, with top-down parsers (English and Chinese speakers) having a preference for top-down discourse patterns—the main point being mentioned before contextual information—and bottom-up parsers (Japanese speakers) building a discourse in which contextual information precedes the main point. These discourse strategies were expected to exercise a larger effect on responses than any cultural affiliation.
We tested this hypothesis by means of narrative description (story-telling), picture description, and visual recall tasks. In the story-telling task, it was clearly shown that Japanese speakers were more likely to report contextual information before the main point than either English and Chinese speakers, consistent with the linguistic typology. Next, in the picture description and visual recall experiment, it was clearly revealed that Japanese speakers not only reported more background detail, but also recalled details about peripheral information significantly more accurately, than English and Chinese speakers, as evidenced by reliably higher scores on both identification and information recall tasks.
The present findings across three tasks are thus consistent with the hypothesis advanced here, namely, that the grammatical structure of particular languages predisposes speakers to particular attentional patterns: In other words, these results are consistent with a particular—and rather far-reaching—interpretation of the thinking for speaking hypothesis (Slobin 2003).

Perhaps more significantly than what these results speak for, is what they speak against: They allow us to reject not only the null hypothesis—that a speaker’s native language has no reliable effect on visual attention and recall scores—but also to reject the alternative hypothesis presented in Masuda & Nisbett (2001), that is, that Japanese participants’ enhanced ability to identify peripheral elements in visual scenes is due to cultural attributes common to Asian cultures. Our experiments show that across all tasks involving visual recall Chinese participants generally behave more like English participants than like Japanese, regardless of cultural affiliation: To reinforce the point—this is in spite of the fact that the test subjects were Chinese students studying Japanese in Japan. Whatever definition of culture one might employ, the expectation must surely be that if cultural factors determine response, these two groups should pattern together. The fact that they did not renders suspect any explanation in terms of immanent cultural values, at least with respect to these data.

Three final points are worth mentioning. First, as noted above (footnote 1), these are not unprecedented results. The findings of the present study directly confirm those of an independent set of studies reported elsewhere Anon (2010), where again the Chinese group’s results patterned directly with those of the English group and separately from the Japanese across a similar set of description and recall tasks. Thus, in a total of six different tasks, we have found that the Asian response has been split in ways that challenge the cultural relativity explanation, advanced by Nisbett and his colleagues.
The second point to observe is that these results do not necessarily refute Masuda and Nisbett’s (2001) interpretation of their own data (though such an explanation would be untenable in the present case). Our results, at the data level, are entirely compatible with those obtained by Masuda & Nesbitt for their Japanese and American participants: We also endorse their concluding suggestion that “[typical] Japanese may simply see far more of the world than do [typical] Americans” (Masuda & Nesbitt, 2001, p. 933 [added by authors]). Where we disagree is in respect of the most plausible explanation of this difference. We claim that if the suggestion is true, then it is not primarily because they are East Asians, but because they speak a head-final language, that Japanese speakers may see far more of the world. Such an interpretation would cover both our and Masuda & Nisbett’s findings: The alternative, that a different explanation applies to our respective experiments, seems to be considerably more ad hoc.

Note that we do not discount the view that cultural traditions may influence modes of perception or categorization in other cases. For example, in other studies, Nisbett and his colleagues have found cognitive (attitudinal and perceptual) differences between ethnic groups of participants sharing a common first language (e.g., monolingual speakers of Turkish in Uskul, Kitayama & Nisbett, 2008; second generation Korean vs. European Americans in Choi, Dalal & Kim-Prieto, 2000): unless the latter participants were also bilingual, then our hypothesis could not be applied to explain such results. All that is claimed here is that observed differences between English and Japanese speakers in these particular types of description and visual recall tasks are better explained in linguistic, rather than cultural, terms: If it were otherwise, Chinese and Japanese participants should pattern together.11

Notice finally that our hypothesis generates further, testable predictions about cross-linguistic splits and groupings within and across cultural spheres. For instance, given our hypothesis, speakers of Korean, another head-final language, should behave like Japanese participants in visual recall, while Vietnamese and Thai speakers should pattern with the Chinese participants. These predictions will be tested in future experiments. If all effects of language structure, whether it is the grammatical parameter of head position or particular discourse strategy, can be shown to outweigh effects of culture for speakers of other languages, then our results will constitute a significant challenge to this part of the evidence base for cultural relativism.

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Uskul, A. K., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. N. (2008). Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders. PNAS, 105, 8552-8556.

Footnotes
1 As well as that which immediately precedes it (see Duffield & Tajima 2010). The current study offers a completely new set of experiments, in which we attempted to remedy some methodological shortcomings of the original task. This new experiment (with different participants, materials, and modes of analysis) provides even clearer support for our original hypothesis.
2 Throughout, following Nisbett’s own practice, the term Asian is taken to refer to East Asian ethnic and national groups (especially Chinese, Japanese and Korean groups), rather than to South Asian groups (which is the British default usage of the term): it is unlikely that Nisbett’s claims are intended to extend to any groups beyond the (historical) Han Chinese sphere of influence.
3 This problem comes to the fore in respect of Nisbett’s subsequent work on other cultural groups (Uskul, Kitayama & Nisbett 2008): see below.
4 Other V-languages in Slobin’s survey include Turkish, Spanish, and Hebrew; other S-languages include Mandarin and Russian.
5 It should be clear that the terms head-initial and head-final are completely independent of writing order: Arabic and Hebrew, for example, are head-initial languages that are written from right-to-left; Turkish is a predominantly head-final language written left-to-right.
6 The constituent analysis proposed here simplifies, but does not fundamentally misrepresent, the phrase-structure of Japanese (It may be, for example, that the genitive element no and the post-nominal marker de should bear other category labels, but this does not change the fact that adpositional phrases in Japanese are consistently head-final).
7 The term is due to Hawkins (1990).
8 We are naturally aware of the fact that many generativist linguists, including Huang himself, would treat Mandarin Chinese as underlyingly head-final in the verb-phrase, with verb-movement deriving the overt head-initial order. Be that as it may, what is relevant here are the surface configurations that provide the instructions for parsing and syntactic production: at this level, Chinese patterns—on balance—more like English than like Japanese.
9 The items classified as central and peripheral for each photograph in the picture description task are as follows:
For the Windmill picture (Figure 10), central items are the boy in a yellow T-shirt and the green windmill, while peripheral items are restaurant, table, chair, patrons, trees, shade, European street, passers-by, sunny, summer season, basket, instrument, signboard, pillar, sack, posters, balcony, building, and fallen leaves.
For the Beach Picture (Figure 11), the central item is the boy smiling in the foreground, while the peripheral are balloon, trees, mountains, beach, pebble, sky, clouds, wind, air, buildings, restaurants, construction, sunny, holiday season, resort, and road.
For the Bubble picture (Figure 12), the central is the boy with a bubble-maker, while the peripheral are other children, buildings, shops, street, signboard, air, sunny, summer season, the man with a balloon, the girl sitting on the bench, sack, passers-by, floating bubble, windows, lamp, curtain, and wooden floor.
10 Interestingly, there were only weak correlations for all of the groups concerned between their scores for the identification task and those on the information task (Chinese r = 0.26; English r = 0.13; Japanese r = 0.13). This may suggest that there is no necessary relationship between perceptual knowledge of an event and propositional knowledge about it.
11 This is not to say that our results have no wider implications for Cultural Relativity arguments, but to stress that this is only a first step of a larger project: Ultimately, it would seem to us desirable to account for all putative effects of broad culture in terms of more tangible and more plausible linguistic or local environmental factors. For example, the expectation that inhabitants of high-density urban environments should pay more attention to peripheral visual information than those who live in smaller communities is both plausible and measurable, indeed this is established in Nisbett & Masuda (2003); however, we do not view this effect as ‘cultural’ in any interesting theoretical sense; see introductory discussion.

