Linguistics

Some thought on my thesis

2011-11-18T09:04:00.001+01:00

In the Chinese class for beginners, I always ask the students to remember one model-sentence "我今天在大学学习中文" based on the sentence structure "who when where do what." And then, one day I realized that these are in fact also the basic elements of human's logic, although according to Mr. Gramley (cf. a lecture in 2009), whether all linguistic groups (here I mean people who speak different languages) have the same logic remains still in debate. I believe these elements cannot be avoided when people think about an event or even how to make a speech, and I also reckon that there must be more than these forming one's thoughts. So in this case, how differently greetings are delivered or responded by native speakers of Chinese and English could also be analyzed along this line. On the one hand, these two groups may have differing logics, therefore they understand a speech distinctively; on the other hand, even though they share the same logic, affected by traditions, histories, ideologies, etc. they still judge, categorize or define these elemental concepts in different ways. Therefore, when I do the experimental part of my thesis, I could follow this line to analyze my data.

My problem in learning a language..

2011-09-19T09:06:00.002+02:00

This morning I tried to call my gynecologist to change my appointment with her on Thursday. Then I realized there's always this problem when I am learning a language. I always want to be nice and polite, but sometimes I do not know how to express myself in a good manner. I wander whether I should use "Sie" or "du", whether I should use "möchten" or "wollen", etc. My friends would ask, "aren't you too tied to care so much?" I mean, yes, it's sometimes exhausting, but what can I do? I know so much about language, languages, I know so clearly that there are differences between words, sentence structures, grammatical usages, so how can I ignore all of these?

This is really a big problem in my language learning process, 'cause I want to do everything RIGHT!

Die Kunst des Smalltalk: So kommen Sie leicht ins Gespräch

2011-05-17T16:41:00.001+02:00

Smalltalk - bringt das was?

"Was hat sie, was ich nicht habe?" – Haben Sie sich das auch schon mal gefragt? Mühelos kommt sie mit anderen ins Gespräch, auf Partys lernt sie in Windeseile neue Leute kennen. Und wenn sie einen neuen Job anfängt, fällt es ihr nie schwer, mit ihren neuen Kollegen ins Gespräch zu kommen.

Smalltalk kann man lernen!

Man könnte vermuten, dass das an ihrem Charme, ihrem Aussehen, ihrer Ausstrahlung liegt. Mag sein. Vielleicht ist sie aber auch vor allem eines: verdammt gut im Bereich Smalltalk. Was das bedeutet? Nun ja, sie ist eben nicht diejenige, die am Rande eines Grüppchens steht und aus lauter Verlegenheit die Zähne nicht auseinander bekommt. Denn sie ist eingeweiht in das Erfolgsgeheimnis des leichten Plauderns.

Sie wollen wissen, was dieses Geheimnis ist, sprich mit welchen Worten Sie bei Unbekannten garantiert auf Interesse stoßen und auf welche Gesprächsthemen wirklich jeder einsteigt?

Wir haben für Sie die Kunst des Smalltalks einmal genauer unter die Lupe genommen und Tipps und Tricks rund um die kleine, gekonnte Plauderei zusammengestellt. Smalltalk zu beherrschen ist nämlich kein Privileg einer kleinen Minderheit mit einer besonders selbstbewussten Ader. Smalltalk kann jeder lernen. Man muss nur wissen, wie er funktioniert.

Grundlage 1: Fragen stellen

Meistens läuft es doch so ab: Sie stehen auf einer Party, auf der Sie so gut wie niemanden kennen, als sich irgendwer Ihrer erbarmt und Sie jemandem vorstellt. "Steffi, darf ich dir Anna vorstellen?" – Und dann? Händeschütteln, ein freundliches Lächeln. Stille. Jetzt müsste eigentlich eine von Ihnen mit dem Smalltalk beginnen. Aber wie?

Ganz einfach: Stellen Sie Fragen. Die meisten Menschen erzählen gern von sich und hören sich gern reden. Und letztlich zwingen Sie mit einer Frage Ihr Gegenüber auch zu einer Antwort. Hören Sie Ihrem Gesprächspartner während dieser aufmerksam zu, halten Sie Blickkontakt und signalisieren Sie Interesse an der Unterhaltung.

Mögliche Fragen wären zum Beispiel:

"Woher kennen Sie denn die Gastgeberin?"
"Ach, wir haben uns doch neulich schon bei xy gesehen, oder?" (Aber nur, wenn Sie sich sicher sind!)
"Wo haben Sie denn dieses schöne Kleid / die schöne Tasche / die Kette her?"
"Was trinken Sie da, das sieht super aus!"

Grundlage 2: Schüchternheit überwinden

Natürlich kann es auch sein, dass Sie zu der Gruppe schüchterner Menschen gehören, für die es eine absolute Horrorvorstellung ist, mit fremden Menschen ins Gespräch zu kommen. Seien Sie beruhigt: Sie sind mit Ihrer Schüchternheit nicht allein!

Eine amerikanische Untersuchung hat ergeben, dass jeder Zweite (51 Prozent) Angst hat, in der Öffentlichkeit zu sprechen. Was erstaunlich ist: Nur bei 15 bis 20 Prozent der Befragten sind diese Hemmungen erkennbar (stottern, meiden von Blickkontakt). Den anderen gelingt es, ihre Angst zu überspielen.

Und genau das können Sie auch lernen, denn Hemmungen und Angst vor Kommunikation sind für einen gelungenen Smalltalk natürlich alles andere als zuträglich. Sie haben als schüchterner, smalltalk-gewillter Mensch zwei Möglichkeiten: Entweder, Sie bekennen sich offen zu Ihren Hemmungen ("Ich würde mich gern mit Ihnen unterhalten, bin aber leider total schüchtern"). Oder Sie machen ein Selbstsicherheitstraining, wie es an Volkshochschulen oder von privaten Instituten angeboten wird.

Gesprächsthemen: der Klassiker

Natürlich können Sie auch Pech haben und bei dem Thema "Was machen Sie denn beruflich?" auf gereizte Gemüter stoßen. Vielleicht ist Ihr Gegenüber gerade arbeitslos oder unzufrieden in seinem Job. Vielleicht möchte sich die Person auch gerade nicht über Berufliches unterhalten. In 90 Prozent der Fälle werden Sie mit diesem Thema aber im Bereich Smalltalk Erfolg haben.

Mögliche Fragen, die Sie im Bereich Beruf & Studium stellen könnten, sind:

"Als was arbeiten Sie?"
"Wo arbeiten Sie?"
"Wie sieht Ihr Berufsalltag aus?"
"Was gefällt Ihnen an Ihrer Arbeit?"
"Studieren Sie noch? An welcher Uni? Welcher Prof?"
Vermeiden sollten Sie in diesem Bereich:
Fachgespräche, wenn Sie nicht vom Fach sind
Berufsberatungen, z.B. Anlagetipps für Ihr Geld
Fragen nach dem Gehalt (eine gute Antwort auf diese Frage wäre: "Es könnte mehr sein")

Tabuthemen

Grundsätzlich gibt es keine Themen, die sie von vornherein von einer Unterhaltung ausschließen sollten. Vorausgesetzt natürlich, beide Gesprächspartner sind sensibel im Umgang miteinander und haben kein ausgeprägtes Talent dafür, in Fettnäpfchen zu treten.

Wenn Sie auf dem Gebiet des Smalltalks unsicher sind, ist es ratsam, folgende Themengebiete zu meiden:

Politik
Religion & Weltanschauung
Geld & Geschäfte
Krankheiten
seelische Krisen
Kritik am Essen, den Gastgebern und anderen Gästen
Floskeln
peinliche Fragen wie z.B. nach der Echtheit des Schmucks, der Haarfarbe etc.

Den Smalltalk gekonnt beenden

Ein Smalltalk heißt unter anderem auch deswegen so, weil er nicht zu lange dauern sollte. Maximal fünf Minuten, mehr nicht. Aber was kann man tun, wenn der Smalltalk-Partner nicht aufhört, zu reden? Und stattdessen immer weiter von seinem Urlaub, seinem Job, seiner Familie berichtet? Was am Anfang noch eine nette Unterhaltung war, kann nach kurzer Zeit schon in einen nervtötenden Monolog ausarten, den es irgendwie zu unterbrechen gilt. Nur wie?

Ganz einfach: Verzichten Sie darauf, sich irgendwie aus der Affäre zu ziehen ("Ich muss mal eben zur Toilette"), sondern sagen Sie offen, freundlich und ehrlich: "Ich habe mich sehr gefreut, Sie kennenzulernen. Vielleicht unterhalten wir uns später nochmal, das würde mich freuen!" Falls Sie keine Lust haben, sich später nochmal zu unterhalten, beenden Sie Ihren Satz mit: "Noch einen schönen Abend dann!"

Noch eleganter ist es, den Gesprächspartner einfach weiterzureichen. Er hat erwähnt, dass er eine bestimmte Person im Raum noch nicht kennt? Super, das ist Ihre Chance! Sagen Sie: "Kommen Sie, ich stelle Sie vor." Dann gehen Sie zu der Person und sagen etwa: "Kathrin, darf ich dir Thomas vorstellen, er interessiert sich genau wie du sehr für Südostasien!" Dann ziehen Sie sich dezent zurück.

