The Ling Space: How Do Babies Build Sentences? The Stages of Child Syntax

(The Ling Space)

This episode came out back on March 2nd, but I'm behind in my reviews.

As always, I don't have a lot of intelligent commentary.  Other than to say it was really interesting.

First language acquisition has been touched on in some way in most of the books I've read about Linguistics.  
For example Lightbown and Spada, who I've just got done reading, have a whole chapter devoted to how babies learn languages.  Lightbown and Spada also talk about way babies and toddlers go through stages when they learn languages.
But even after all the books I've read on the subject, I had never heard of the Continuity Hypothesis (which The Ling Space talks about in this week's episode) and I found it really interesting.

Questions
I'm happy to say that I had no trouble following this episode.  I got through the whole thing without being confused once!
The only question I did have is more of an external question, and it has to do with the examination technique described in the video.  When the baby is asked to distinguish between "Sarah is pushing Mickey" and "Mickey is pushing Sarah", doesn't this pre-suppose that the baby knows the difference between masculine and feminine names?  Do babies know this?

The Ling Space: Interview with Anne Charity Hudley

(The Ling Space)

So once again, I'm behind on my reviewing.  This episode actually came out all the way back on February 18.  But I've been distracted by other things.

Actually I don't really have a lot to say about this. Other than to say that it was interesting.

And one or two other brief comments:

* I picked up an interesting little tidbit about language and national boundaries recently.  I can't remember where.  (It was actually probably on a previous episode of The Ling Space, but I can't remember the exact episode now.)
Anyway, what I learned was that national boundaries often influence the classification of language.  Several of the Scandinavian languages are so similar that they are mutual intelligible, but we classify them as different languages, and not different dialects, because of the different national boundaries.  On the other hand, the various dialects of "Chinese" are mutually unintelligible, but we classify them all as one language because they're all inside China.
I believe this relates to what Professor Hudley is saying about how our taxonomy of languages come from nationalism.

Professor Hudley talks about how this taxonomy has racial implications as well.  She never says so directly, but I suspect what she is talking about is the classification of African American English.
Perhaps she's implying that this variation of English is more based on geography than on skin color, and it's only racial prejudices that have caused us to label it as African American English rather than as a variety of Southern English?  Am I picking up on that right?

* In many of the previous books on linguistics that I've read, the discussions of African American English have focused on its structure.
If memory serves, this was a theme here, here and here.
Those authors all considered the regular structure of African American English as something important to highlight, because previously it was thought that African American speakers were just making a lot of mistakes because they were lazy or stupid.  So linguistics were at great pains to point out that people speaking AAE were not making "mistakes"--AAE had just as much rules and structure as standard English, it just had different rules and structures.
Interestingly, however, Professor Hudson claims that she and the new generation of linguistics no longer consider this important.
I was a little bit unclear on exactly why she's moved away from focusing on structure.  I think her argument was that people should be free to speak whatever variety of English they speak, and whether or not you can show that this variety has structure is really besides the point.  The legitimacy of a dialect does not come from its structure, but just from the fact that people are comfortable speaking it. (Am I picking up on that right?)
At one point she talks about how focusing on structure is misleading, because the modern generation of linguistics are viewing the taxonomies as more fluid.  She says that focusing on structure is dangerous because "if things are a bit more fuzzy, people are a bit more apprehensive."
I wasn't entirely sure what the implication of this was.
Perhaps she is saying that everyone is speaking their own idiolect, so it's dangerous to put people into categories and say "Your speech variety has these rules."  ?
Or is she thinking about Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance--i.e. people might be apprehensive because linguistics will look to find structural rules from the corpus data, but the regular rules might not always show up in the speakers' performance?

