wordplay

ali_wildgoose asked for linguistics nerdity. This got out of hand. There's a lot of "how I got into linguistics and why it is totally awesome" that you can feel free to skip - the geekcore is behind the last cut.

I finished my BS in Physics in December (and I was married the same day my diploma was signed, so how 'bout that?) and started graduate work in my undergrad department the following spring. However, the only spring-start graduate sequence in my department was Quantum Mechanics, so I took that, but I had to fill in the rest of my hours (which I needed, since I was a physics TA) with other stuff. I took a women's studies course, I think, and I also took a class called Intro to Linguistics. AND IT WAS SO COMPLETELY MADE OF AWESOME!

So the other thing is that, before I was a physics student, I was majoring in Classics. I eventually washed out when I took my third course to translate "The Aeneid" because (a) I mean, you know, enough with Aeneas and his issues already but also (b) it started to really bother me how bounded the enterprise was. (And, interestingly enough, after all that rehash, I can't remember a single passage of "The Aeneid", but I can still recite little bits of Ovid and Catullus, probably the parts you might imagine I can - a boyfriend in high school sent me the basia mille verse on a card with roses the day before his prom. Yes, of course this ended up being one of my gay high school boyfriends. My bitterness is boundless, but this digression ends here.) There was never going to be new material, new work, it was always going to be this endless intellectual exercise of finding a new way to talk about something old and it just seemed really bloodless. Even after I left for physics, though, I never stopped appreciating Latin and Greek because they really are beautiful, aren't they? Latin was the first language I ever studied in depth and I loved how orderly it was, its structures and its elegance. Declensions and conjugation classes were a marvel; that they are as organic as they are and still so internally consistent still amazes me. I started studying Latin when I was 13 and it was something really special that I didn't discover again for almost another 10 years.

I love the breadth of linguistics - there are so many different ways to think about language and all of them fall into the very broad definition of the discipline, and that's very cool for people who really like thinking about a problem in a lot of different ways. You can go really teeny and micro and focus on one structural phenomenon or you can go bigger and work on cross-linguistic stuff or you can go historical and work on change over time or go social and work on the ways people use language to signal identity or you can go all cognitive and think about learnability issues and all of that? Is part of the same question! I was a semanticist in grad school, so I did a lot of formal logic and the work was almost mathematical, and that was really v. fun - I'm sort of over it now, but it was fun. The conference I was at this week was about narrative structure and identity markers - how you construct narratives about the world and about yourself and the kinds of functions they serve in terms of community construction and all that. SEE?! TOTALLY COOL!

These aren't new, but they are beautiful, and I still love them.

(1) If you've ever taken any psychology or linguistics classes EVER, you should have heard about the McGurk effect. If you have, feel free to skip. If you haven't, omg are you in for a treat, because it's travel-sized and SO NIFTY. So, the idea is that if you see a video of someone's mouth saying [ba] and hear audio of someone saying [ga] and they're timelocked, you're going to *perceive* them as saying [da], because /b/ is right up there on the lips and /g/ is all the way back in the back of your mouth, and /d/ sort of averages it all out, right there in the middle. Aren't our brains kind of wacky and cool?! And did you have any idea that you were relying so much on visual context for language processing? This is one of the cool things about processing - there's so much more going on than we think there is, and that's why I get huffy when people think that just because they speak a language they know all about the way languages work. Nobody ever thinks that just because they fell down the stairs last week they're an expert in gravitational theory.

(2) So, one of the things we have to do when we speak is set up all these referents that we're talking about, so that we're picking the same entities out of the world. It's a process of establishing common ground, and a lot of time it's not clear what we're talking about, at least to an outside observer - you sort of have to be inside the conversation to know exactly what entity in the world is being discussed. So pronouns like "her", and deictics like "that guy" or "the store on the corner" or "that thing we were talking about earlier". You tie these ambiguous referents down to one real-world entity either overtly ("I didn't know you knew Jessica! I work with her!") or through assumed shared knowledge (you're in class and Irritating Guy says something stupid and you turn to your friend and say, "That guy is making me nuts."), and then once you do THAT work, you can use shorter forms. Pronouns, especially, are breath-saving gifts.

ANYWAY. In spoken languages there a zillion different ways to use these shorter referents, pronouns being a really big one in European languages - we really like our pronouns. But ASL, American Sign Language, does this breathtakingly beautiful thing where it assigns each referent in an extended discourse a physical space and then uses points to that space every time it wants to bring that referent up. So the first time you're going to talk about something, you say what you're setting up, then point somewhere out in front of you and assign that referrent to that spot. Then, later, when you want to talk about that same guy, you can sign to or away from that spot, point to it again to bring it up, or just basically use it sort of like a spatial pronoun. Space also seems to have some kind of personalizing and contextualizing component; this week I was at a talk about the way the namesign for I. King Jordan (the former president of Gallaudet, the premier US University for the deaf, who left in very very bad circumstances a year or two ago) changed during the extended protests that sprang up around his departure - not only did people not want to call him anything having to do with the word "King" anymore, they didn't even want to sign his new namesign (just his initials, thanks) anywhere close to their bodyspace. The whole system is just SO unbelievably elegant, and it's an example of one thing I really love about crossmodal linguistics, because it's very easy for linguists to forget sometimes that so many of the phenomena that we work with are bounded by physicality and the limitations of the speech apparatus; it's not necessarily that language is inherently linear, it's that the vocal tract can only shape one phoneme at a time, and looking at signed languages lets you strip a lot of that away to get to a better understanding of the cognitive tasks of language.

(3) Most European languages mark things on the verb like number (he thinks v. they think), tense (he thinks v. he thought), aspect (he thinks v. he is thinking), mood (he thinks v. he think, as in "it is necessary that he think that's true!") - we all know that bundle pretty well, and they're important because we can't go through a sentence without them. It's a v. cool thing to learn that an awful lot of languages in the world mark for other things on the verb, too. As a semanticist, one of my favorites is the evidential marker. These are little affixes that indicate how sure the speaker is of the assertion they're making, whether they saw it for themselves, or heard about it from somebody else, or maybe had non-visual sensory experience of it, or they consider it to be general knowledge; there's a good handful of different systems. We can do this in European languages, of course - we just embed the phrases in a bigger sentence ("I heard that he was there" v. "I saw that he was there" v. "Everybody knows that he was there") or in some other way throw more words at the problem - but that there are completely unrelated languages doing this all over the world (indigenous languages across North & South America, the Tibeto-Burman languages in Asia) really tells you something about the social function of language, about how information changes hands and what groups of unrelated people all over the world think is so critical to pass along that it gets tacked onto all their verbs.

HOW AWESOME ARE OUR SCREWED UP BRAINS?! This is part of my seldom-discussed belief that it's hard to be a linguist and not be at least a little bit of a humanist. We fuck up so much, yes, but look at these beautiful, rich, diverse systems we created so effortlessly. Surely a species that does that can get this global warming thing sorted, yes?