category: language & linguistics

An apparent typological anomaly

Thinking more about the work of linguist Simon Kirby, featured in the New York Times book review that I wrote about a couple days ago, so I Googled him. That led me to the rich vein of glorious word ore that is Linguistic Typology, an academic journal about, well, linguistic typology, stupid.

The LT website features an index of all the articles and book reviews published in the journal’s ten-year history. Here is a mashup list of titles from this page — beginning with good old Simon Kirby, who leads off this list with a jaw-dropping title from 1997:

  • Competing motivations and emergence: Explaining implicational hierarchies
  • Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information
  • The Implications Register
  • A grammar of Supyire
  • Ergativity
  • Tone systems in New Guinea
  • On nominal and verbal person marking
  • An apparent typological anomaly
  • The co-variation of phonology with morphology and syntax: A hopeful history
  • The Ergative in Proto-Australian
  • Language sampling
  • Regularity in irregularity
  • A parsing view on inconsistent word order
  • The morphosyntax of demonstratives in synchrony and diachrony
  • Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other?
  • Intransitive Predication
  • The colours of Tsakhur
  • Split morphology: How agglutination and flexion mix
  • The Decay of Ergativity in Kurmanci
  • Tense Systems in European Languages
  • Verbal Periphrases in Romance: Aspect, Actionality, and Grammaticalization
  • The Navajo Verb
  • A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals
  • Counting genera
  • Stochastic models in typology: obstacle or prerequisite?
  • The indefinite-interrogative puzzle
  • La négation
  • Lexico-semantic universals
  • Activation levels in Lavukaleve demonstratives: oia versus foia
  • The complexities of arguing about complexity
  • The case of Sinitic
  • Historical baggage and directionality
  • Complexification, erosion, and baroqueness
  • Rejoinder to the replies
  • Motivation for copula in equational clauses
  • Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state?
  • The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood
  • Evidentials
  • Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope
  • The parameter of actionality
  • Against implicational universals
  • A case for implicational universals
  • Significant and non-significant implicational universals
  • Crosslinguistic insights on the labial flap
  • The Structure of Tone
  • Animacy and Reference
  • Mental state postpositions in Tiriyó
  • Hand, head, and face: Negative constructions
  • Depictive secondary predicates
  • The Origin of Agent Markers
  • Testing Trudgill’s hypotheses
  • On the complexity of simplification
  • A typological overview of Mwotlap
  • Anaphors
  • Suppletion in personal pronouns
  • Theory versus practice
  • The place of reproducibility
  • The Universals Register
  • Motion, Direction and Location
  • Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects
  • Listening to the Pacific
  • The semantics and pragmatics of composite mood marking
  • Recipient-prominence vs. beneficiary-prominence
  • A Pan-Dialectal Grammar
  • The myth of a language
  • Does sampling matter?
  • The robust bell curve
  • Multifunctional agreement
  • The possibility of genderless nouns
  • A typology of intensifiers
  • Constituent order
  • THE UNIVERSALS ARCHIVE
  • Wider and deeper
  • Explaining recurrent sound patterns
  • Methodology and the empirical base
  • Where’s phonology in typology?

This is like three Thanksgiving feasts worth of lingoism, causing me to experience multiple wordgasm. Time to get back into the studio. My apologies in advance to all of these undoubtedly brilliant linguists whose work I am mangling and will no doubt be plagiarizing in the months to come.

The first word

Interesting review in the New York times today of a new book that attempts to unravel the mystery of how language came to be: THE FIRST WORD — The Search for the Origins of Language, by Christine Kenneally.

This it what turned me on the most (italics mine):

One of Ms. Kenneally’s most intriguing scientists, Simon Kirby, a linguist at the University of Edinburgh who works with computer models, has proposed the idea that language might be a self-evolving phenomenon. Somewhat like a computer virus, it changes and adapts to survive.

…Mr. Kirby, the computer modeler, devised an experiment in which subjects were shown objects on a screen along with words describing the objects in what was represented as an invented alien language. The subjects were asked to learn the language. In testing one student after the other, however, Mr. Kirby added new objects to the ones already shown, whereupon the subjects unthinkingly generated new words and combinations. These changes were added to the core list and passed along to successive subjects who, trying to master the language created, in part, by each of their predecessors, made their own additions and changes.

“Except for the initial random language given to the first subject, there was no alien language, only the contributions of each individual, which were culturally transmitted from generation to generation,” Ms. Kenneally writes. “Each subject in the experiment believed that he was simply giving back what he had learned, but instead the language was evolving.”

In similar fashion, researchers have been looking at Internet sites that generate their own protolanguages and linguistic structures.

I’ll have to alert these researchers to my site — they’ll have a field-day here. Actually, there’s probably too much English and not enough Alienish to properly nourish them. But we’ll see.

Perhaps they’ve already played around with another site I developed, Wordlab, nearly a decade ago.

Memex and the Google Galaxy

Memex and the Google galaxy. The original article by Vannevar Bush in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly: As We May Think.