Anti-Fettnapf-Strategien

Dass Sie bei einem Smalltalk ins Fettnäpfchen treten, kann schon mal vorkommen. Wie peinlich! Hier hilft nur eines: schnell reagieren, um den Schaden so klein wie möglich zu halten. Und so geht's:

Abbiegen in letzter Sekunde: Wenn Sie merken, dass Sie den Satz, den Sie gerade aussprechen wollen, besser nicht zu Ende bringen sollten, dann tun Sie das auch nicht. Stammeln Sie, verlieren Sie den Faden, wechseln Sie abrupt das Thema. Das ist besser, als jemanden zu beleidigen.
Entschuldigen: Wenn Sie den Satz schon beendet haben, hilft nur noch eine angemessene Entschuldigung weiter. Übertreiben Sie dabei nicht maßlos, sondern reagieren Sie so, wie Sie es auch erwarten würden. Alle im Raum werden froh sein, wenn sie sich wieder einem anderen Thema zuwenden können und nicht Ihr stundenlanges Entschuldigen anhören müssen.
Bekenntnis: Wenn Sie das Gefühl haben, Sie würden den anderen durch eine Entschuldigung nur verhöhnen, dann sollten Sie sich zu Ihrem Fehler bekennen, ohne wenn und aber. Geben Sie eine kurze Begründung für Ihr Tun ab und lassen Sie sich nicht auf längere Rechtfertigungen ein.

Das Buch: 'Die Kunst des Smalltalk' Mehr Tipps und Tricks rund um das Thema Smalltalk finden Sie in:

Titel: Die Kunst des Smalltalk: Leicht ins Gespräch kommen, locker Kontakte knüpfen

Autor: Frank Naumann

Verlag: Rowohlt, rororo Sachbuch (2001)

Preis: 8,95 €

The Sims 3

2011-05-17T16:00:00.000+02:00

I played "the sims 3" on my new Wii a few days ago. The experience was really amazing, and I have to say, it is a great game! Yes, it's the first game that I've ever played that I called great, because it's not simply a game but something about life. To me, it enclosed some true side of life that one has to focus on only a few things if one wants to get successful in some field; that it is extremely hard or even impossible for one to be successful in all the fields; that one has to learn to give something interesting up, as it's irrelevant to one's goal or the so-called "life-wish" in the game; and so on so forth.

So, I came to the idea that maybe it would also be great if we could base a similar model, through which people could learn how to succeed in communication, just like what I did in "The Sims", the sim met some other sims, talking, trying to analyse the conversation partner, and then responding in a proper way, of course, by choosing among a few options. But then, I realized that it might be impossible to realize, because there couldn't be a fixed answer. For sure some person with specific personalities would prefer to getting some specific responses; nevertheless these responses could change under differing circumstances or with the uncertainty of the emotions of the conversation partners. I guess we have all been there that sometimes we couldn't believe it's us that said this or did that, the well-known saying "OMG, is that me?!"

So, this is the human language, the marvelous and interesting human language. Only when you think you understand and get it, you realize that it's still a mystery. But you still couldn't stopping following it to see more, because you always want to know more.

So, yes, that's what I am doing, and I do love these stuff!

Branding: Need a lawyer?

2011-05-03T14:30:00.002+02:00

IMAGINE you are trying to think of a name for a legal-services auction site. (A client needs a simple will; he describes it on the site, and lawyers bid on the job.) What did you come up with?

All right, now think of another. Then another. Do this one billion times.

Was any of the billion names you came up withShpoonkle? I'll bet it wasn't. But it was someone's name for exactly such a company. Today's deadline day so no time for more commentary here; just read Nancy Friedman, a branding and company-naming expert, on why your first billion tries did not produce Shpoonkle.

Addendum: Deadline having passed, I realised on my trip home why you probably didn't come up with "Shpoonkle": it's forbidden by English phonotactics (basically what sounds can be strung together in a native English word. "gork" is nonsense, but obeys English phonotactic rules; "gkor" is nonsense and violates the rules.) The sh- sound plus another consonant like p* can't begin a native English word: we have shmuck, shmutz, schmaltz, shmendrick, Sturm und Drang and so on. But they're all German or Yiddish, which is why Big Legal Brain mockingly called Shpoonkle "the new Yiddish-language lawyer bidding and matching service". It's one thing to come up with a name that violates English orthographic rules, I suppose. Flickr and PwC and Yahoo! have all in their way done their worst, and haven't suffered too much for it, because their names remain naturally pronounceable. It's another thing to violate English's rules of pronunciation; I have tried and failed to think of a company that has done so successfully with their brand name in English. If anyone can think of one, let us know in the comments. Otherwise, I leave you with the words of Robert Niznik, Shpoonkle's founder:

Some people don’t like change, others don’t like what they don’t understand or better yet don’t want to understand... Well, get ready, Shpoonkle is here and we are ready for the mainstream. Kleenex, Blog, Xerox, and yes even Internet were silly names people mocked and thought were ridiculous too. Now these words are part of our every day language.

Shpoonkle: could it be the next internet?

* I originally wrote that sh + consonant is forbidden, but Ben Zimmer notes that of course shr- is allowed, as in "shrimp" and "shriek". r is unusual in being a "liquid" consonant, often barely noticeable in itself and only seen in its colouring of a neighboring vowel.

Misunderstandings between native Chinese speakers

2011-02-03T11:55:00.000+01:00

So, here's some interesting "evidence" about semantics and pragmatics I found in my daily life.

Today, I called Aunt Qian, who recently visited her daughter in Mannheim, to wish her a prosperous Year of Rabbit. In the end of the call, I asked her as usual as I always did with my mum, "姐姐还有什么事儿吗？(Literal translation: Does my cousin have anything else?)" When I called my parents, at last I used to ask my mum like this--"爸爸还有什么事儿吗？" to be polite, and meant "Does dad have anything else to say to me?" What my mum usually does would be to ask my dad whether he wants to talk with me and the answer is usually "No, I have nothing important to say." Then we end the call.

What surprised me today was the reply of my aunt. She didn't ask my cousin whether she wanted to speak on the phone, instead, she told me something about my cousin's health condition, saying "she's much better now, although sometimes she still feels pains". (little background info: my cousin has just given birth to a baby.) This means, my aunt has misunderstood my question as "Does everything go on well with my cousin?" which is actually another interpretation of the question but is pragmatically used at the very beginning of a conversation, simply like "How's my cousin doing?"

Right now, I'm not sure why my aunt misunderstood me. Perhaps that's her way of interpreting such kind of questions, and thus, according to her, the question has been correctly answered. I reckon in this case, she must have felt weired why I delivered such a question at the end of the conversation. If she didn't feel awkward, then the reason might probably be the differing backgrounds we grow up from: she's from South China, while I'm from the North. And people do speak differently in these two regions.

Twice blessed

2011-01-11T09:38:00.001+01:00

http://www.economist.com/node/13489730

Twice blessed
Bilingual babies are precocious decision-makers

Apr 16th 2009 | from PRINT EDITION

WHETHER to teach young children a second language is disputed among teachers, researchers and pushy parents. On the one hand, acquiring a new tongue is said to be far easier when young. On the other, teachers complain that children whose parents speak a language at home that is different from the one used in the classroom sometimes struggle in their lessons and are slower to reach linguistic milestones. Would 15-month-old Tarquin, they wonder, not be better off going to music classes?

The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain’s “executive function”. This allows people to organise, plan, prioritise activity, shift their attention from one thing to another and suppress habitual responses. Bilingualism is common in Trieste which, though Italian, is almost surrounded by Slovenia. So Dr Kovacs and Dr Mehler looked at 40 “preverbal” seven-month-olds, half raised in monolingual and half in bilingual households, and compared their performances in a task that needs control of executive function.A study just published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help resolve this question by getting to the nub of what is going on in a bilingual child’s brain, how a second language affects the way he thinks, and thus in what circumstances being bilingual may be helpful. Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste say that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with.

Monitoring languages and keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that even before a child can speak, a bilingual environment may speed up that function’s development. Before rushing your offspring into Tongan for Toddlers, though, there are a few caveats. For one thing, these precocious cognitive benefits have been demonstrated so far only in “crib” bilinguals—those living in households where two languages are spoken routinely. The researchers speculate that it might be the fact of having to learn two languages in the same setting that requires greater use of executive function. So whether those benefits accrue to children who learn one language at home, and one at school, remains unclear.First, the babies were trained to expect the appearance of a puppet on a screen after they had heard a set of meaningless words invented by the researchers. Then the words, and the location of the puppet, were changed. When this was done, the monoglot babies had difficulty overcoming their learnt response, even when the researchers gave them further clues that a switch had taken place. The bilingual babies, however, found it far easier to switch their attention—counteracting the previously learnt, but no longer useful response.

Tongue twisters

2011-01-11T09:34:00.001+01:00

http://www.economist.com/node/15108609

Tongue twisters
In search of the world’s hardest language

Dec 17th 2009 | NEW YORK | from PRINT EDITION

A CERTAIN genre of books about English extols the language’s supposed difficulty and idiosyncrasy. “Crazy English”, by an American folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?”. Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth.”

Such books are usually harmless, if slightly fact-challenged. You tell “a” lie but “the” truth in many languages, partly because many lies exist but truth is rather more definite. It may be natural to think that your own tongue is complex and mysterious. But English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.

English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)

Perhaps the “hardest” language studied by many Anglophones is Latin. In it, all nouns are marked for case, an ending that tells what function the word has in a sentence (subject, direct object, possessive and so on). There are six cases, and five different patterns for declining verbs into them. This system, and its many exceptions, made for years of classroom torture for many children. But it also gives Latin a flexibility of word order. If the subject is marked as a subject with an ending, it need not come at the beginning of a sentence. This ability made many scholars of bygone days admire Latin’s majesty—and admire themselves for mastering it. Knowing Latin (and Greek, which presents similar problems) was long the sign of an educated person.English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö. “Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.

Yet are Latin and Greek truly hard? These two genetic cousins of English, in the Indo-European language family, are child’s play compared with some. Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall.

Even before learning a word, the foreigner is struck by how differently languages can sound. The uvular r’s of French and the fricative, glottal ch’s of German (and Scots) are essential to one’s imagination of these languages and their speakers. But sound systems get a lot more difficult than that. Vowels, for example, go far beyond a, e, i, o and u, and sometimes y. Those represent more than five or six sounds in English (consider the a’s in father, fate and fat.) And vowels of European languages vary more widely; think of the umlauted ones of German, or the nasal ones of French, Portuguese and Polish.