List of Figures

Figure 2. Sample scene fragments: Focal Fish Condition (from Nisbett and Masuda, 2003).

Figure 3. Top-down versus Bottom-up parsing mechanisms. This figure illustrates the way in which top-down parsers (e.g., English speakers) first decide the whole sentence structure and then fill each slot with words, whereas bottom-up parsers (e.g., Japanese speakers) begin with laying words, and gradually construct the whole sentence.

Figure 4. Sample picture used in the story-telling task: Mouse-Shadow picture (Donaldson & Scheffier, 2007).

Figure 5. Experiment 1 Results (Measure 1): Average number of times that some type of contextual information was mentioned ahead of the main point in the story-telling task by English, Chinese and Japanese participants.

Figure 6. Experiment 1 Results (Measure 2): Mean number of contextual descriptions mentioned before the main events and situations in the story-telling task by English, Chinese and Japanese participants.

Figure 7. Experiment 1 Results: Each percentage of responses where time-, place-, inferred antecedent event-, or the field-related information was mentioned ahead of the main events and situations in the story-telling task.

Figure 8. Experiment 1 Results: Each percentage of responses in which cause was mentioned ahead of its effect (Cause-First) and where effect precedes its cause (Effect-First) in the story-telling task. Only constituents that were explicitly mentioned with markers for causal relations are counted into the data.

Figure 9. Task 1 Results (Measure 3): Mean number of overall different contextual descriptions reported in the story-telling task, in any order of mention.

Figure 10. Windmill Picture used in the picture description task: Picture 1.

Figure 11. Beach Picture used in the picture description task: Picture 2.

Figure 12. Soap Bubble Picture used in the picture description task: Picture 3.

Figure 13. Mean number of central and peripheral items mentioned by Chinese, English, and Japanese participants in the picture description task.

Figure 14. Extracted fragments of pictures used in the identification test of the visual recall task (sample).

Figure 15. Picture fragments identification scores in the visual recall task (by language group).

Figure 16: Mean scores for the forced-choice memory test in the visual recall task (by language group).

Loose Ends? Commentary on Sorace

2010-11-28T07:36:00.000-08:00

[This commentary on a position paper by Antonella Sorace has now appeared in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1: 35-38]

Writing a commentary that makes an original contribution without being self-serving or carping—or simply rehearsing what everyone else will have written, in poorer prose—is never easy. In the present case, however, the task is rendered particularly difficult by the fact that Sorace has largely done the work for us. Rather than being presented with an article containing radical or overbearing claims, as one typically finds in position papers, we are here asked to comment on what is essentially a self-assessment exercise: a moderate, well-informed and nicely argued discussion of the main claims that would have featured in the position paper, had it existed. But it doesn’t, and in offering in its place her own review, in which all of the obvious criticisms of the IH are addressed and skillfully deflected, Sorace has effectively ‘headed us off at the pass.’ That said, the proposal that emerges from Sorace’s treatment is not completely immune to further criticism: in the limited space remaining, I shall make a couple of specific points that bear on a more general— persisting—concern about the overall proposal, namely, the problem of circularity.

In order to illustrate the IH, Sorace reviews a series of studies of L2 acquisition and/or L1 attrition by various colleagues and co-workers: in each instance, a near minimal opposition is presented between two superficially similar phenomena: on the one hand, a grammatical construction or property that is easily acquired by second language learners (or is unaffected by attrition), and on the other one that presents some measure of difficulty for near-native L2 learners (and L1 attriters), reflected in unstable or errorful performance vis-à-vis monolingual controls. In every instance, the latter construction is identified as the one involving an interface of some kind, whereas the former calls on ‘narrow syntax’ (either exclusively, or to a larger degree). Though Sorace is generally careful to avoid any explicit claim, the clear implication in each case is that it is the ‘interface properties’ of the construction in question that are responsible for the learners’ difficulty. But it is also true in most cases that it is the relative difficulty of the construction that provides the diagnostic of interface involvement: again by implication, if monolinguals and near-native learners showed complete convergence in performance on a given construction, then interface properties would not be to the fore. The danger of circularity of reasoning should be obvious: in the absence of some principled and independent criteria for defining what an interface is—let alone for distinguishing external vs. internal interfaces—the term ‘interface’ runs the risk of becoming simply a non-explanatory formal label for ‘learner difficulty.’ Sorace is clearly aware of this problem, as most of the article—section 3, in particular—is devoted to trying to unpack the notion of interface. Yet in spite of a sterling attempt, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, ultimately, the tail is wagging the dog: that is to say, the phenomenological or behavioural effects are being used to determine the architecture of the system.

Aside from the general worry produced by this form of argumentation, working from constructional evidence to theory brings with it some more specific theoretical and methodological difficulties. One such problem is that of cross-linguistic generalization: what to do if the constructional properties associated with core or interface in one grammar are aligned slightly differently—or even in a reverse fashion—in another. A case in point arises in Sorace’s treatment of contrasts between Topicalisation vs. Focus constructions in Italian and Greek. In discussing the apparently contradictory results of Tsimpli and Sorace (2006), whose Greek learners showed no difficulty with Focus constructions, but instability with Topicalisation vs. those of Belletti (2007), whose Italian learners showed difficulty with narrow focus constructions, Sorace suggests that the contrary results may indicate that Greek and Italian Focus constructions are not in fact formally identical (‘[implying] the need for a more fine-grained differentiation among interface conditions’.] If this is the case, though, then one or other set of contrasts must be abandoned as diagnostic of a formal interface: either way around, it seems, the problem of circularity raises its head.

Matters become still more complex with respect to the Topic/Focus distinction when we look a little further afield, to ‘Topic-prominent’ languages such as Vietnamese, in which null arguments are licensed and identified not by verbal agreement, but exactly by (overt and non-overt) Topic arguments. As the following examples from Cao Xuân Hạo (1992:145) clearly demonstrate, pro subjects in Vietnamese are exclusively licensed by preceding topics, rather than by subjects: the (a) examples make sense because the ‘hanging topic’ (1a), and topicalized shifted object in (2a) provide appropriate antecedents for the null arguments in the following clause; by contrast, the topicalized subjects in the (b) examples are inappropriate as antecedents, giving rise to interpretive anomalies:

(1) a.             Xã      bêni       ruộng       tốt    nên proi rất giàu.
                        village side     rice-field good should     very rich
                        ‘As for the neighbouring village [Topic], its rice-fields [Subject] are good (fertile), and therefore it [pro subject = the village] is very rich.’

       b.       [*Ruộng của    xã         bên]i tốt nên [pro]i rất giàu.
                  rice-field poss village side good should very rich
   #’The neighbouring village’s rice-fields [Subject/Topic] are good (fertile), and therefore they [pro subject = the rice-fields] are very rich.’