* Because I don't have many intelligent things to say about this video, I'm going to go off on a tangent here.
A few years ago I was at a conference in which a Filipino national was presenting a paper on how difficult it was for Filipino's to write papers in academic English, because the colloquial English used in the Philippines was so different from the style required in formal academic papers.
This got me thinking.  I spoke standard English, but my colloquial English would not be acceptable in a formal academic setting either.  I could not write an academic paper in the same style I used to talk to my friends.
I guess the advantage I had, in comparison to Filipino speakers, was that for me the socialization started incredibly early.  (As early as primary school, I was already getting some socialization in formal academic writing).  But it was a long 12 year struggle for our school teachers to finally get me and my classmates to realize that we had to write formal papers in a certain way.
So was this a case of Filipino's being uniquely disadvantaged, or was this a case of everyone having to adjust to the conventions of formal academic English?
I brought this up during the Q&A session at the end of the paper, and we had some interesting discussion.
I had the same question when Professor Hudson mentioned the problems faced when people who spoke non-standard dialects went to university.

The Ling Space: How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory

(The Ling Space)

(Note: This episode came out over a week ago, but I'm just getting around to reviewing it now.  Sorry, I've been distracted by other things.)

So, since September, I've committed myself to writing mini-reviews of new Ling Space episodes as they come out.  It seemed like it would be a good intellectual exercise, and that it would force me to engage more with the content.

But as it's been turning out,  99% of the time, I don't have anything intelligent to say other than:
"That was interesting" and "I didn't know any of that before."

So it was with this week's episodes, where my only thoughts are "that was interesting" and "I didn't know any of that before."

What's great about The Ling Space is that it is essentially a graduate level linguistics course completely free on Youtube.  But it is NOT easy listening.  I always have to pay careful attention to follow what they're talking about.

Like many Ling Space episodes, this episode builds on theories they've already established in previous episodes.  So you need to watch several other episodes first to understand this one.

This episode  started with the recommendation "Maybe Watch These First".  But let me make that a bit stronger.  Definitely watch the recommended videos first, or you won't have a hope of understanding what they're talking about in this video.
In my case, I had seen those previous videos before, but I still re-watched them and I'm glad I did.  I needed the review, and I doubt I would have understood this episode without that review.

In a way, I like that The Ling Space keeps making me go back and re-watch those old-videos, because I need the review and it makes me learn more.  But anyone who is short on time should be forewarned--you'll need about 30 minutes of background before you even get to this video.

************************

It turns out this week's episode is based around a theory Noam Chomsky developed in the 1980s.  (The Ling Space folks joke around by flashing out the graphic  "#stillchomsky" .)

Someone like me, who only knows a little bit about Chomsky's linguistic work, sometimes gets the impression that after Universal Grammar in the 1950s, Chomsky didn't do anything more of significance in linguistics.  But he apparently was still coming up with interesting new theories as late as the 1980s.

***************************

In my review of the last Ling Space episode, I expressed frustration that I was not able to understand it.
I intended this as a self-criticism, but the author of the episode in question actually reached out to me by commenting on my blog post and apologizing for not explaining better.

I thought this was very generous of him to take the time out to personally interact with a viewer.  (These guys have a high profile on Youtube--at least in certain circles--so I was impressed that they actually cared what I thought.)

I'm still not convinced that it's their fault when I don't understand something.  (It could just be that I don't have an aptitude for linguistics).  But in an effort to try to provide useful feedback to them, I said that in the future I would try to be more specific about what exactly I didn't understand.
This is meant simply as feedback to give the folks at The Ling Space insight into what a typical viewer might be thinking as they watch their videos.  They are under no obligation to actually go through the work of answering these questions if they are busy with other things.

In this video, I think I was tracking with everything right up until the very end.
This last bit threw me off, though.  To quote:

In the sentence "Gabriel claims to know what's best for the Jennings family", the subject Gabriel hasn't risen out of the lower clause, since he really is the one doing the claiming.  But since he's also doing the knowing, we've argued that there must be a silent pronoun that refers back to Gabriel sitting at the front of the embedded clause.  So the sentence comes out to mean something like "Gabriel claims he knows what's best for the Jennings family."  With this new idea at our disposal, we can finally make sense of why this should be.  Because the lower clause has no tense, and the verb "claim" isn't the sort that can assign case to something following it....