Yet much more exotic vowels exist, for example that carry tones: pitch that rises, falls, dips, stays low or high, and so on. Mandarin, the biggest language in the Chinese family, has four tones, so that what sounds just like “ma” in English has four distinct sounds, and meanings. That is relatively simple compared with other Chinese varieties. Cantonese has six tones, and Min Chinese dialects seven or eight. One tone can also affect neighbouring tones’ pronunciation through a series of complex rules.

Consonants are more complex. Some (p, t, k, m and n are common) appear in most languages, but consonants can come in a blizzard of varieties known as egressive (air coming from the nose or mouth), ingressive (air coming back in the nose and mouth), ejective (air expelled from the mouth while the breath is blocked by the glottis), pharyngealised (the pharynx constricted), palatised (the tongue raised toward the palate) and more. And languages with hard-to-pronounce consonants cluster in families. Languages in East Asia tend to have tonal vowels, those of the north-eastern Caucasus are known for consonantal complexity: Ubykh has 78 consonant sounds. Austronesian languages, by contrast, may have the simplest sounds of any language family.

Perhaps the most exotic sounds are clicks—technically “non-pulmonic” consonants that do not use the airstream from the lungs for their articulation. The best-known click languages are in southern Africa. Xhosa, widely spoken in South Africa, is known for its clicks. The first sound of the language’s name is similar to the click that English-speakers use to urge on a horse.

For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).

Beyond sound comes the problem of grammar. On this score, some European languages are far harder than are, say, Latin or Greek. Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions. Estonian’s cousins in the Finno-Ugric language group do much the same. Slavic languages force speakers, when talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not. Linguists call this “aspect”, and English has it too, for example in the distinction between “I go” and “I am going.” And to say “go” requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or other conveyance. For Russians or Poles, the journey does matter more than the destination.

Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

Agglutinating languages—that pack many bits of meaning into single words—are a source of fascination for those who do not speak them. Linguists call a single unit of meaning, whether “tree” or “un-”, a morpheme, and some languages bind them together obligatorily. The English curiosity “antidisestablishmentarianism” has seven morphemes (“anti”, “dis”, “establish”, “-ment”, “-ari""-an” and “-ism”). This is unusual in English, whereas it is common in languages such as Turkish. Turks coin fanciful phrases such as “Çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz?”, meaning “Were you one of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovakian?” But Ilker Aytürk, a linguist, offers a real-life example: “Evlerindemisçesine rahattilar”. Assuming you have just had guests who made a mess, these two words mean “They were as carefree as if they were in their own house.”

Yes we (but not you) can

This proliferation of cases, genders and agglutination, however, represents a multiplication of phenomena that are known in European languages. A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely. Take “we”. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands, “we” has two forms: “me and you” and “me and someone else (but not you)”. And Kwaio has not just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too. While English gets by with just “we”, Kwaio has “we two”, “we few” and “we many”. Each of these has two forms, one inclusive (“we including you”) and one exclusive. It is not hard to imagine social situations that would be more awkward if you were forced to make this distinction explicit.

Berik, a language of New Guinea, also requires words to encode information that no English speaker considers. Verbs have endings, often obligatory, that tell what time of day something happened; telbener means “[he] drinks in the evening”. Where verbs take objects, an ending will tell their size: kitobana means “gives three large objects to a man in the sunlight.” Some verb-endings even say where the action of the verb takes place relative to the speaker: gwerantenameans “to place a large object in a low place nearby”. Chindali, a Bantu language, has a similar feature. One cannot say simply that something happened; the verb ending shows whether it happened just now, earlier today, yesterday or before yesterday. The future tense works in the same way.

A fierce debate exists in linguistics between those, such as Noam Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in the brain and those who do not. The latter view was propounded by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist of the early 20th century, who argued that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s habits of thought.

With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.Whorfianism has been criticised for years, but it has been making a comeback. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University, for example, points to the Kuuk Thaayorre, aboriginals of northern Australia who have no words for “left” or “right”, using instead absolute directions such as “north” and “south-east” (as in “You have an ant on your south-west leg”). Ms Boroditsky says that any Kuuk Thaayorre child knows which way is south-east at any given time, whereas a roomful of Stanford professors, if asked to point south-east quickly, do little better than chance. The standard Kuuk Thayoorre greeting is “where are you going?”, with an answer being something like “north-north-east, in the middle distance.” Not knowing which direction is which, Ms Boroditsky notes, a Westerner could not get past “hello”. Universalists retort that such neo-Whorfians are finding trivial surface features of language: the claim that language truly constricts thinking is still not proven.

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

Linguists ask precisely how language works in the brain, and examples such as Tuyuca’s evidentiality are their raw material. More may be found, as only a few hundred of the world’s 6,000 languages have been extensively mapped, and new ways will appear for them to be difficult. Yet many are spoken by mere hundreds of people. Fewer than 1,000 people speak Tuyuca. Ubykh died in 1992. Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Linguists are racing to learn what they can before the forces of modernisation and globalisation quieten the strangest tongues.

Language barriers

2011-01-11T09:31:00.000+01:00

http://www.economist.com/node/3104346

Language barriers

Can a concept exist without words to describe it?

Aug 19th 2004 | from PRINT EDITION

TAKE heart, those of you who struggled with maths at school. It seems that words for exact numbers do not exist in all languages. And if someone has no word for a number, he may have no notion of what that number means.

The Pirahã, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, use a system of counting called “one-two-many”. In this, the word for “one” translates to “roughly one” (similar to “one or two” in English), the word for “two” means “a slightly larger amount than one” (similar to “a few” in English), and the word for “many” means “a much larger amount”. In a paper just published inScience, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question.

This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought.

While there is no dispute that language influences what people think about, evidence suggesting it determines thought is inconclusive. For example, in 1972, Eleanor Rosch and Karl Heider investigated the colour-naming abilities of the Dani people of Indonesia. The Dani have words for only two colours: black and white. But Dr Rosch and Dr Heider found that, even so, Dani could distinguish and comprehend other colours. That does not support the deterministic version of the Whorf hypothesis.

While recognising that there are such things as colours for which you have no name is certainly a cognitive leap, it may not be a good test of Whorf's ideas. Colours, after all, are out there everywhere. Numbers, by contrast, are abstract, so may be a better test. Dr Gordon therefore spent a month with the Pirahã and elicited the help of seven of them to see how far their grasp of numbers extended.

Using objects with which the participants were familiar (sticks, nuts and—perhaps surprisingly—small batteries), he asked his subjects to perform a variety of tasks designed to measure their ability to count. Most of these tests involved the participant matching the number and layout of a group of objects that Dr Gordon had arranged on a table.

The tests began simply, with a row of, say, seven evenly spaced batteries. Gradually, they got more complicated. The more complicated tests included tasks such as matching numbers of unevenly spaced objects, replicating the number of objects from memory, and copying a number of straight lines from a drawing.

In the tests that involved matching the number and layout of objects they could see, participants were pretty good when faced with two or three items, but found it harder to cope as the number of items rose. Once it was beyond eight, they were getting it right only three-quarters of the time. The only exception was in those tests that used unevenly spaced objects—an arrangement that can be perceived as a group of clusters. Here, performance fell off when the number of objects was six, but shot up again when it was between seven and ten. Dr Gordon suggests that the participants used a “chunking” strategy, counting the clusters and the numbers of objects within each cluster separately.

Things were worse when the participants had to remember the number of objects in a layout and replicate it “blind”, rather than matching a layout they could see. In this case the success rate dropped to zero when the number of items became, in terms of their language, “many”. And line drawing produced the worst results of all—though that could have had as much to do with the fact that drawing is not part of Pirahã culture as it did with the difficulties of numerical abstraction. Indeed, Dr Gordon described the task of reproducing straight lines as being accomplished only with “heavy sighs and groans”.

The Pirahã are a people who have steadfastly resisted assimilation into mainstream Brazilian culture. Their commerce takes the form of barter, with no need to exchange money. Exact numbers do not exist in their language simply because there is no need for them. And in this case, what you do not need, you do not have. At least in the field of maths, it seems, Whorf was right.

Logic and Grammar

2010-09-22T14:03:00.002+02:00

Chatting with my mum via Skype, I typed the following sentence: "smartvoip要开始扣钱了。" (Literal meaning: It will be to cost money by smartvoip.) Then I realized that this sentence is logically wrong. According to Chinese grammar, "要……了" is a set phrase that indicates the future tense; whereas "开始", a temporal adverb, is also used to indicate the future action, here "cost money". Therefore, the indications are redundant here, just as in English, "will + infinitive" is seldom coordinated with "be to + infinitive"--that is, "will be to do something." However, from the grammatical point of view, "要……了" is modal verb while "开始" is adverb, the two can be combined with few problems, i.e. the sentence here is grammatically right.

...

Why?

Logic and grammar, they are related, but which decides what? Or the two could only coexist in a relation of "cooperation"?

Chaotic thinking

2010-09-17T10:09:00.000+02:00

It is quite funny. Seems like in so many years of language learning, I haven't realized what exactly the words I'm speaking mean. But the more I do to my thesis, the more readings I do, the more uncertain I am about the expressions I use in my speech. Do they really mean what I mean? Are they accurate enough to make myself clear? Can others understand me? Can others get the exact information that I'm delivering? These questions have been part of my habits. OMG! Professional illness?

Qs on MA thesis

2010-09-17T10:05:00.001+02:00

How many video clips do I need to analyse?
If a questionnaire or questionnaires are necessary, how many informants do I need?
How can I get "1,0"??? What do I have to do?
Since sometimes what people say they do differs from what they really do, what can I do to avoid such mis-data?

Eggs or chicken, which come first?

2010-09-17T09:45:00.001+02:00

In G. Lakoff's "Linguistics and Natural Logic", he tries to illuminate how "grammar is related to logic" with piles of examples. After reading him, I got a question about the relation between the completeness of the grammar of one language and the logic of the people who speak this language.