(2)     a.    Ông nàyi tôi quen   nhưng proi không   phải    là     bạn tôi.
                  man dem I know   but               neg right cop friend    I
                  ‘As for this man [Topic], I [Subject] know (him), but he [pro subject = the man] is not my friend.’

          b'.      *Tôi quen ông này nhưng [pro] không phải là bạn tôi.
              I know man dem    but               neg right cop friend I
            #‘I [Topic = Subject] know this man, but I [ pro subject = I] am not my friend.’

These examples, however, seem to force the conclusion that Topicalisation in Vietnamese (and other null-topic languages) is functionally equivalent to null subject licensing in Italian, which Sorace definitely assumes to be a core syntactic process, certainly, one in which ‘errors involving misuse and misunderstanding of null subject pronouns are not attested: both native and near-native speakers of Italian have a clear and determinate preference for the subject of the matrix clause as the antecedent of the null subject pronoun.’ This begs the question of how to treat East Asian Topicalisation: as equivalent to Italian Topicalisation constructions (high interface involvement) or, as equivalent to Italian null-subject licensing (low interface involvement)? The predictions for near-native learners are entirely unclear: what we certainly can’t do is to let their behaviour decide.

In short, though the IH is better looking than ever before following Sorace’s rigourous self-analysis, there is still something unsettling about it: while it may be that more data will help to decide the issues, in the absence of some more principled criteria, scepticism will remain.(Cao 1992)

Reference

Cao, X. H. (1992). "Some preliminaries to the syntactic analysis of the Vietnamese sentence." Mon-Khmer Studies 20: 137-152.

Roll up for the mystery tour!

2010-03-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

This commentary on Evans and Levinson (2009) has recently appeared in a special issue of Lingua. Please cite as: Duffield, Nigel (2010) Roll Up for the Mystery Tour! Lingua 120, 2673-2675.

Roll up for the Mystery Tour (Click to play)

There's a danger zone, not a stranger zone
Than the little plot I walk on that I call my home
Full of eerie sights, weird and skeery sights
Ev'ry vicious animal that creeps and crawls and bites!!

On the Amazon, the prophylactics prowl
On the Amazon, the hypodermics howl
On the Amazon, you'll hear a scarab scowl, and sting
…zodiacs on the wing…

Excerpt from ‘On the Amazon.’ Grey/Newman/Ellis.

E&L’s rich polemic against Language Universals and Universal Grammar provides an entertaining, at times dazzling, performance that is most reminiscent of modern representations of the Victorian side-show: for those of us of a certain age, the fairground scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! meets Sgt. Pepper (Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite), as we are presented with all manner of linguistic exotica, from languages bereft of consonantal onsets (Arrernte), to those defying the normal laws of constituency relations (Jiwarli), to those allegedly lacking even the most fundamental grammatical attribute, recursivity (Piraha). If, at its worst, E&L’s article evokes the freak show, it also calls to mind the very best in nature documentaries, the image of Pablo Fanque replaced by David Attenborough in the rain forest, crouching over some particularly unlikely, exquisitely adapted, tree frog. Whichever allusion is the more appropriate, this is fascinating material, which should convince even the most agoraphobic armchair linguist of the phenomenal wealth of grammatical diversity that still remains out there (even at a such a late stage of language extinction).

Yet, for all that E & L make an irrefutable case for diversity, their case against generativist linguistics in general—and Universal Grammar in particular—is much less persuasive. Given space constraints I shall restrict attention to what I view as three critical failures of argumentation, involving two misunderstandings about the content and locus of UG, and a mistaken assumption about the theoretical significance of surface diversity. As a consequence of this mishandling of the brief, Universal Grammar—to continue the legal metaphor—walks free from the courtroom.
One of the more obvious misunderstandings of the paper emerges from E&L’s discussion of the notion of grammatical subject (Section 4), where it is argued clearly but otiosely that the notion of subject most relevant to describing surface constructions in English cannot be applied directly, or in any way appropriately, to the description of the grammars of other languages. Regarding subjects, E&L write (2009: 440):

‘[L]inguists have also known for some time that the notion “subject’ is far from universal, and other languages have come up with strikingly different solutions… Having a [unified] subject relation is an efficient way to organize a language’s grammar because it bundles up different subtasks that most often need to be done together. But languages also need ways to indicate when the properties do not coalesce…Given languages like Dyirbal, Acehnese or Tagalog, where the concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are dismembered in language-specific ways, it is clear that a child pre-equipped by UG to expect its language to have a ‘subject’ could be sorely led astray [emphases mine: NGD].’

It is not clear what type of UG E&L have in mind, but it cannot be the generativist conception, given that one of the hallmarks of mainstream generativism since very early on in the development of the theory—at the very latest since Chomsky (1981)—has been precisely its rejection of subject as a unified concept. This is most clearly stated in the following paragraph from McCloskey (2001):

…[I]n the intellectual tradition represented by the frameworks of ‘Government and Binding’, ‘Principles and Parameters’ and the ‘Minimalist Program’, the notions [‘subject’ and ‘object’: NGD] play no (recognized) role at all. That tradition has always insisted that talk of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ is either illicit or casual, and that reference to such terms is to be cashed out in terms of more primitive notions (phrase-structural measures of prominence, featural properties of heads, the theory of A-movement and so on)… McCloskey (2001: 157).

Generativists might disagree with functionalists about precisely which grammatical primitives interact to yield epiphenomenal ‘subject effects’ (even though—somewhat ironically—E&L’s tri-partite distinction (topic/agent/pivot, p. 40) is commonly accepted, if differently formalized), but there is really no general disagreement about whether ‘subject’ has any theoretical status. It follows from this that no generative acquisitionist assumes—as E&L appear to—that a child “equipped by UG” would expect his language to have a subject, for the simple reason that this is never claimed to be part of UG.

If E&L misunderstand the content of UG, they also appear to misunderstand its ontology (in the computer science sense of the term): specifically, the relationship between UG and properties of end-state grammars. As Chomsky and others have repeatedly tried to articulate—albeit with changes in terminology over the years—UG is a theory of the initial state, which Chomsky now terms FL (Faculty of Language), not of any particular endstate grammar (LEnglish, LJiwarli, LPiraha, etc.,). That UG/FL is ontologically distinct from any particular L is clear from this recent quote:

‘I understand L (for me, some variety of English) to be an attained state of a genetically-determined faculty of language FL…’ (Chomsky, cited in Stemmer 1999: 1)’

The problem is not merely that UG is not claimed to be a property of final state grammars, but that it need not even be definitional of these grammars. As far back as the mid-seventies, Chomsky entertains the idea that the core properties of final state grammars are not exclusively, or even mainly, determined by UG principles:

‘I have been assuming that UG suffices to determine particular grammars (where again, a grammar is a system of rules and principles that generates an infinite class of sentences with their formal and semantic properties). But this might not be the case. It is a coherent and perhaps correct proposal that the language faculty constructs a grammar only in conjunction with other faculties of mind. If so, the language faculty itself provides only an abstract framework, an idealization that does not suffice to determine a grammar (Chomsky 1975: 41) [emphasis mine: NGD].’