1st question: Why can't claim assign case to something that follows it?  Was this explained earlier and I missed it?
Actually, come to think of it, maybe this was explained earlier.  Verbs that assign case are ones that assign the accusative case to nouns that follow it, like "I want her to eat".  Is that right?  So "claims" can't do that then?  But why not?  Was it explained why "claims" can't assign case?

...our silent pronoun is left out in the cold.  As speakers we understand it's there, but it remains pronounced because it has no way of getting case.

 But didn't you just show an example where it got case? "Gabriel claims he knows what's best for the Jennings family."   Or do you mean that it has no way of getting case as long as the "to" is in the sentence?
Actually, if that's the way it is, then why do we need this system at all?  Why don't we just say "Gabriel claims he knows what's best for the Jennings family" all the time instead of messing around with the infinitive form?

Oh, actually one more question.  In the video you say that Japanese has 9 cases.  I actually learned a bit of Japanese  and I don't remember the noun forms having cases.  The verbs could get conjugated, but the nouns always had the same form.  Or am I remembering wrong?

Other Notes
Since making contact with me, Stephan Hurtubise (the writer of The Ling Space mentioned above) has also been generous enough to try to sort out some of the grammar questions in my "Grammar Questions I Couldn't Answer" Series.

His comments make for very interesting reading.  It really makes you think about all the intricacies of English grammar.
Even though we never completely untangled it, he wrote a lot of interesting thoughts about question tags in the comments of this post.
And he gave me a very clear explanation of when "the" goes with the superlative in the comments of this post.

Check it out if you're at all interested in grammar.  Actually, even if you're not interested, it's still fascinating to see how complicated the whole system is.

The Ling Space: How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory

(The Ling Space)

Before I get too negative here, let me start with the positives:
God bless the people at The Ling Space for making these videos.  It's really great to have what is essentially a graduate-level course on linguistics available on line completely for free.
Truly, the Internet is helping us live in a golden age of free information.

But that said, a lot of this video was over my head, and I found it frustrating.

Like a lot of The Ling Space videos, this video started out with a list of videos to watch first.  3 in total.
Since I have an anal-retentive personality, I set out to watch all the prerequisite videos first.  I clicked on the first link to watch What Does "Most" Even Mean? Generalized Quantifiers.  But then that video had two more videos I was supposed to watch before it.  So I clicked on another link.  And then that video had two more videos I was supposed to watch before it.  Then that video referenced back to the video in topic two.

I worked my way back through all of the prerequisite videos, and by the time I even got to this week's episode, I had watched like 10 videos as prerequisites.  (I've got a certain personality type.  It would have given me a nagging feeling of incompleteness if I would have skipped one of the prerequisite videos.)

Now, technically, I had watched all of these prerequisite videos before.  Or at least listened to them.  In my first encounter with The Ling Space, I had put all of the videos on a playlist, and had them on in the background of my apartment.
But re-watching them, I realized how complicated a lot of them were, and how little I had absorbed by just playing them in the background.
I tried to watch them now with a focused attention.  I had to pause and rewind the videos frequently to make sure I was understanding everything, but I mostly got it.

Until I got to some of the more technical mathematical videos (here and here), when I started not to understand things, and gradually became more and more lost.

By the time I got to this week's featured video, I was already mentally exhausted, and frustrated.

And I didn't understand all of this week's video either.
I got the general concept of the notations (e= entity, t= truth value) but I never understood why they were nestled the way they were.  And the explanation given "one of them has a closer relationship with the truth" didn't help me at all.  Why does one have a closer relationship with the truth?

From there, the various other formulas and semantic trees just confused me more.

I began to wonder if this was my fault or  the videos fault.  Was the video not explaining it well, or was I just a little bit dense?

I checked the youtube comments to see what the reaction from the rest of the Internet was, and it looks like it's just me.  The other youtubers were making comments like:

* This is a fantastically lucid explanation.
and
* You are amazing!! thanks a lot!!
I had a course on this topic last semester in my masters, and you basically covered and explained almost everything in 10 minutes.

As someone whose true love is history, and has been trying to move into linguistics simply on the basis of my experience teaching English, I sometimes wonder if my brain is really cut out for linguistics.  Videos like this make me doubt my ability.