Deep in the night, I got myself confused again. We all know that when people talk, especially when people speak a foreign language, it is not rare to find some ungrammatical sentences in their speech, or sometimes much worse, the surface forms are grammatical but they are still misunderstandable. According to Lakoff--"grammar is related to logic"--in this case I couldn't help wondering what leads people to the misunderstandable sentences. Is it the grammar that they are not good at or their thinkings that are illogical? Which comes first? Do people have a grammatical or ungrammatical sentence which expresses their ideas at first or do they have a logic or an logical or illogical inference in the very first seconds of their reaction?

It really sounds pretty weird to me, just like the question of eggs and chicken, which come first? One thing is for sure: they cannot appear at the same time and we have both of them.

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

2010-09-16T10:41:00.000+02:00

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Last Updated August 2005

BACK TO LPSG CONTENTS

1. The Paper

Philosophy of Language is organised around general questions of language and meaning. The nature of language has long been an obsession of philosophers, more recently it has also become the focus of empirical investigation in linguistics. The subject is concerned both with the most general and abstract aspects of language, meaning and knowledge of both and with more specific problems that arise in understanding particular aspects of natural languages.
Certain more elementary aspects of the philosophy of language are covered in Logic and Metaphysics, and it is good to have a grounding in issues surrounding reference and truth covered on that paper. On this paper you will be focusing more on general methodological considerations about meaning and reference: what form should a theory of meaning take; in what does knowledge of meaning consist; what kinds of facts are there about meaning? Certain figures have dominated discussion of language in the twentieth century, from Frege, and Russell on to Wittgenstein's emphasis on use of language over representation, to Quine's scepticism about the determinacy of translation, Grice's attempt to explicate meaning in terms of speaker's intentions, Davidson's work on theories of truth and radical interpretation, to the consequences of Chomskian linguistics. In addition to studying the work of these philosophers, you will have the opportunity to look at particular problems concerning indexical expressions; proper names; the nature of definite descriptions; pronouns and quantified phrases in natural language; indirect contexts and propositional attitude ascriptions; adverbs, adjectives and metaphor.

2. Basic Reading

Introductory Reading

Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. A thorough introduction to philosophy of language for both philosophy and linguistics students.
Platts, M. 1997. Ways of Meaning: an Introduction to Philosophy of Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. An excellent exposition of the Davidsonian approach to meaning.
Neale, S. 1990. Descriptions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. A clear defence & elaboration of Russell's theory of descriptions, as updated by Kripke and Evans.
Blackburn, S. 1984. Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Readable, if opinionated, treatment of the central areas of philosophy of language, with large amounts of metaphysics thrown in for free.
Lycan, W. 1999. Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. London: Routledge. Nomen est omen. Covers competently main topics.
McCulloch, G. 1989. The Game of the Name: Introducing Logic, Language and Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. A vigorous introduction to issues in the theory of reference.
Taylor, K. 1998. Truth and Meaning. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Oxford Blackwell. Contains among other things an exposition of intensional semantics.

Anthologies

Hale, B. and C. Wright, eds. 1997. A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Contains essays by leading philosophers of language on key topics of this paper.
Ludlow, Peter, ed. 1997. Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Martinich, A. P. ed. 1996. The Philosophy of Language. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Contains most of the classic papers.
Harnish, R. M. ed. 1993. Basic Topics in the Philosophy of Language. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. An alternative source for many of the same papers, together with a useful abridgement of Kaplan's classic, Demonstratives.
Hawthorne, J. and D. Zimmermann. 2004. Language and Philosophical Linguistics. Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 17. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview.
Moore, A. W. ed. 1993. Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Idiosyncratic selection of important papers.
Evans, G., and J. McDowell, eds. 1976. Truth & Meaning: Essays in Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. State of the art papers in semantics & philosophy of language, c. 1976, including important papers by Davidson, Dummett, Evans, & Kripke.
Salmon, N., and S. Soames, eds. 1988. Propositions & Attitudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Despite its title, a selection of papers on direct reference theories.
Yourgrau, P. ed. 1990. Demonstratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Not what its title might suggest, but it does include important papers by Perry, Kaplan, Evans, & Anscombe.
Lepore, E. ed. 1986. Truth & Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tomberlin, J. ed. 1993. Language and Logic. Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 7. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview.
—. 1994. Logic and Language. Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 8. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview.
—. 2002. Language and Mind. Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 16. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview.
Katz, J. J. ed. 1985. The Philosophy of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Key Works

Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black, (3rd ed., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). Many of the key papers have now been collected in The Frege Reader, edited by M. Beaney, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968; 3rd ed, 1972). Pt. 1, the first 135 odd sections of this work emphasise Wittgenstein's gnomic insistence on the role of use in understanding meaning.
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Austin's original statement of speech-act theory which has been influential in both areas of linguistics and philosophy.
Davidson, D. 1984. Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Contains almost all of Davidson's important papers in the philosophy of language.
Chomsky, N. 1985. Knowledge of Language: its Nature, Origins, and Use. New York: Praeger. A good introduction to his theories for philosophers.
Dummett, M. 1993. The Seas of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Includes his two papers on theory of meaning, together with his valedictory lecture on anti-realism.
Evans, G. 1982. Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Challenging investigation of singular thought and reference.
Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Includes, among other things, 'Meaning' and his William James lectures which outline the theory of conversational implicature.
Kripke, S. 1980, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. Kripke's influential attack on Description Theories of Names.
Quine, W. V. 1960. Word & Object. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Ch.2 is the original statement of Quine's views on radical translation.
Wilson, D., and D. Sperber. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. An influential theory of communication by linguists but with philosophical implications.

3. Topics

Theories of Meaning

One of the most fruitful ways of addressing the question of what meaning is has been to ask what form a theory of meaning for a particular language should take. In this the work of Donald Davidson has been most influential. Davidson suggests that an adequate theory of meaning for a given language would be one which would suffice for the interpretation of speakers of that language. In addition, he has suggested that a Tarskian theory of truth (look at the reading under the semantic conception of truth in the chapter Logic and Metaphysics) could be employed as an adequate theory of meaning for natural languages.
Is it really possible that there could be a theory of truth for a natural language such as English-how is one to cope with context-sensitive expressions, for example? A truth theory is interpretive where the right-hand side of its T-theorems translate the sentence mentioned on the left-hand side: e.g., '"Elephants wear tutus in the wild" is true in English if and only if elephants wear tutus in the wild' is an interpretive T-theorem, while '"Polar bears smoke cigars" is true in English if and only if London is south of Canberra' is not. A theory of truth could do duty as a theory of meaning only if it was interpretive, but it is conceivable that a theory of truth could be true and not interpretive. What constraints can be imposed on constructing a theory of truth for a natural language which would narrow down the options only to the interpretive ones, and how could a theorist know that a theory was interpretive without already knowing that the right-hand side of the theorems translate the left-hand side?
While the details of Davidson's own account are the subject of much controversy, the idea that we should look at problems of language in terms of the need to construct a systematic and compositional theory of meaning for problematic constructions has been highly influential and is reflected in the way many philosophers both frame and attempt to settle the problems discussed further below.

Meaning & Truth

Davidson, D. 1967. 'Truth & Meaning'. Synthese 17: 304-323. Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
—. 1976. 'Reply to Foster'. In G. Evans, and J. McDowell, eds., Truth & Meaning: Essays in Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, reprinted in D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
—. 1973. 'Radical Interpretation'. Dialectica 27: 314-328. Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
—. 1977. 'Reality Without Reference'. Dialectica 31: 247-258. Reprinted in D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
—. 1990. 'The Structure & Content of Truth'. Journal of Philosophy 87: 279-328.
Blackburn, S. 1984. Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ch.8.
Davies, M. 1981. Meaning, Quantification, Necessity: Themes in Philosophical Logic. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Evans, G., and J. McDowell, eds. 1976. Truth & Meaning: Essays in Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Introduction.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chs. 1-3.
Sainsbury, M. 1980. 'Understanding and Theories of Meaning'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 80: 127-144.
Segal, G. 1999. 'How a truth theory can do duty as a theory of meaning', in: U.M. Zeglen, Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning, and Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Meaning & Anti-Realism

Dummett has been an influential discussant of Davidson's approach to meaning: he both emphasises the need to see an account of meaning as an account of understanding; and that meaning is use. While endorsing Davidson's aim to construct a systematic meaning theory for natural languages, he challenges the idea that truth should be the central notion used to construct such a theory; he places much weight on the need for speakers to be able to manifest their knowledge of meaning, and assertibility conditions in their use of language.

Dummett, M. 1959. 'Truth'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 59: 141-62. Reprinted in Truth & Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth,1978.
—. 1976. 'What is a Theory of Meaning II?'. In G. Evans, and J. McDowell, eds., Truth & Meaning: Essays in Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted in The Seas of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
—. 1993. 'Realism and Anti-realism'. Reprinted in The Seas of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
—. 1991. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, London: Duckworth. Chs. 14 & 15.
Craig, E. 1982. 'Meaning, Use & Privacy'. Mind 91: 541-564.
Wright, C. 1981. 'Anti Realism & Revisionism'. Reprinted in Realism, Meaning & Truth. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Grice's Theory

Grice sought to explain facts about the meanings of public languages in terms of facts about mental states and social conventions. A speaker has the intention to lead the audience to have a certain response to his speech act and to recognise his intention in doing so. Are there problems specifying the relevant response, and the intentions involved? Can the account be generalised from one off communication to a shared language? Even if one does not look for a reduction of meaning to the mentalistic facts that Grice appeals to, can his approach give us some account of the nature of speech-acts?

Grice, H. P. 1957. 'Meaning'. Philosophical Review 66: 377-388. Reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Avramides, A. 1989. Meaning & Mind: an Examination of a Gricean Account of Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Blackburn, S. 1984. Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ch.4.
Neale, S. 1992. 'Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language'. Linguistics and Philosophy 15: 509-559.
Rumfitt, I. 1995. 'Truth Conditions and Communication'. Mind 104: 827-862.
Strawson, P. F. 1964 'Intention and Convention in Speech Acts'. Philosophical Review 73: 439-460. Reprinted in Logico-Linguistic Papers. London: Methuen, 1971.
Schiffer, S. 1972. Meaning. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Introduction.
Sperber, D and D. Wilson. 2002. 'Truthfulness and Relevance'. Mind 111: 583-682.
Travis, C. 'The Annals of Analysis'. Mind 100: 237-264.
—. 1997. 'Pragmatics'. In B. Hale, and C. Wright, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.