Now, obviously one can take issue with the idea of any apriori knowledge of language, whether in the form of autonomous syntactic principles (Move, Merge, etc), as theories of UG/FL would have it, or in any other form (e.g. Slobin 1973, Bickerton 1984, Klein & Perdue 1997, amongst others): most cognitivists, for example, reject the idea of any crosslinguistic consistency in the initial state of language acquisition; see e.g. Tomasello 1995). In the end, whether UG exists and what form it takes are—or should be—empirical questions, albeit difficult ones. However, the crucial point here is that facts about attained, endstate grammars bear only tangentially on theories of UG. Baldly stated, the absence of Language Universals—granting for the sake of argument that these are a ‘myth’—does not imply the absence of UG. This is not simply an issue of abstractness (as E&L seem to believe, in their disparaging comment ‘expert linguistic eyes can spot the underlying common constructional bedrock, p. 432’). It is, rather, a category error: no matter how deep one digs into mature grammatical systems, there is no logical reason to expect that one will excavate UG in any recognizable form, any more than one should discover universal principles of embryology through an in-depth study of mature organisms.

The final point to address is less a direct misunderstanding about UG than an implicit misconception that runs throughout the paper, namely, the idea that surface diversity presents some kind of prima facie threat to proponents of UG, that UG is challenged in direct proportion to the divergence between English and the weirdest, most exotic alternatives. In fact, quite the opposite is true: UG thrives—indeed depends—on diversity. This is so for two reasons. The first is an epistemological one: if it is true that children acquiring language settle quickly and effortlessly on uniform endstate grammars regardless of the properties of the language being acquired, then the case for innate grammatical knowledge is strengthened the greater the variability in the final state rule-systems and in the external conditions of language acquisition. Looked at the other way around, if there were clear and obvious Language Universals manifest in all end-state grammars—and, especially, if these universals could be explained in external, functionalist terms—there would be no need for UG to explain uniform convergence. This wouldn’t mean that the theory was incorrect, just that it would be less necessary. (It’s not a mystery that trains invariably end up at a railway station, rather than wandering at will all over the countryside: it’s rather trickier to explain the directed behaviour of migratory species of birds or fish without appeal to some innate principles: see Dresher 1997, for discussion). The second reason that diversity is good for UG is that whenever UG principles do find surface expression—and pace E&L, I believe these kinds of universals can be shown to exist, see the commentaries by Baker, Pesetsky, Pinker & Jackendoff, amongst others—then the greater areal and typological distance between two varieties showing common traits, the more compelling the case for UG becomes. To draw on a final analogy to genetics: the fact that the DNA of all humans is 99.9% identical—regardless of race, gender or provenance—is less compelling evidence of the genetic uniformity of all organic life than the fact that we share 50% of our genes with a worm (C. elegans).

In short, Evans & Levinson may offer us ‘eerie sights, weird and skeery sights’, but there’s little here to truly terrify the stouthearted generativist.

References
Bickerton, D., 1984. ‘The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7.
Chomsky, N., 1975. Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon.
— 1981., Lectures on Government and Binding: the Pisa Lectures. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Dresher, E., 1997. ‘The Geese re-think Innateness.’ GLOT International 2, 8-9.
Klein, W., Perdue, C., 1997. The Basic Variety (or: Couldn't natural languages be much simpler?) Second Language Research 13, 301-347.
McCloskey, J., 2001. On the distribution of subject properties in Irish. In Davies, W., Dubinsky, S., (eds.) Objects and Other Subjects. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 157-224.
Slobin, D., 1973. Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In Ferguson, C, Slobin, D., (Eds.), Studies of child language development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. New York, pp. 175-208.
Stemmer, B. 1999. An on-line interview with Noam Chomsky: on the nature of pragmatics and other issues. Brain and Language 68, 393-401. < http://cogprints.org/126/0/chomsweb_399.html, > accessed 1/03/10.
Tomasello, M. 1995. “Language is not an instinct”. Cognitive Development 10: 131–156.

Minimalist Angst

2009-05-28T03:17:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to write the introduction to a new monograph on Vietnamese: to do this, unfortunately, I have to make sense of current Minimalism. This is not easy, even for those more talented than I am, but—given that the subtitle of the work will be An Alternative Minimalist Analysis of Vietnamese Phrase Structure—I have no choice but to give it a shot. Here is an informal reflection on the topic, some parts of which I may be able to use:

'I must say that, like many people, I find a lot of Minimalist writing exceptionally dense. This may be for good reason—and it may just be too hard for me—but I have a sense that it's unnecessarily obscure and convoluted, and that much of the difficulty stems from two considerations: first, that Minimalism, up to 1999 at least, was a reductionist programme aiming to dismantle what was viewed as its too complex predecessor. Yet if the general spirit of Minimalism is correct, we shouldn't have gone there in the first place. Early minimalism reads more like a set of suggestions to Linux users on how to debug Windows 95. To which the appropriate response might well be: why bother? One possible reason is that this reductionism was early Minimalism's only real raison d'etre, and for many people this still seems to be the case: GB wasn't obviously broken on the empirical side of things, and certainly Minimalism has done little to improve or expand empirical coverage, so the main justification for it seems to have been an exegetical house-keeping exercise aimed at simplification for its own sake. (I'm reminded of a university friend of mine, now a distinguished philosophy professor, who dismantled a Mini engine, and put it back together in working order leaving out about 20 redundant components. He found this result immensely satisfying, as it may have been, but it didn't really extend his engineering knowledge, or come to that, make a better car: indeed, the redundancy may have been engineered in).

Leaving the analogy before it quickly collapses, I'll move to the second consideration as to why I think Minimalism is so hard, namely, because there is no consensus on which empirical facts it is supposed to derive. Indeed there is little consensus of whether it should have any empirical coverage at all with respect to end-state grammars. This uncertainty has had particularly deleterious consequences for language acquisition research, such that, as far as I can make out, no-one is doing empirical Minimalist studies of the acquisition of syntax. Rather, the language acquisition field has fragmented into two groups: on the one hand, those who continue to do GB-style acquisition, but call it "Minimalist" (as the new cover term for generative), and on the other, those like Stephen Crain, Andrea Gualmini and others for whom post LF-semantics is the new syntax. The uncertainty has also led researchers like Culicover (who I think makes some excellent headway in trying to cut to the chase, or better, finding some chase to cut to) to draw such distinctions as that between "Abstract" and "Concrete Minimalism". Personally, I'm not optimistic that Minimalism has a future in the language acquisition area until someone clearly spells out what it's supposed to do or explain. Moves, such as the ploy critiqued in Atkinson (2001), in which previously syntactic phenomena are dumped into PF (faute de mieux) are again reminiscent of the strong UG lobby in SLA, where mismatches between native-speaker and L2 learners were previously written off as due to processing errors or pragmatics. If it really has no empirical teeth, or even empirical aspirations, Mainstream Minimalism not likely to win over many voters in the long term.'

If you have any thoughts on this rant, please let me know.

Mea Culpa

2009-03-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

This is the first in an occasional series where I'll try to put down some more general thoughts about the work I've been engaged in these last 20 years or so. I'll start with this observation about language acquisition, which can be found in the introductory chapter to my 1995 monograph on Irish:

"The goal of determining the precise nature of Universal Grammar is externally constrained in two ways. First, as we have mentioned, there is the fact that first language acquisition is uniformly successful (barring pathology) and that it is also astonishing rapid; by the age of four at the latest, children show clear evidence of having acquired all of the major grammatical properties of their particular language."