The Ling Space: What Constraints Are There on Linguistic Sounds? Optimality Theory

(The Ling Space)

I'm running out of intelligent things to say about these Ling Space episodes.  My comments are going to be the same as usual.
So, let's march through my usual observations.  As always:
* I feel like I understood this, but barely.  I really had to watch closely, and I kept having to pause and go back
* Once I put in the effort though, I found it interesting
* The Ling Space is like essentially a graduate level linguistics program available for free on Youtube.  It's really cool that they're making all this available for  people.  I wish I had watched all this before I had done my Masters degree.

Those are more or less the same comments I make for every Ling Space review.  But they're true here as well.
As for specifically this episode, I have some experience with Japanese phonotactics from my 8 years living in Japan.  One of the first things foreigners always notice is how Japanese speakers will always add in extra vowels to English words because Japanese only permits /m/ and /n/ in the coda, as The Ling Space said.

In fact I wrote a post back in 2006 about this--Joel's Guide to Japlish.

The Ling Space: The Linguistics of Arrival

(The Ling Space)

This week's episode was rather different: an interview with several linguists who worked as consultants on the movie Arrival.

(I realize now why the last episode was on alien languages.  It fed into this week's topic perfectly.)

No doubt, I would have gotten much more out of this episode if I had seen Arrival first.  (If I ever do get around to seeing the movie Arrival, I'll have to come back and give this episode another viewing.)

But for the moment, I still enjoyed the episode for what it was.

This episode was as much about how Hollywood works as it was about linguistics.
It turns out that Hollywood actually spent a lot of time and money trying to get the science of linguistics right in this movie.  (Which is funny, because Hollywood is notorious for always getting science wrong.   Do they do this much research for every movie they do?  And if so, why do they routinely get everything wrong all the time.)

There was some interesting discussion on linguistic issues as well.

Much of it, such as the discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and linguistic determinism, the problems the human brain has parsing complex sentences, and Noam Chomsky's universal grammar theories, were discussed in Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct, which is still after all these years my main point of contact with all these issues.

The Ling Space: What Could Alien Languages Look Like?

(The Ling Space)

An interesting (if possibly theoretical question) is posed in this week's The Ling Space.

Namely: If, according to Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar, our ability to create grammar is innate, then what happens when we meet intelligent creatures with different biology.  Their grammar and syntax would not be defined by Universal Grammar, and could be something completely different.

In all my years of watching Star Trek, that question has never occurred to me before.   I wonder how the universal translator (W) would handle that.

The Ling Space: What Do Nasal Sounds Look Like? Sonorant Acoustics

(The Ling Space)

I mentioned this in my review of the previous episode, but I'm starting to realize now how little I absorbed of this series by previously just playing it on in the background.  There's a lot of technical stuff in here that requires very careful attention.

I went back and carefully re-watched all the relevant episodes before moving on to this one.  (The Ling Space helpfully tells you which episodes to watch first at the beginning of each episode).

This current episode as well I had to watch very carefully and slowly to fully understand it.  I frequently paused parts of it, and played some sections several times.

But if the disadvantage of The Ling Space is that it requires careful attention, the advantage is that it's essentially a graduate level linguistics course that's available on-line completely free.   (I really wish these guys had been around back when I did my own M.A. in applied linguistics.  A thorough knowledge of this video series would have given me a huge head-start.)

This particular episode talked about sonarants and formants, which brought back bad memories of my phonetics class in graduate school.   (I had really struggled to understand that course when I was taking it.)

In fact, I'm still not sure I'm exactly clear on what the difference is between the first formant, second formant, and 3rd formant.  I think each formant represents a different frequency of sound wave...is that right?

The topic of the end of the episode, the difference between the approximants /l/ and /r/, and how many non-native English speakers struggle to distinguish them, is something I'm also somewhat familiar with.  I wrote my final paper on the Japanese perception of /l/ and /r/, which I later expanded into a minor thesis.

The Ling Space: What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? Determiner Phrases

(The Ling Space)

Like many of The Ling Space videos, this one starts out with suggestions of previous videos to watch first.  "Maybe Watch These First" the video suggests, with links to two previous videos on syntax.