Quine & Indeterminacy of Meaning

Quine challenges the assumption that there are determinate facts about what someone means. He introduces the much appealed to notion of a radical translator. All facts about meaning, Quine claims, must be accessible to such a translator. According to Quine, it is possible that there could be distinct translation manuals for a language each with an equally good claim to being the correct translation manual.

Quine, W. V. 1960. Word & Object. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Ch.2.
—. 1990. The Pursuit of Truth. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Chs.1-3.
—. 1970. 'On the Reasons for the Indeterminacy of Translation'. Journal of Philosophy 67: 178-183.
—. 1897. 'Indeterminacy of Translation Again'. Journal of Philosophy 84: 5-10.
—. 1975. 'Mind & Verbal Dispositions'. In S. Guttenplan, ed., Mind & Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Chomsky, N. 1969. 'Quine's Empirical Assumptions'. In D. Davidson, and J. Hintikka, eds., Words & Objections: Essays on the Work of W.V. Quine. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Evans, G. 1975. 'Identity & Predication'. Journal of Philosophy 72: 343-363. Reprinted in Collected Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
George, A. 1986. 'Whence and Whither the Debate Between Quine and Chomsky?'. Journal of Philosophy 83: 489-499.
Neale. S. 1987. 'Meaning, Grammar, and Indeterminacy'. Dialectica 41: 301-319.

Knowledge and Rules of Language

What is it to know a language or to follow rules of language? Chomskian linguistics, as a matter of empirical enquiry, posits a language faculty possessed by each human in virtue of which he or she can come to acquire a language. If Chomsky is right, is it true that we know the languages we speak? Some philosophers have sought to extend Chomsky's account of knowledge of syntax to knowledge of meaning, and there has been a lively debate over what implicit or tacit knowledge of meaning could consist in.

Chomsky, N. 1985. Knowledge of Language: its Nature, Origins, and Use. New York: Praeger. Chs.1 & 2.
—. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
—. 1995. 'Language and Nature'. Mind 104: 1-61; reprinted in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Higginbotham, J. 1989. 'Knowledge of Reference'. In A. George, ed., Reflections on Chomsky. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
—. 1987. 'The Autonomy of Syntax & Semantics'. In J. Garfield, ed., Modularity in Knowledge Representation & Natural Language Understanding. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Segal, G. 1994. 'Priorities in the Philosophy of Thought'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 68: 107-130.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chs.1 & 13.
Evans, G. 1981. 'Semantic Theory and Tacit Knowledge'. In C. Leich, ed., Wittgenstein: to Follow a Rule. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Reprinted in Collected Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
Davies, M. 1987. 'Tacit Knowledge and Semantic Theory: Can a Five Percent Difference Matter?'. Mind 96: 441-462.
Wright, C. 1986. 'Theories of Meaning & Speakers' Knowledge'. Reprinted in Realism, Meaning & Truth. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Smith, Barry C. 1992. 'Understanding Language'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 92: 109-139.

Meaning as Use: Realism and Irrealism about Semantics

Where the dominant approach to the study of meaning has focused on reference and truth, some philosophers have instead stressed the need to focus on the use that words are put to in order to explain what meaning is. Use-based approaches to meaning have sometimes been thought to lead to scepticism about the existence of rules or of determinate meaning facts. Some have argued that such irrealism about semantic facts is incoherent; others have argued that use-theories do not lead to these consequences anyway.

Wittgenstein, L. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972. See esp. Pt. 1 secs. 1-315
Brandom, R. 1994. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Horwich, P. 1998. Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—. 1990. 'Wittgenstein & Kripke on the Nature of Meaning'. Mind & Language 5: 105-121.
—. 2004. 'A Use Theory of menaing'. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68: 351-372.
Kripke, S. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules & Private Language: an Elementary Exposition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schiffer, S. 1987. Remnants of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Boghossian, P. 1989. 'The Rule Following Considerations'. Mind 98: 507-549.
—. 1990. 'The Status of Content'. Philosophical Review 99: 157-184.
Wright, C. 1992. Truth & Objectivity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Ch.6.

Reference

Indexicals & Demonstratives

Indexical expressions appear to have a constant conventional meaning across different speakers, while varying in their reference. Can a semantic theory both account for how indexicals have a constant meaning, and yet in a context fix a referent? Do indexicals cause special problems for a Fregean theory of meaning?

Frege, G. 'Thoughts'. Reprinted in N. Salmon, and S. Soames, eds., Propositions & Attitudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; also in M. Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Kaplan, D. 1979. 'On the Logic of Demonstratives'. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8: 81-98. Reprinted in P. Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
—. 1977. Demonstratives. Reprinted in Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Castañeda, H-N. 1989. Thinking, Language and Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Perry, J. 1977. 'Frege on Demonstratives'. Philosophical Review 86: 474-497. Reprinted in P. Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Evans, G. 1981. 'Understanding Demonstratives'. Reprinted in Collected Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; and in P. Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Burge, T. 1974. 'Demonstrative Constructions, Reference and Truth'. The Journal of Philosophy 71: 205-223.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Ch.6.
Taylor, B. 1980. 'Truth Theory for Indexical Languages'. In M. Platts, ed., Reference, Truth & Reality: Essays on the Philosophy of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Rumfitt, I. 1994. 'Frege's Theory of Predication: An Elaboration and Defense, with Some New Applications'. Philosophical Review 103: 599-637.
Higginbotham, J. 1993. 'Priorities in the Philosophy of Thought'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 68: 85-106.
—. 1995. 'Tensed Thoughts'. Mind & Language 10: 226-249.
Sainsbury, M. 1998. 'Indexicals and Reported Speech'. In T. Smiley, ed., Philosophical Logic. Oxford: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press.
King. J. 2000. Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational View. Cambridge, Mass. M.I.T. Press.

Proper Names

Must a name have a bearer in order to have a sense? Does one have to know which person is being referred to in understanding a name? Could we treat names as predicates rather than referring expressions?

Kripke, S. 1980. Naming & Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Frege, G. 'On Sense and Reference'. Reprinted in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; and in Peter Geach and Max Black, eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980; and in M. Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Bach, K. 1987. Thought and Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Blackburn, S. 1984. Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ch.9.
Katz. J. 2001. 'The End of Millianism: Multiple Bearers, Improper Names and Compositional Meaning'. The Journal of Philosophy 98: 137-168.
Burge, T. 1973. 'Reference and Proper Names'. Journal of Philosophy 70: 425-439.
—. 1983. 'Russell's Problem and Intentional Identity'. In J. Tomberlin, ed., Agent, Language & the Structure of the World: Essays Presented to Hector-Neri Castañeda, with his replies. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Donnellan, K. 1974. 'Speaking of Nothing'. Philosophical Review 83: 3-31.
Evans, G. 1973. 'The Causal Theory of Proper Names'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 47: 187-208. Reprinted in Collected Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; and in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; and in A. P. Martinich, ed., The Philosophy of Language. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
—. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Edited by John McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ch.11, but also look at Chs.1-3, 6, & 9.
Heck, 1995. 'The Sense of Communication'. Mind 104: 79-106.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Ch.5.
McCulloch, G. 1989. The Game of the Name: Introducing Logic, Language and Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. See esp. Chs.4 & 8.
McDowell, J. 1977. 'The Sense and Reference of a Proper Name'. Mind 86:159-185. Reprinted in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; and in M. Platts, ed., Reference, Truth & Reality: Essays on the Philosophy of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Recanati, F. 1993. Direct Reference: from Language to Thought. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sainsbury, R.M. 2005. Reference without Referents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. 2002. Beyond Rigidity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Descriptions

What is the best treatment of definite descriptions in a theory of meaning? Does the distinction between referential and attributive uses bear on this? Do recent theories of quantification in natural languages bear on the theory of descriptions?

Russell, B. 1905. 'On Denoting'. Mind 14: 479-93. Reprinted in R. C. Marsh, ed., Logic & Knowledge: Essays 1901-1950. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956.
—. 1919. 'Descriptions'. In Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin, Ch. 19; reprinted in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Strawson, P.F. 'On Referring'. Mind 59:269-86. Reprinted in Logico Linguistic Papers. London: Methuen, 1971; and in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Donnellan, K. 1966. 'Reference & Definite Descriptions'. Philosophical Review 77: 203-15. Reprinted in A. P. Martinich, ed., The Philosophy of Language. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Kripke, S. 1977. 'Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference'. In P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Language. Midwest Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 2. Revised edition,Contemporary Perspectives on the Philosophy of Language. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Reprinted in A. P. Martinich, ed., The Philosophy of Language. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Evans, G. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Edited by John McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chs.2 & 9.3.
Neale, S. 1990. Descriptions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. See esp. Chs.2 & 5.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Ch.9.
Bezuidenhout, A. 1997. 'Pragmatics, Semantic Underdetermination and the Referential/Attributive Distinction'. Mind 106: 375-409.
Bezuidenhout, A. and M Reimer (eds.) 2004. Descriptions and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quantifiers in Natural Language & Anaphora

What treatment should we give of terms such as 'every', 'all', 'some', and 'most' in English? In first order logic we translate these using 'unary' quantifiers which attach to single predicates, simple or complex; but no such account is available for terms such as 'most' which seem to belong in the same category. The natural language equivalent of variables in a formal language seem to be pronouns, but are there different varieties of pronoun?

Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chs. 8 & 10.
Davies, M. 1981. Meaning, Quantification, Necessity: Themes in Philosophical Logic. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ch.6.
Dummett, M. 1981. Frege: Philosophy of Language. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth. Ch.15.
Geach, P. 1980. Reference & Generality: an Examination of some Medieval and Modern Theories. 3rd ed. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press.
Wiggins, D. 1980. '"Most" and "All": Some Comments on a Familiar Programme and on the Logical Form of Quantified Sentences'. In M. Platts, ed., Reference, Truth & Reality: Essays on the Philosophy of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Evans, G. 1977. 'Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses (I)'. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7: 467-536. Reprinted in Collected Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
Neale, S. 1990. 'Descriptive Pronouns & Donkey Anaphora'. Journal of Philosophy 87: 113-150.
Sainsbury, R.M. 2002. 'Reference and Anaphora'. Philosophical Perspectives 16: 43-71.
Soames, S. 1994. 'Attitudes & Anaphora'. In J. Tomberlin, ed., Logic and Language, Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 8. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview.
Kripke, S. 1976. 'Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?'. In G. Evans, and J. McDowell, eds., Truth & Meaning: Essays in Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Boolos, G. 1984. 'To Be is to Be A Value of a Variable (or to Be Some Values of Some Variables)'. Journal of Philosophy 81: 430-448.
Williamson, T. 'Everything'. Philosophical Perspectives 17: 415-465.

Propositional Attitude Ascriptions

Many have the intuition that the sentence 'John said that Cary Grant lived in the next street' can be true while the sentence, 'John said that Archibald Leach lived in the next street' is false, even though Cary Grant is Archibald Leach. This suggests that words occurring within 'oblique contexts' have a significance over and above what they stand for. Frege sought to solve this problem by appeal to his theory of sense, but it is not clear how his approach can deal with the use of indexical expressions within subordinate clauses or with the existence of 'quantifying in' to attitude ascriptions-various recent accounts nevertheless attempt to develop Fregean ideas to handle such problems. An alternative approach has been offered by Davidson, with his paratactic theory, which seeks to preserve 'semantic innocence', allowing words to mean the same thing in different contexts, and seeking to avoid any commitment to the existence of abstract items such as Fregean thoughts or propositions. Kripke has questioned whether our intuitions here are coherent, with his notorious Pierre and Paderewski examples, and others have sought to explain the intuitions away as bearing solely on the pragmatics of attitude ascription and not on their semantics.

Frege, G. 'On Sense and Meaning'. Reprinted in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning & Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; and in Peter Geach and Max Black, eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980; and in M. Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Forbes, G. 1990. 'The Indispensability of Sinn'. Philosophical Review 99: 535-563.
Richard, M. 1990. Propositional Attitudes: an Essay on Thoughts and How we Ascribe Them. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crimmins, M. 1992. Talk about Beliefs. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chs.1, 5 & 6.
Davidson, D. 1968. 'On Saying That'. Synthese 19: 130-146. Reprinted in D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Burge, T. 1986. 'On Davidson's "Saying That"'. In E. Lepore, ed., Truth & Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schiffer, S. 1987. Remnants of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Ch. 5.
Higginbotham, J. 1986. 'Linguistic Theory and Davidson's Program in Semantics'. In E. Lepore, ed., Truth & Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Segal, G. 1989. 'A Preference for Sense and Reference'. Journal of Philosophy 86: 73-89.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: an Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Ch.11.
Rumfitt, I. 1993. 'Content and Context: The Paratactic Theory Revisited & Revised'. Mind 102: 429-454.
Kripke, S. 1979. 'A Puzzle about Belief'. In A. Margalit, ed., Meaning and Use. Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in N. Salmon, and S. Soames, eds., Propositions & Attitudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Salmon, N. 1986. Frege's Puzzle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Sense, Force & Mood

Can a semantic theory given in terms of truth provide an account of non indicative sentences in natural languages? What is the connection between mood and type of speech act performed?

Dummett, M. 1991. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. London: Duckworth. pp.113 121.
—. 1993. 'Mood, Force & Convention'. In The Seas of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. 1984. 'Moods & Performances'. In Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Green, M. S. 1997. 'On the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning'. Mind 106: 217-243.
Segal, G. 1990. 'In the Mood for a Semantic Theory'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91: 103-118.
Pendlebury, M. 1986. 'Against the Power of Force: Reflections on the Meaning of Mood'. Mind 95: 361-372.
Hornsby, J. 1986. 'A Note on Non-Indicatives'. Mind 95: 92-99.

Adverbs

What account can we give of adverbs? Can we best understand our use of action verbs in terms of quantification over events?

Davidson, D. 1980. 'The Logical Form of Action Sentences'. In Essays on Actions & Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wiggins, D. 1985. 'Verbs and Adverbs and some other Modes of Grammatical Combination'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 86: 273-306.
Bennett, J. 1985. 'Adverb Dropping Inferences and the Lemmon Criterion'. In E. Lepore, and B. McLaughlin, eds., Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Taylor, B. 1985. Modes of Occurrence: Verbs, Adverbs, and Events. Oxford: Blackwell.
Higginbotham, J. 1983. 'The Logic of Perceptual Reports: An Extensional Alternative to Situation Semantics'. Journal of Philosophy 80: 100-127.

Language, Conventions & Idiolects

Is there such a thing as a common language shared by a social group? Or is the notion of a shared language simply a socio political fiction? Chomsky gives one reason for rejecting shared languages and Davidson another.

Davidson, D. 1986. 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs'. In E. Lepore, ed., Truth & Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dummett, M. 1986. 'Reply to Davidson'. In E. Lepore, ed., Truth & Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Burge, T. 1975. 'On Knowledge and Convention'. Philosophical Review 84: 249-255.
—.1989.'Wherein is Language Social?'. In A. George, ed., Reflections on Chomsky. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
George, A. 1990. 'Whose Language is it Anyway? Some Notes on Idiolects'. Philosophical Quarterly 40: 275-298.
Higginbotham, J. 1989. 'Knowledge of Reference'. In A. George, ed., Reflections on Chomsky. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Laurence, S. 1996. 'A Chomskian Alternative to Convention Based Semantics'. Mind 105: 269-301.
Lewis, D. 1975. 'Languages and Language'. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers. Vol.I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Peacocke, C. 1976. 'Truth Definitions & Actual Languages'. In G. Evans, and J. McDowell, eds., Truth & Meaning: Essays in Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schiffer, S. 1993. 'Actual-Language Relations'. In J. Tomberlin, ed., Language and Logic. Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 7. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview.

Metaphor

What is metaphor? Is there a distinction to be drawn between literal and metaphorical meaning? Can a systematic theory be given of metaphorical meaning?

Davidson, D. 1984. 'What Metaphors Mean'. In Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Black, M. 1979. 'How Metaphors Work: a Reply to Davidson'. In S. Sacks, ed., On Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goodman, N. 1981. 'Metaphor as Moonlighting'. In M. Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Moran, R. 1997. 'Metaphor'. In B. Hale, and C. Wright, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cooper, D. 1986. Metaphor. Oxford: Blackwell.
Davies, M. 1983. 'Idiom and Metaphor'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 83: 67-86.
Wilson, D., and D. Sperber. 1986. 'Loose Talk'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 86: 153-172.

How to tell when your boss is lying

2010-08-25T17:23:00.000+02:00

http://www.economist.com/node/16847818?fsrc=nlw|mgt|08-25-2010|management_thinking

Corporate psychology

How to tell when your boss is lying

It's not just that his lips are moving

Aug 19th 2010

“ASSHOLE!” That was what Jeff Skilling, the boss of Enron, called an investor who challenged his rosy account of his firm’s financial health. Other bosses usually give less obvious clues that they are lying. Happily, a new study reveals what those clues are.

David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

When they are lying, bosses avoid the word “I”, opting instead for the third person. They use fewer “hesitation words”, such as “um” and “er”, suggesting that they may have been coached in their deception. As with Mr Skilling’s “asshole”, more frequent use of swear words indicates deception. These results were significant, and arguably would have been even stronger had the authors been able to distinguish between executives who knowingly misled and those who did so unwittingly. They had to assume that every restatement was the result of deliberate deception; but the psychological traits they tested for would only appear in a person who knew he was lying.

This study should help investors glean valuable new insights from conference calls. Alas, this benefit may diminish over time. The real winners will be public-relations firms, which now know to coach the boss to hesitate more, swear less and avoid excessive expressions of positive emotion. Expect “fantastic” results to become a thing of the past.

Dafydd Gibbon

2010-08-24T11:21:00.000+02:00

LL Fund Drive 2010

Dafydd Gibbon

Bielefeld University, Germany

How to become a linguist: some complicated ways

Why and how did I become a linguist? Coincidences? Parental heritage? Because I was no good at drawing freehand maps of Australia? Because of a love affair as a student? Discourse theorists say that we regularly reconstruct our past so that it makes sense as a coherent story. That is what I am doing right now, trying to weave many unrelated strands together into the compact magic carpet which has carried me through my career. As a Welsh Baptist minister, my father moved between chapels in Yorkshire (where he met my mother and I was born), London, Yorkshire again (where I went to elementary school), Wales and Norfolk (where in both cases I went to secondary school), before I went to King's College, University of London, to study German and French. The family environment was and is very aware of linguistic and cultural diversity – in fact my siblings are scattered around the world today in four countries and three continents. My first contact with other languages was obviously through my father, who learned English as a foreign language in school but (unfortunately) did not speak Welsh at home, and my Welsh farming grandparents, who normally spoke Welsh, but (unfortunately) switched to English when we arrived for the summer holidays.

I was unaware of being party to language endangerment at that time: I learned Welsh at secondary school, and was not particularly fluent, though as an older pupil, when it was my turn to read from the Welsh Bible my reading (possibly with a slight Yorkshire accent?) was apparently highly convincing – an early mark of a future phonetician, maybe, or perhaps of a future text–to–speech synthesis researcher? Welsh has (fortunately) lost its acute endangerment status in the meantime, unaided by me.

My languages in school were English, German (which I selected in preference to Geography for reasons hinted at in the first sentence above), French, Latin and Welsh. Languages and physics were my strong points, and my knowledge of some areas of physics (later enhanced by a hobby: amateur radio) was of inestimable value for my later research in computational linguistics, phonetics and speech technology.