There is nothing particularly controversial about this assertion in the context in which it was made, namely, in a book by a generative syntactician for other generative syntacticians. I don't know if I believed it then, or whether I just followed the prevailing rhetoric, but one thing is certain: it sits uneasily, to say the least, with the following quote from a commentary I wrote last year, and which has just appeared in Second Language Research. (Notice, incidently, the change from we to I: I'm not sure if this reflects greater humility or arrogance, and in what direction—most likely, I'm more comfortable in defending my own position, now, whatever others may say.)

"As someone who spends the greater part of his time in first language research, I am continually struck by the optimism displayed by second language researchers about young children’s language abilities. For the fact is that—barring a very few precocious exceptions—children do not perform like little adults either in terms of spoken language comprehension and production, or with respect to their performance in judgment tasks. Instead, they behave (unsurprisingly!) like children, deviating in a variety of interesting and systematic ways from the adults around them. Pace Hawkins, there is simply no empirical evidence for the claim that ‘children…acquire all the major structures of their language by the age of three-and-a –half [my emphasis: NGD]’; nor am I aware of any first language researcher who has advanced such a claim."

Oh dear. In a discipline that values consistency over credibility almost every time, this is very bad news, and, at least, a indictment on my own lack of scholarship. The puzzling thing is, though, that in spite of the clear contradiction, I don't really feel that I've taken a u-turn, to use political commentators' favourite metaphor. Instead, what is of interest is what such assertions are in (rhetorical) service of. Let me explain. In the passage that follows the latter (2009) quote, I wrote quite carefully:

"There is of course evidence supporting the view that children show sensitivity to subtle abstract constraints of the adult target grammar considerably in advance of their own productive capacities, and that they project far beyond the input in ways that are consistent with nativist explanations, but those are entirely different matters."

They are, but the two are often conflated. All, I think, that most generativists intend by making such sweeping claims about acquisition is to refer to the mismatch between young children's language production and their capacity to make adult-like discriminations between well-formed and syntactically deviant utterances: i.e., that "children [are able to] project far beyond the input in ways that are consistent with nativist explanations." Having thus pointed the reader into the rhetorical flow of nativism, we then set about our own analyses, largely ignoring the general acquisition issues from there on. For this claim about projection to be legitimate, it doesn't have to be true that children have mastered the adult grammar by the age of three, four or five or indeed any age up to adulthood: even though early emergence of grammatical knowledge is considered to be one of the hallmarks of innateness (Crain 1991), it doesn't follow that late emergence runs against innateness; what matters, as Crain & Pietroski (2001) point out is the way in which the developmental trajectory is constrained...

I suspect now that the source of the difficulty is a failure adequately to distinguish between the capacity to "create grammar" and the capacity to "learn language". The only person I know of to clearly articulate the difference between these two with respect to theories of Universal Grammar is Wolfgang Klein, whose presentation will receive the attention it deserves in this monograph I'm supposed to be getting on with...

Expatriotism

2008-12-26T00:47:00.000-08:00

For the intro music, click here

It’s Christmas Day 2008. I’m sitting alone in Starbucks in Mikage, a suburb of Kobe, Japan, having just dropped off my son Seán for his last day at school here. This is about as dyslocated as an ex-patriot could wish for, supposing that I had indeed wished for it.

Over the last few years, I’ve had occasion to think a lot about national identity, and self-identification. Not just because of the almost embarrassing number of citizenships available to me—and even more to the children—but also because of the time spent away from the country for which I feel the greatest affection. Love, perhaps. Christmas stirs up this pot, as no other time in the year.

As a British/Irish/Canadian[1] citizen, I am one of the few trial citizens I know: to my knowledge my children, Seán and Julian, are the only people to have the right to four passports each, though they will have to choose between Japan and everything else unless Japanese law changes between now and their age of majority. Having being born in the Netherlands, Seán might have made it to five, if the Dutch based citizenship on country of birth, as Americans do, rather than on blood-lines.

With so many options, it would be reasonable to be flippant about nationality. In some ways I am, of course, shuffling through passports to get into the shortest queue at airport immigration counters (“EU citizens only/”Returning Residents only/”Canadians this side”), or filling in that too constraining box near the top of a job application form. Flags of convenience.

Convenience matters, though. Being Irish, or Canadian, rather than British, might offer protection against ill-treatment overseas, or simply a warmer reception. (Being Irish one day got me a free Guinness in the pub in Kobe, which is worth something—well, 700 yen, as I recall). Our countries may not take much responsibility for us abroad, but we have to shoulder all their recent—and not-so-recent—sins: if the Brits have it bad, spare a thought for the American traveler (not to mention the citizens of other, even less fortunate, former imperialist powers.) I am no more responsible for British intervention in Iraq—or, come to that, the bombing of Dresden, or the Chinese Opium Wars—than is my American counterpart for the actions of George W and his Neo-Con handlers over eight appalling years, or for the My Lai massacre or the whole sordid episode that was the Vietnam War—the American War, as the Vietnamese call it—or Slavery, or the genocidal campaigns against the American First Nations (to use a historically accurate piece of Canadian terminology). The list goes on. Nor, as a Canadian, can I take any personal credit for the liberation of Holland, or the protection of the Dutch royal family during the war years, yet the these facts still simmer on the back-burner of the Dutch national consciousness, and Canadians are held in great affection as a consequence. No less gratitude is shown by many French people, as a visit to the towns around the Vimy memorial will confirm. I am not responsible for the seal hunt in the Canadian Arctic, or for Canada’s execrable record on meeting climate change targets, any more than my wife Ayumi should take the rap for commercial whaling, the rape of Nanking, the Burma railway or—much more trivially—for Japan‘s stubborn and intolerable refusal to get rid of Muzak in public spaces (long after it was successfully eradicated in most parts of the developed world). Finally—and just to be absolutely clear—the Northern Irish Troubles were nothing to do with me...

Given all this guilt by association, as undesirable as it is undesired, one would be justified in handling all strains of patriotism as a lab technician might handle bio-hazardous waste: like institutionalized religion, excessive love of country has caused just shit-loads of trouble—there’s no nice way to put it—especially when exported from its native environment. And growing up in Belfast in the 1970s was certainly enough to inspire a profound ambivalence about chauvinistic flag-waving, which had lethal consequences for activists and by-standers alike. Though it is in virtue of the territorial dispute in that part of Ireland that I hold two of my three nationalities, both are irremediably compromised, corrupted, for me, by this same fact. The Northern Irish are—to me—neither flesh nor fowl: not British, as other Britons might accept; nor yet truly Irish, in the eyes of most Southern Irish or the rest of the world. (I know that my family members will disagree with this, and will many others from the province, and no doubt their view is correct for them: self-identification is hardly an exact science, there is no shared truth-of-the-matter. If there were, history would be a much less bloody affair.)

It is perhaps because of this experience that I am so happy to be an ex-patriot. Ex-patriotism affords the necessary focal length for a clear view both of one’s own country and that of one’s host. Terrestrial telescopes perched on Chilean mountaintops give us great pictures of the solar system, but are useless when it comes to charting the Earth; navigating a maze is child’s play if you’re hovering above it in a helicopter. This perspective of estrangement has other mental health benefits: for example, one becomes much less exercised about local and national politics, local education policies, mortgage rates, house-prices, the relative merits of Tesco and Sainsbury’s, and much else about the social fabric of England that so preoccupies its citizens, when one realizes that 99% of the world’s population neither knows nor cares about such objectively tedious facts, being only concerned about the equally mundane trivia of their own locality.