So I did.

I had already listened to the whole Ling Space collection, but previously I had it on in the background.  This time, I was concentrating my full experience on it.

Re-watching these videos was a humbling experience, because once I focused my full attention on these videos, I realized I had absorbed just about nothing previously.  I mean, the words all sounded familiar, sure.  I had definitely heard those videos before.  But I realized I had never understood or absorbed any of the meaning.  I hadn't actually learned X-bar theory.

I've re-watched all the relevant videos now, however.  With my attention fully focused.

It's complicated stuff, and I was just barely hanging on.

Like a lot of TESOL teachers, I ended up in TESOL because of circumstances, not because of a passion for linguistics.   My predispositions are more toward history and humanities, and trying to make sense of syntax theory make me wonder if my brain can handle linguistics.

But I got through it.  I had to watch this video a couple times, but I think I made sense of it all.

I don't really have much to say other than
1) it's complicated but,
2) interesting once you put the effort in.

In my own experience, I discovered that determiners and possessives can't go together several years ago, by reacting to the mistakes of my students who were trying to put them in the same noun phrase.

The Ling Space: What Do You Start with in a Third Language? L3 Acquisition

(The Ling Space Videos)

As I mentioned in my original review of The Ling Space, I'm going to try to give quick little mini-reviews to new episodes as they come out (much like I do with TEFLology).

This is going to be a short review, because I don't have much knowledge on the subject.  So I can't give any comments other than to say: it was interesting.

I'll just jot down a few brief notes:

* L1 transfer to L2 is something I've studied before--it's in just about every book on second language acquisition--for example here and here.  (It's also something all second language teachers observe on a daily basis.)
I don't remember reading anything before on transfer to L3, but I could just be forgetting it.

* I've never really gone much beyond L2 myself.  (I was never fluent in Japanese, but at my peak studying I think I was about upper-intermediate level.  I count upper-intermediate as proficient, so I'm counting Japanese as an L2).
Unfortunately I completely dropped the ball on learning Khmer when I was in Cambodia.
I'm trying now to learn some Vietnamese, but haven't really gotten far enough with it to make any useful comments.
Someday, when I progress a little bit further with Vietnamese, I might do a blog post on studying Japanese.

The Ling Space--Review of a Youtube Series

(Review of a Youtube Series)

So, a couple months ago, I posted a review of the TEFLology Podcast series, in which I said that I had started listening to the TEFLology Podcast as a way to increase my professional development in my spare time.

And then once I completed TEFLology  I moved onto to The Ling Space Youtube channel as my next listening project.
Actually, I discovered The Ling Space through TEFLology in an indirect sort of way.  Via TEFLology, I learned that there is an active TEFL community on twitter.  So, I started looking up linguists I knew and subscribing to their twitter feeds.  Among the linguists I started following was Stephen Pinker (whose book on linguistics I had enjoyed) and Stephen Pinker tweeted about The Ling Space.

Latest Ling Space: Building words out of pieces (Derivational and Inflectional Morphology). https://t.co/AYuWioosUV via @YouTube

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 18, 2016

The Ling Space consists of a series of 10 minute videos each on some aspect of linguistics.

At the time of this writing, they're up to 91 videos, but the series is still ongoing.

Being a completist, I wanted to listen through all the videos in order as a series, but as far as I could tell, there was no playlist available containing all the videos.  So I created my own.   It's my gift to you Internet.



...although be warned, I indulged my completist tenancies when making this playlist and included all the videos--including the trailer, the outtake episodes, and both versions of the same Daniel Dennet interview (the original and the re-mastered audioversion).

The Review
These are short little fun videos.

The presenters don't strike me as media professionals, but the videos are semi-professionally done, with theme music, and eye catching graphics.
At around 10 minutes (or less) for each video, these are prefect for the short attention span of the digital age.
And the presenters know their audience as well--they're on Youtube, so plenty of references are thrown into geek culture.  Linguistic phenomena is always illustrated with references to Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, X-Files, Star Trek, et cetera.