At King's my interest was initially in German and French literature and in theology, and of course in 1960s hippie and rock culture (anyone remember the Holy Ground Club in Notting Hill?) and the 1968 anti–war demonstrations. I rapidly became fascinated by the history of languages, both in my courses and in intercollegiate lectures. During a study year abroad at Erlangen University, Germany, I not only came into contact with the German dialects I had already studied but fell in love with a young lady from Kalamazoo who perchance introduced me to her professor of English Studies, who in turn employed me to teach conversation classes. Subsequently, by a remarkable coincidence, the professor, Theodor Wolpers, had moved to Göttingen when I applied to Göttingen University for a lector's position three years later, and employed me again.

After two years of lectoring and taking courses in philosophy and Indo–European studies, another fortunate coincidence occurred. In 1970 the late Tom Gardner, linguist and artist, left his colleagues Ilse Lehiste, Chuck Fillmore, Arnold Zwicky, and David Stampe in the fertile Ohio State University niche and came to Göttingen. Tom was the strongest formative influence on my linguistic development. He immediately decided I needed to do 'real linguistics', 'real logic', 'real computational stuff', and after a while I became employable in this field. Tom's mentoring led to a doctorate on prosody and later to various jobs in Göttingen, Cologne ('Theory and Practice of Translation') and, in the early 1980s, Bielefeld ('English and General Linguistics'), where I have since been enjoying my family, my teaching, researching and publishing in computational linguistics, language documentation and speech technology, and my travelling and guitar playing.

During this time I have had the great good fortune to meet and work with excellent doctoral students and distinguished linguists from all corners of the globe (Poland, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Canada, U.S.A., Jordan, Taiwan, ...) as well as Europe, and to participate in many funded international projects, such as SAM (of SAMPA fame), EAGLES, VerbMobil, E-MELD, DoBeS, FLaReNet, ABUILD (and others can be googled). These projects have provided the material basis for the international networks which have been so successfully extended by my students, who have enlightened me on many languages, and to whom I owe my greatest intellectual debts. Like my family, my students are now also scattered around the world and occasionally invite me to perform for their students. As with the most recent coincidence, in fact, which set me 'à la recherche de la cohérence perdue' in the form of this personal biosketch.

Save The Words

2010-08-24T10:37:00.000+02:00

Save The Words

Public relations: PR blacklist | The Economist

2010-08-12T11:25:00.000+02:00

Public relations: PR blacklist | The Economist: "PR blacklist
Aug 10th 2010, 18:50 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK

A BIT of synergy here: my colleagues and I at this blog decry overused words in journalism. As journalists, we are also on the receiving end of quite a few press releases (I'd conservatively estimate about seven quadrillion a second), and they are often very tired in their attempts to grab attention. So Kudos to Adam Sherk, a public-relations and strategy consultant, for putting together this list of the most overused words in PR. Extra Kudos for backing it up with actual data. The numbers below are the number of mentions in a single database of press releases, PRWeb.com. So yes, it seems everyone is a 'leader,' nearly everyone is the 'best,' at the 'top' and of course, 'unique'. This isn't even Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average; it's an even more mathematically improbable world where everyone is number one.

1
leader 161,000
2 leading 44,900
3 best 43,000
4 top 32,500
5 unique 30,400
6 great 28,600
7 solution 22,600
8 largest 21,900
9 innovative 21,800
10 innovator 21,400"

Chinese Teaching/Learning

2010-07-29T16:52:00.000+02:00

Don't ever on Pinyin. It only represents how the words sound like but has no meaning at all. At the beginning, it can be very slow, but once we get the rules, the regularities, it can also be quite fast. So just have some patience, we'll see the result. What's the words again? “心急吃不了热豆腐” or if you like, “量变到质变”！

Die Angst vor dem Anrufbeantworter

2010-02-10T15:23:00.000+01:00

14.02.2001 13:26

Die Angst vor dem Anrufbeantworter

Die Kommunikation mit einem Anrufbeantworter ruft bei vielen Menschen immer noch Angst hervor. Zu diesem Schluss kommt der Sprachwissenschaftler Rainer Knirsch an der Universität Göttingen[1]. Er untersuchte rund 2000 Gespräche mit Anrufbeantwortern. Der Göttinger Philologe schätzt, dass in Deutschland jedes dritte Gespräch, das ein Anrufbeantworter entgegennimmt, vom Anrufer vorzeitig beendet wird, weil er Angst hat oder in der Kommunikation mit der Maschine in seinem Anliegen nicht weiterkommt. Untersuchungen in Großbritannien kommen zu ähnlichen Ergebnissen.
"Im Kern besteht das Problem für den Anrufer in den Abweichungen von den Regeln des Telefongesprächs", erklärt Knirsch die Tatsache, dass die Kommunikation mit dem Anrufbeantworter zwar gesprächshafte Züge trägt, aber von den dialogischen Merkmalen des Telefonierens deutlich abweicht. Der Mensch hört am Anrufbeantworter auf, frei zu sprechen, und beginnt zu formulieren, um Sprechfehler und Wiederholungen zu vermeiden. Er neigt dann dazu, beim Sprechen den Text in Richtung geschriebener Sprache zu planen, was eine Belastung für den Arufer darstellt. Besonders jene Anrufer, die sich beim Sprechen auf den Anrufbeantworter verstärkt selbst wahrnehmen, sind in der Aufnahmesituation gehemmt, da sie sich der Abweichungen ihrer gesprochenen Sprache und deren Konservierung bewusst sind. "Es ist sicherlich für keinen Sprecher eine erfreuliche Vorstellung, anhand des Anrufertextes als sprachinkompetent bewertet zu werden", hat Knirsch die Erfahrung gemacht. Im Bewusstsein des gesellschaftlichen Ansehens von geschriebener Sprache und ihrer Normen sowie der eigenen Unzulänglichkeit kann ein Anrufer leicht "sprechängstig" werden – eine mögliche Erklärung dafür, warum die Kommunikation mit dem Arufbeantworter bei vielen angstbesetzt ist. Nur bestimmte Berufsgruppen wie zum Beispiel Politiker könnten teilweise "reden wie gedruckt", da sie mikrofonerfahren sind.
Viele Anrufer sehen im Anrufbeantworter daher auch einen Gegner, der genau aufzeichnet, was und auch wie es gesagt wird. "Die Sprechstimme auf dem Anrufbeantworter ist für den Abhörer der Nachricht ein beinahe offenes Buch, aus der er oft auch die Ängste des Anrufers lesen kann", meint Knirsch. Der Anrufer weiß, dass das Gesprochene aufgenommen und aufgezeichnet wird, und manche Anrufer werden dadurch gehemmt. Studien haben nachgewiesen, dass, sobald die Testperson in ein Mikrofon sprechen muss, die Sprache durch den Überwachungseffekt plötzlich unnatürlich wird. Hinzu kommt noch, dass der Anrufer nicht weiß, ob der Angerufene nicht gerade neben dem Anrufbeantworter steht und ihm beim Sprechen zuhört. Außerdem spüren sich manche Anrufer durch einen gewissen Zeitdruck genötigt, möglichst schnell und kompakt ihr Anliegen auf den Anrufbeantworter zu sprechen, weil sie meinen, dieser schaltet nach kurzer Zeit von alleine wieder ab. Unter diesem Druck ist aber keine Sprachverdichtung mehr möglich. Eine unbegründete Angst: Denn die meisten, hat Knirsch in seiner Untersuchung mit der Stoppuhr herausgefunden, schaffen es, ihr Anliegen in einer Minute vorzutragen, nur wenige brauchen länger.
Um trotz ihrer Unsicherheit mit dem Anrufbeantworter zu kommunizieren, greifen unroutinierte Anrufer zu unterschiedlichen Bewältigungsstrategien. "Während die einen den Anrufbeantworter, meist ironisierend, als elektronischen Sekretär personifizieren und ihn durch direkte Anrede zum Gesprächspartnerersatz erklären ('hallo Anrufbeantworter, was für eine nette Überraschung. Könntest du XXX bitte ausrichten, dass er YYY mal zurückrufen soll, das wäre äußerst nett, tschüss'), bevorzugen andere Anrufer die Mensch-zu-Mensch-Kommunikation und gestalten ihren Text quasi-dialogisch, etwa mittels bestätigungsheischender Partikel ('Telefonieren wir morgen einfach noch, o.k.?')", berichtet Knirsch aus seinen aufgenommenen Gesprächen. Wiederum andere beenden das Gespräch mit 'Ende' wie im Funkverkehr oder mit Formeln, wie sie Briefe oder Postkarten beenden ('Sehr geehrter Herr XXX..., für ihre Mühe im Voraus meinen besten Dank. Auf Wiedersehn').
Ein weiteres Problem: "Die Telefonleitung gibt das Gesprächsanliegen des Anrufers meist ohne dessen vorheriges Wissen an den Anrufbeantworter weiter, sodass die Zeitdauer des Ansagetextes oft nicht genügt, um sich auf die neue Kommunikationssituation und das veränderte Reglement einzustellen", meint Knirsch. Unerfahrene machen dann nach dem Piepston oftmals eine längere Planungspause oder stocken bei der Begrüßung, während routinierte Anrufer die Eröffnung einfach abspulen.
"Im Vergleich zu der langen Zeit, in der wir schon mit dem Telefon umgehen, ist für viele Menschen der Anrufbeantworter einfach ein noch zu neues Medium, das gerade jetzt durch den Handy-Boom sicherlich immer mehr Bedeutung erhält". Medium-unerfahrene hätten noch keine Zeit gehabt, sich für den richtigen, routinierteren Umgang mit dem Anrufbeantworter Schablonen mit Kommunikationsstandards zurechtzulegen, da sie den Umgang noch nicht erlernen konnten.
Knirschs Tipp daher: Besitzer eines Anrufbeantworters sollten den Ansagetext nicht ablesen, sondern frei und locker sprechen und den Text inhaltlich so gestalten, dass er dem Anrufer eine klare Identifikation der angerufenen Person ermöglicht ('Hallo, dies ist der automatische Anrufbeantworter von XXX. Ich bin leider nicht da oder: kann leider nicht drangehen. Ich freue mich aber über eine Nachricht nach dem Signalton oder: ein Fax unter derselben Nummer oder: eine E-Mail unter YYY. Tschüss'). Knirsch hat bei seiner Untersuchung festgestellt, dass die Auflegerquote ansteigt, wenn der Ansagetext zu lang oder zu kurz ist und so manche Personen überfordert, in ein paar Sekunden vom erwarteten Telefonat in ein Gespräch mit dem Anrufbeantworter umzuschalten. Am besten ist ein Mittelmaß von 12 bis 15 Sekunden.
Während die Angst vor der Kommunikation mit dem Anrufbeanworter für Knirsch eigentlich eher unproblematisch ist, sieht er jedoch in dem Thema auch eine diskussionswürdige, gesamtgesellschaftliche Relevanz. "Es kann sich jeder mit seinem Anrufbeantworter gegen unerwünschte Störungen oder Anrufer abschotten, er ist quasi ein telefonischer Sekretär, der als Filter dient und damit die erste Stufe, um Selektionskriterien einzubauen". (Andreas Grote) / (Andreas Grote) / (jk)