And through all the countries I’ve spent some time in—England, Germany, Canada, the United States, The Netherlands, Japan—I’ve never once felt homesick for that “stroke country”—to adapt the broadcaster Gerry Anderson’s label for Northern Ireland’s second city—however much I might miss the part of my family that lives there. I still don't. Northern/Ireland is like the United States to me, a very familiar foreign country.

Japan, of course, is an unusually pleasant place to practice ex-patriotism. Due to, or perhaps in spite of the post-war reconstruction by the MacArthur administration—I’m not a historian, or political scientist, and even they can’t decide which is the case—the Japanese treat most Westerners inordinately well, in some respects much more favorably and tolerantly than they do their own citizens.[2] And, it should be added, I’m a “weird foreigner”—a hen na gaijin, my father-in-law calls me, with no intended flattery: I love almost all Japanese food, eating things that many Japanese would turn up their noses at—if nose-turning-up were a culturally sanctioned response to disgust, as opposed to the polite smile and peculiar glazed expression that is their translation-equivalent; I live for a day at the onsen, and can go for months, years probably, without a cup of English tea or pint of bitter. Moreover, I feel no particular kinship with other foreigners I meet in Japan, who, for reasons I understand but cannot relate to, feel obliged to make eye-contact, smile, and even engage in conversation for no other reason than that we share the same ex-patriot status. This response doesn’t seem to be triggered by ethnic affiliation: I get the same hopeful glances from South Asians, Central and South Americans, African Americans and North Africans. The physiognomies may vary, but the implication of the facial expression remains constant: you are not Japanese, I am not Japanese, let us be friends... Unfortunately, I am immune to this amiable supplication: I am not Japanese, it’s true, but my family is, and the most I can generally muster is the kind of polite smile and nod that would not look out of place on a Japanese face. Unless, that is, the stranger happens to be Canadian...

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The official record shows that I became a Canadian citizen at—as is said of other such occasions—“a private ceremony” in September 2000, five months before Seán was to be born to his Canadian father. Like most naturalized citizens, the objective reasons were pragmatic rather than patriotic: certainly the timing was, for I wanted Seán to enjoy the right to live and work in Canada (or in the US under NAFTA) if that should be his choice when he grows up. But unlike many refugees and economic migrants, becoming Canadian was not an end to a means, but the end in itself: the end of my search for a home.

I love Canada. This is no light statement. It is not the love in the ubiquitous slogan where a happy pink heart substitutes for the word “I ¤ NY/ London/ Amsterdam /put your city here". I love Canada as I love my family—not in quite the same way, of course, I wouldn’t abandon my kids for eight years and more!—but in the sense that we are inextricably attached ("in my blood like holy wine"; see below). When the plane touches down in Dorval—do people call it Pierre Elliott Trudeau now?—or Pearson, and I pass through immigration, I am home. When I listen to As it Happens on the Internet, I am home. Even the thought of returning to Canada immediately evokes the kind of clichéd total physical response that informs every tacky romcom or sentimental drama. I rejoice in Canada’s too occasional victories, whether artistic, political, intellectual, or sporting...Hockey, I care about hockey! The defining moment in my appreciation of the patriot I had become came in Winter 2002. Seán had just turned one, and we were living in Ottawa on that night during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City when Canada beat the US in the Hockey finals: 5-2 Men’s final, 3-2, Women’s final, in case you’ve forgotten). Ottawa is, some might say, the most boring city in the world, especially in winter—which means about 5o weeks of the year—but not that night. As we all poured out into ice and sub-zero temperatures to scream with excitement and joy and congratulate each other—on the cumulative effort of sitting with a six-pack in front of a tv, you might surmise, if you weren’t Canadian—I knew then that I was part of us. Of course, this victory was special: it means so much more to beat the US (twice!) than to beat Finland, and yet I felt none of the triumphalism or schadenfreude that is the downside of the patriotic reflex, rather, “We beat the Americans: we were that good!!” In a line from another Tragically Hip song on the album you’re hopefully listening to by now—did you click the link above?!—Gordon Downie sings: You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey/I never heard someone say that before! This pretty much sums it up. And I do. I miss Tim Horton’s, too...

My love for Canada works in times of adversity, as well. I share in its shortcomings, am saddened by natural, political or social crises afflicting any of its citizens. Canada rarely lives up to its ideals, though like the US, and some other new countries—or reborn ones like France—it at least has ideals and publicly-stated aspirations, as laid down in the belated Charter of Rights and Freedoms and reflected in the oath of citizenship. Arguably, the failure of Britain to achieve the kind of integration its politicians claim to want stems from its complete lack of national purpose: at any rate, I have no idea what it means to be British beyond right of abode, or of what Britain really stands for. Japan sidesteps the issue of ideals by holding to racial purity: see note 2. I suspect the same is true of less pluralistic European countries. Canada—and the US—shows that patriotism can be decoupled from ethnicity. This is not to trivialize the many serious social problems that remain: for example, in the relationship between old and new Americans (Pre-/Post-Columbus), or between black and white, especially—but not exclusively—south of the 49th parallel. Nor am I oblivious to the failings of multi-culturalism, Canadian–style. Yet, just as I may be disappointed if Seán flunks a school test, or irritated by his refusal to practice guitar, while still demanding to go to the lesson, or driven to distraction by Julian’s tantrums and apparently manic desire not to leave his brother in peace, yet still I have a parent’s profound conviction that my children are fundamentally great and good people. The best, in fact. And so it is with Canada.

I'll end this piece, as it should have started (if you followed the instructions!), with another Joni Mitchell song. It’s not about her love of Canada, I think: if you read the lyrics carefully, the association is only incidental. But for me—and perhaps for other Canadians—it is virtually a national hymn. (Nearly as good as Bobcaygeon, in fact.)
Just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as the Northern Star
And I said,
Constant in the darkness — Where's that at? —
If you want me I'll be in the bar.
On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue tv screen light
I drew a map of Canada, O Canada
With your name sketched on it twice.
You're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter, and so sweet
I could drink a case of you, oh darling
And I would still be on my feet, I would still be on my feet.
From A Case of You, Joni Mitchell (Full lyrics here)

[1] The sequence reflects the order in which I obtained passports, nothing more.
[2] At least this is true for all the things that don’t fundamentally matter. True integration is another issue entirely. It is reported that third- and fourth-generation Korean Japanese still face powerful discrimination, due to the way the Japanese have of defining nationality, which is, certainly to North Americans, deeply offensive and highly racist: if Japanese blood runs through your veins, you are Japanese: if not, you are foreign, no matter Japanese is your own language and sole culture, no matter when your ancestors came to Japan, no matter—in the case of the Koreans—whether you are physically virtually indistinguishable from “true Japanese”. You don’t belong. Since I have no special need or desire to become Japanese, the fact that I couldn’t if I wanted to is moot. I do worry for my children, though, and hope they are Japanese enough to pass.

PS. Canadians will notice that I use American spelling: no idea why, other than that I get tired of fighting with the Spellchecker...

Between a Rock and a Hard Place?