Despite the pop culture friendly tone of these videos, some of the linguistic theories being explained can get a bit technical, particularly some of the ones that deal with universal grammar and sentence trees.
Since I only had these videos on as background noise in my apartment, I can't claimed to have fully absorbed absolutely everything, and some of the more technical stuff flew right by me.

[Sidenote: In my review of TEFLology, I complained that the information content of each episode was light, and the banter/discussion quotient was high.  This had seemed like a waste of air time to me, but I'm now beginning to better appreciate how that format helped me to absorb new ideas.  On TEFLology, any new information was given in small doses and always thoroughly discussed.  On The Ling Space, they rush through new information fast, and if you're not listening closely, you can miss a lot.  Since I mostly had these videos on as background noise in my apartment, I'm sure I missed a lot.]

But although I can't claim to have absorbed everything in these videos, I did pick up a lot.
I'd recommend this series without hesitation to anyone else looking to brush up on their linguistic knowledge.

Odds and Ends
The makers of The Ling Space appear to have a working knowledge of several different languages, and pull on many of them for examples.  Among the languages they are familiar with is Japanese (which happens to be the only second language I know).

Fortunately for me, Japanese pops up as an example frequently.

I particularly enjoyed their episode on oyagi-gags--(literally "uncle jokes" in Japanese--although The Ling Space translates it as "dad jokes".)



It's weird how certain senses of humor appears to be associated with certain ages.  When I was in Japan, I remember my young Japanese friends would complain about the "oyagi gags" that the old men in their office were fond of telling.
Actually, me and the other foreigners were quite fond of "oyagi gags".  It  was fun for us to see Japanese people playing with the language, and it was good practice for us as language learners. But young Japanese people hated them.

Stephen Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and The Ling Space
It's no surprise that Stephen Pinker is a big fan of this series, since the view of linguistics in The Ling Space is very partial to Chomsky's theories of Universal Grammar, of which Stephen Pinker is also a big advocate.

(Noam Chomsky is referenced repeatedly in these videos, and at one point Chomsky is called the "godfather of modern linguistics".)

In fact many of the episodes especially, much of the material covered in The Ling Space was simply reviewing for me stuff I had already learned from Stephen Pinker's book.  (Not that I'm complaining about that.  It's good for me to review this stuff, or else I'll start to forget it.)

Stephen Pinker actually shows up personally in this series in one of the interview episodes.



One the anti-Chomsky side, however, Daniel Dennet appears to be very uspet about Chomsky's reluctance to accept evolution as an explanation for Universal Grammar.



My only insight into this evolution controversy comes via Stephen Pinker's book.  According to my memory of Stephen Pinker's paraphrase of Chomsky, Chomsky's thinking goes something like this: if we are committed to the naturalist worldview that evolution is, in one way or another, responsible for all of human behavior, then fine,  we can say that Universal Grammar came from evolution.  But we have no theoretical model for how evolution could possibly have produced something as complex as Universal Grammar.
(This is one of the few points in his book where Pinker differs from Chomsky, and in his book Pinker provides an explanation of how Universal Grammar could have come from evolution.  Chomsky, apparently, never altered his view, and Daniel Dennet is not happy about it.)

This Series is Still Ongoing
The Ling Space channel is still active, and they're still putting out new videos.  So I'm going to try to do short mini-reviews for each episode (as I have been doing with TEFLology) and indexing them below.

* Topic 78: What Do You Start with in a Third Language? L3 Acquisition
* Topic 79: What Does Possession Tell Us About Syntax? Determiner Phrases
* Topic 80: What Do Nasal Sounds Look Like? Sonorant Acoustics
* Topic 81: What Could Alien Languages Look Like?
* The Linguistics of Arrival
* Topic 82: What Constraints Are There on Linguistic Sounds? Optimality Theory
* Topic 83: How Do We Capture the Truth of Beliefs? Type Theory
* Topic 84: How Can We Tell What Roles Nouns Play? Case Theory
* Interview with Anne Charity Hudley
* Topic 85: How Do Babies Build Sentences? The Stages of Child Syntax

Link of the Day
noam chomsky on universal grammar and the genetics of language with captioning