2008-11-03T20:16:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about Google is that it lets you know quickly when the work has already been done by someone else. Trouble is, this is almost always the case: no matter how arcane or perverse the topic may seem to be, it's odds-on that someone will have got there first. They may or may not have made a better job of things than you would, but there is very little under the sun (or anywhere else) that someone has not published an article about. And so I suppose it is unsurprising that a topic as close to life as suicide in Japan should have been well researched and reported.

I've now been in Japan for over a month, which was previously my longest period of stay, and recently my thoughts have been turning increasingly to suicide [PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED BY THIS! I am not thinking personally, but more abstractly]. This is a country in which almost everyone has a level of material security, well-being, and personal convenience considerably in advance of anything in the UK or US, let alone in such awful places as DR Congo (which just happens to be in the news today). It could change of course, but at present Japan's average citizen — and there are a lot more of these people in Japan than in England (where median rather than mean income is the more informative measure, and where there is more like a bi-modal distribution) enjoys a very good life in material terms. It is a safe, secure, and comfortable place. And yet the suicide rate is one of the highest in the world. This might seem strange until you think about it more deeply, when it starts to make some sense. For it is only in a society where every material need is met that the conditions are right to face the devastating emptiness of most human existence. By contrast, suicide rates are comparatively low in developing countries where people face a daily struggle for physical survival, also in wartime in developed countries, where again, such effete metaphysical concerns tend not to rank as highly as finding food and safe drinking water for oneself and one's children, and staying away from bombs and bullets, or machete-wielding neighbours. [The exception is where conditions are truly atrocious: I've just finished reading Antony Beevor's Berlin: 1945 The Downfall about the Soviet capture of Berlin at the end of the Second World War, where many Germans, especially women, killed themselves in advance of what they believed was a fate worse than death. But even here, or in Nazi death camps or the Soviet Gulag, most people seem to have clung on to life past hope, past worth]. Paradoxically, then, a half-life may be better than a full one, not because hopes are unfulfilled but because people have no time to appreciate the emptiness beyond material well-being.

That said, the UK is not that much less comfortable, nor less developed than Japan, and yet the suicide rate is considerably lower: 7.05 (UK) vs. 24.20 (Japan) per 100,000 people (according to World Health Organization figures). Which got me to wondering what Japanese citizen has or doesn't have compared to their British counterparts. My hunch is that it's religion ... but before you think I've been born again, read on. So in preparing this pronouncement, I checked the Internet. And Lo! (:-)), I found a report, which both confirms and—on closer reading, see below—contradicts my not-so-original intuition. This Gallup poll compared suicide rates in 67 countries with an index of religiosity in each of those countries, and found a reliable negative correlation between the two: r (65) = -.64, p<.001: in other words, the less religious the country, the higher the suicide rate.

Before reflecting on this, it is important to understand how religiosity was defined:

Gallup Polls asked respondents whether religion was an important part of their daily lives, if they had attended a place of worship in the week prior to polling, and whether they had confidence in religious organizations in their countries. The Gallup Religiosity Index reflects the percentage of positive responses to these three items. A nation's index score speaks to that nation's overall level of religiosity.

There are several points to note here, the first of course being that correlation does not necessarily imply any causal relationship. (There a clear negative correlation between wealth and obesity in the UK, but that doesn't mean being poor makes you fat, much less that being slim makes you rich). It is nonetheless interesting to discover from the report that though there is also a positive correlation between wealth and suicide rate—proportionately more people kill themselves in richer countries than in poorer ones—the correlation with GDP was much weaker than that with religiosity). So let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a causal relation. Why should it be that being religious keeps the suicide rate down. The editors of the Gallup poll offer three possible interpretations:

...It is thus possible that religion serves as an antidote to the lack of purpose that can make a desperate act such as suicide seem appealing. Believing in something bigger than oneself may allow some people to hold onto life in a world where people without such a belief sometimes give up all hope. Another possibility is that some religious people may believe that committing suicide jeopardizes their security in an afterlife. Alternately, the human connections that people typically forge in religious groups may serve as a buffer against suicide.

Perhaps because of my cultural background, it is the second of these interpretations I find most plausible. Whenever I give time to such thoughts, I am so nearly suffocated by dread of Death and the Hell that will follow—at least according to bogey figures of fundamentalist Protestantism—that I want to cling to this side of the abyss for every second left to me). Without such sanctions, and in the absence of the distraction of baser material needs, and crucially feelings of love and moral responsibility for others, suicide would seem to be an entirely rational and reasonable option. In a sense, the wonder is that the rate isn't even higher, among young adults with no dependents. I suspect that it will only increase in Japan, as young people become more like Westerners, devoid of a sense of obligation to their parents and grandparents.

More anon (especially, on how the correlation, though it works overall, may not in fact explain much about Japan vs. UK, whose religiosity indices are quite comparable).

PS. I should stress, for anyone who reads this but doesn't know me, that it was not my parents who inculcated this Old Testament dread of the afterlife, but the surrounding culture. Wherever it comes from, it's damned hard to shake (forgive the pun!)

PPS. I also want to say that this should not be construed as an anti-Japanese comment. This is truly a wonderful place to live, as I'll talk about in another post. But that's just the (puritanical) point, I suppose...

Thinking about Madeleine (1)

2007-09-20T13:32:00.000-07:00

"Every parent's worst nightmare". Not just the tabloids and the women in the local sandwich shop have repeatedly trotted out this phrase: Radio four started an early segment about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann with the same tired cliche. We're all supposed to accept this, it seems, our agreement signalled by a dutiful nod implying sympathy and compassion. I’d go along with it too, except that it's nonsense, and a distraction from the real tragedy of this case.
There are a number of reasons aside from pedantry for my refusal to let this pass as mere sloppiness, but let's start right there. As stated, it's simply not true: for this parent at least, nearly seven years have gone by without my sleep being disturbed once by any sort of nightmare about my children. Perhaps this is because I spend so much of my waking existence worrying about actual or likely situations affecting them that there's little room for them in my dream-life. Sleep is about the only time I have for myself, and my subconscious knows this. If we're honest, I think, most of our dreams and nightmares are about us, not our children or anyone else we love. The whole familiar Freudian menagerie—horrors of missed exams, apprehension of pain, torture, disease, public nakedness or other humiliation, decay of tooth and claw, the discovery of suppressed urges—all of these things are reasonable candidates for the title "parent's worst nightmare": child abduction is not. It's not that suddenly losing our children is hypothetically better or worse than any of these; it's merely that it doesn't feature in our dreamscapes. (Unless I'm so much more selfish than everyone else, this is generally true.)
A natural response to the foregoing is: "But that's not what they mean. They just mean 'our worst fear'. Don't be so literal!" This is no better. I am chock-full of fears and concerns about my children: such apprehensions pervade all aspects of my personal and professional thoughts, crowding out useful and coherent ideas; they infiltrate each waking moment, impinge on every other concern, from the intimate to the mundane. It’s a tremendous nuisance, really. Among my daily fears: that Sean will have an accident at school, or, more likely, when we drive somewhere in our aging Fiat; that Julian will fall on the concrete step again, or touch the hot oven, or catch one of the few communicable diseases from which his already over-immunised body has not been officially protected. Longer term, I worry that they will fail where they could have succeeded if only I had done something right, or will not learn to deal with the jolts that are a normal part of growing-up. And these are only chronic low-grade fears. I have many worse fears, of course: that somehow the children will be orphaned, or become chronically—even terminally—ill, or be taken from me by drugs as teenagers. The list goes on...
Added to these are a plethora of selfish fears concerning them: that I may be denied custody or access in the event of divorce; that I will lose contact with them if they’re taken abroad; that they’ll hate me or hold me in contempt.
But abduction or abuse, particularly by complete strangers in a holiday resort, just doesn’t come into it. I don’t fear they’ll be taken by extra-terrestrial life either, or worry about the psychological trauma they may suffer if suddenly we were to become lottery winners, or hapless members of a witness protection programme, or political refugees.
The point is not that one shouldn’t fear these things, but that one doesn’t. And the reason has to be probability: our legitimate fears are based on proximate probable universes: what could well happen with only a slip here, some carelessness there, the unexpected—though not improbable—meeting of contiguous synchronicities. Sliding Doors.
However comfortable our domestic lives might seem, we live only a few streets away, figuratively speaking, from bankruptcy, unemployment, homelessness. We’re right next door to traumatic car crashes, heart disease, separation, the mild dystopias of other people's everyday existence…But we’re not even in the same metaphorical country as gangs of child snatchers that have targetted our beloved children. That is Vulgaria (remember Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?), not Portugal. For what it's worth, my money is currently on the little green men: the odds are about the same as for human abduction, but it’s a lot more interesting.
I’ll take up the probability theme again in the next post about Madeleine. But for now, the point to observe is that it is Gerry and Kate McCann’s current situation, not the loss of Madeleine, that represents “every parent’s worst nightmare.” To be formally suspected of your child’s murder and threatened with a trial in a country whose language and legal procedures are alien, to be pilloried by a completely ignorant public, and to face the real prospect of losing your other children to state-sanctioned abduction: these are indeed nightmares worthy of Kafka. This is true whether the McCanns are completely innocent of their daughter’s fate or, as some now believe, complicit in the removal of her body following an accidental homicide: unless they are masochistic, publicity-seeking psychopaths or victims of a bizarre form of Munchausen by proxy—which not even The Sun has alleged...yet—these people are now in Hell. There is no more appropriate word. The most remarkable thing about this case is that neither of them has broken down completely: in their position, I would have been committed weeks ago. God knows where they get their strength: it may indeed be from God. If only they could wake up.

[to be continued]

Scents and Sensibility

2007-09-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

Dreadful pun though it may be, the title captures the theme of this post (I was going to say essence, but that would compound the sin).

I'm losing my sense of smell. This is not some private affliction, though its loss to me is certainly personal; it's less a symptom of aging than of the age itself. With regard to other cognitive faculties we are told to "use it or lose it", but my nose hasn't got a chance, really. It's not for want of trying, but for lack of stimulus, that the sense of smell is gradually giving up its ghost. The same homogenisation of popular culture that has turned every high street into a paltry clone of the next, has done the same for the smells, pongs, stinks, odours, aromas and perfumes that used to infest them. Actually, it's done for most kinds of smells altogether: "reeks" have gone the way of smallpox, leaving only feeble "scents", and pathetic "hints" of this and that...It's not only that everywhere smells the same, everywhere smells of nothing much at all.
As a child, for instance, I remember being taken shopping by my great-aunt along the Upper Newtownards Road in Belfast. First, we'd go to a newsagent just opposite Evelyn Avenue: you walked in to the smell of old broadsheets, packets of Players, Sherbet Lemons, and furniture polish mixed with shoe cream. In the butcher's shop further down, other mixtures breezed around on the draft under the door: sawdust, blood, fresh sausages, cured bacon, mingled with smoked haddock from the fish counter, and wicker shopping baskets. Further down still was the bakery, and Irvine's shoe shop: a new pair of shoes used to colour my bedroom for a fortnight at least. And nearer home, a weekly dose of woody mustiness in Ballyhackamore Post Office filled out my sense of place.
I also remember the stench from the Lagan and the nearby gas-holders on summer days in Victoria Park: since the barrier was built, and gas is 'natural', that's gone too, as has the fantastic smell from Gallaher's cigarette factory, the coal lorries on their delivery runs, fumes of leaded petrol and old diesel.
All these have vanished, and with them an olfactory topography of East Belfast, replaced by the same vapid nondescription found in Bracknell, Boston, and—for all I know—Bogota.
The term "air quality" refers only to levels of noxious carcinogens, eye-watering sulphurs, particulates and their gritty ilk: the contemporary ideal is sterility, absence. This is telling, I think.
Nowadays, even milk goes off without emitting any cloying warning of its transition to unpalatability. This may of course be good for those of us with a toddler who regularly dribbles said liquid across the back seat of the car; time was, this meant a new car in extreme cases! But it should raise concerns, even among the sanguine, about food science and genetic modification.
It's not just the undesirable smells that have been driven from these islands: I can't recall the last time I noticed aftershave or perfume in a public place—or come to that a private one. We've become a Simple^TMr generation: washed yet unperfumed, cleansed but literally unremarkable, and the poorer for it. (This is not universal: many Italian and French women still inhabit scented microcosms, other European men retain their nasal sensibilities, but the Anglo-American world is aggressively fragrance-free.)
Most likely, this is just another 'Golden Age' rant: no doubt something has been gained by the expulsion of scents and sinners, but I suspect much more has been surrendered. When bemoaning the loss of biodiversity, we should spare a thought for our noses too.
If I were a dog, I would weep at such sterility (or whatever dogs do instead).

Parenthood

2007-09-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

People say that I am a good father. It may be true, but it does not reflect any strength of character or personal virtue. Quite the opposite: it is a symptom of loss, of involuntary abandonment, transformation of the person I used to be. Every time I change a dirty nappy, or put Germolene on a grazed knee, or quarrel about who should pick up the kids this time, or serve tepid pasta at 6pm, a piece of me is lost. There is no less of me, but I am less myself. Every tiny sacrifice for the sake of domestic continuity is just that: a sacrifice. The laws of physics demand that such loss is replaced: entropy requires that what replaces it is more smoothed out, dissipated and disordered than what came before; and so it is, molecule by molecule, cell by cell... The result is parenthood incarnate, not the realization of some ideal social virtue, but a slow, largely painless, smothering of vitality and egotism. It is not that we change our priorities for our children, which might indeed be a virtuous impulse; rather, the priorities change us.
This insidious transformation is not without consolations, of course: there is probably nothing to equal the experience of seeing a child's first smile, first steps, their continual pleasure (for now at least!) in having you around, the feeling of watching them sleeping soundly. The principal consolation is that it provides an easy reason to live, to go on, a banal raison d'etre. Just because it's banal doesn't mean it's not true; just because it's true doesn't make it interesting. Parenthood is a pastime, like almost everything else in our existence, a distraction from our purpose, whatever that may be...
My friend Eric Kellerman told me before Sean was born that he was too selfish to have children. From anyone else, this should have been interpreted as mild self-deprecation; from him, it is only the truth, and he is right to believe it. What he can't know of course, is that everyone with a reasonably healthy mind is too selfish to have children; soon enough, though, like Winston Smith coming to love Big Brother, that selfishness slips away, leaving only a remembered trace in photographs, occasional rages, and passing flirtations. This may not be a bad thing—surely it is better to have the consolations of parenthood than to grow old without any achieving any other purpose—but it is sheer self-delusion to believe that it is an inherent good, or that it deserves any special reverence. To coin a phrase, "parenthood happens".