URL dieses Artikels:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Die-Angst-vor-dem-Anrufbeantworter-36594.html

Siezen oder duzen

2009-11-30T15:01:00.000+01:00

This is really an interesting topic, which bothers me quite a long time until now, this very moment I write this sentence, even though I've been in Germany for three years. It seems that I can never get used to these two forms. Sometimes when I considered I should have been "siezen"-ed, people just "duzen"-ed me, whereas other times when I "duzen"-ed people, they "siezen"-ed me back. Well, it's not anything about grammar, but just kind of feeling, something closely related to respect, I guess. Or again, possibly, I'm too sensitive.

Europe.view: Linguistic discontents | The Economist

2009-10-30T22:57:00.001+01:00

Europe.view: Linguistic discontents | The Economist

Oct 29th 2009
From Economist.com

Slovaks, Hungarians and missing data

THE row is over but the problems remain. Amid an outcry from neighbouring Hungary, and discreet pressure from other outsiders, Slovakia’s government has backed away, for the moment, from implementing its badly drafted and intrusive-sounding new language law (see article).

Despite the backdown, hopes that membership of the European Union and NATO would bring a permanent end to central Europe’s tribal conflicts and historical grudges now look over-optimistic. It would be good if all concerned—the Slovak government, Hungarians in Slovakia and Hungary’s political parties—paused for reflection about the troubling issues that divide them. But the economic crisis, and the likely victory of the tough-talking Viktor Orban and his right-of-centre Fidesz party in Hungary’s parliamentary elections next year, are among the reasons for expecting another flare-up sooner rather than later.

A short list of Hungarian grievances would go like this. Since 1992 the new Slovak state has made its largest linguistic minority feel like outsiders. Native Slovak-speakers increasingly dominate the upper reaches of government; the handful of Magyarphones in the diplomatic service has been purged (from ten ambassadors to one, for example). The parts of southern Slovakia where Hungarians tend to live have missed out on foreign investment and have the worst public services. Bilingualism is declining: few mother-tongue Slovaks learn Hungarian; Hungarian-language schools teach Slovak remarkably badly. The rise of the Slovak National Party has made anti-Hungarian racism alarmingly acceptable in public life.

Slovak grievances read rather differently. Hungary has a conceptual problem in accepting that Slovakia is a real country. Public figures there stir up Slovakia’s Hungarians with reheated historical wrongs. The number of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia is exaggerated: many of them are in fact Gypsies (Roma). All citizens of Slovakia are equal before the law and talk of discrimination is absurd. All efforts to pamper the Hungarians just make them complain all the more, in an annoying and disloyal way. If Hungarian-speakers really do not feel at home in Slovakia then they can leave.

To an outsider, the striking thing is the prevalence of assertion and the absence of facts. How many people in Slovakia are really “ethnic Hungarians” as opposed to, say, Hungarian-speaking Roma, or native Slovak-speakers with Hungarian surnames, or the products of mixed marriages who do not regard themselves as being fully in one camp or the other? Are those who self-identify as ethnic Hungarians better or worse paid, housed or educated than other population groups? Is this changing over time? Is bilingualism declining? How many go to Hungary for higher education? How do their fortunes compare to Slovak universities’ alumni? What are the statistics on mixed marriages, migration, and life expectancy? And how do all these compare to the comparable population groups in Hungary proper, and to Hungarians living in other places such as Transylvania in Romania or the Vojvodina province of Serbia?

Nobody seems to be collecting this data, either in official statistics or in academic surveys. Lessons could be learned from Britain’s diplomatic service, which makes a big effort to attract applicants from a wide range of class, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and monitors how successful this has been. But Slovak officials react with shock at the idea that monitoring the composition of the civil service could help settle arguments about prejudice. “It would not be politically correct” says a senior government spokesman.

That seems a rather lazy and complacent approach. Consequently, without even the elementary information to know what is right and what to do, the two sides remain entrenched in their silos of ignorance, making myths, and sooner or later, mischief.

how to transribe a tape

2009-10-26T15:05:00.000+01:00

cited from: http://www.geocities.com/davidvalentine2002/resources/tapelog.html

i. Notes on Transcription

There are many ways to transcribe a tape of an interview, or of naturally occurring conversation. The method you choose -- and the data you want to record -- depends on the kinds of data you want to elicit. For example, if you are a linguist or linguistic anthropologist, you may want to record the length of vowels, pitch, volume, or other para linguistic data. This could be very important if you are trying to investigate, for example, claims about "women's speech" which frequently fix on such markers. If you are more interested in the content of the interview/conversation, these features will be of less importance to you, but other features may be more important, such as noting the use of particular kinds of terms.

There are also different approaches to the amount of data one transcribes. In some cases, you may wish to transcribe the entire interview/conversation. In others, you may only want to transcribe the pieces that are the most relevant to you. Bear in mind, however, that the process of qualitative research is one of ongoing clarification of ideas and theses – i.e. those things that may not seem important to you right now may become of great importance later on.

My suggestion to most students is to transcribe tapes using a tape log. This affords you the most flexibility and gives you access to both context, linguistic, and para-linguistic (i.e. stuff that doesn't show up in transcription, like volume or pitch, but still important) data.

Above all, you should remember that your transcriptions are only ever a guide to your tape recorded data – if you end up using data from tapes in your work, you should go back and carefully check the transcriptions with the tapes. Hence, it is vital to record where on a tape the transcriptions come from (see below).

ii. Doing a tape log

A. Data to record up front.

To start your tape log, the following are vital to note on your transcriptions (on all pages – use a header in your transcription log to carry this information across pages):

1. The number of the tape (each of your tapes should be numbered, with the date of the event, the names of the particpants etc.; I also recommend keeping a log of the tapes you have)
2. The name(s) of interviewee(s)/conversational participant(s) (and pseudonym(s) if you are using them; alternatively, if you are very concerned about the identity of your interviewee, or participants in the conversation, record only their pseudonym and refer it to a list of pseudonyms that you keep separately in a password protected file; you can also password-protect your tape logs if you are concerned about privacy.)
3. Date and location of interview/conversation
4. Type of event (e.g. interview, life history, conversation, support group meeting)
5. PRODUCT NAME AND MODEL # OF TRANSCRIPTION DEVICE. (The latter two points are vital, because there is no standard for tape counters, and when you want to go back to find the place on the tape where the transcription comes from, you will need to have the same machine – this will save you tons of time).

6. Any notes that are pertinent to the event or your transcription (see example).

B. Creating a Tape Log

The most useful method I have found is to create a table in my word processing program with three columns. I title them: LOG, THEME/CONTEXT, and QUOTES.

The first column is to record the location of the transcribed information on the tape, and can be quite small. The second is to record the theme and context of the information. I use this to summarize the general themes, my impressions, important notes, para linguistic cues, contextual information etc.

The third column contains transcribed speech, as accurately as possible (more on this below).

C. Transcription conventions

Again, the kinds of conventions you use depend on the data you want. Some linguists find it of great importance to time pauses or silences in speech. Others focus on overlap between speakers, especially if they are interested in turn taking conventions. Others record pitch and volume. Whatever you choose to transcribe, remember that transcription is a time-consuming process that requires a good deal of attention and concentration.

For the purposes of most general ethnography, unless you are a linguistic anthropologist, I would strongly suggest you at least pay attention to the following, and use the following conventions to transcribe:

1. Note the speaker, first using their name/pseudonym, and thereafter, initials. Record your own speech and interjections, no matter how silly they sound. Note yourself by your own initials or by using "ME" or some such thing. If you're not sure who the speaker is, indicate this in square brackets with a question mark.

2. Use [square brackets] to note indistinct speech, or words that you think you can hear, but are not absolutely sure about. If you can't make head nor tail of the speech, leave empty brackets, indicating by the length of space the approximate space taken up by the indistinct speech.

3. Indicate overlap between speech by spacing. It is conventional to use square brackets between lines to show overlap e.g.

DV Tell us about yourself
[
Ben: Let me tell you about myself.

The square brackets indicate the point at which the overlapping speech starts. Sometimes, especially with multiple speakers, this can be an arduous task, but it is frequently useful to do.

4. Indicate pauses and silences – SILENCE AND PAUSES ARE DATA TOO! Likewise, transcribe hesitations such as "uh," "um," "er," etc. You may very well find, in looking back on your transcriptions, that pauses, hesitations, or silences are as telling as the speech itself -- why has someone stopped speaking? What comes after the silence? What might be indicated by the silence? Why has someone hesitated before using a certain word or voicing a certain opinion? Some linguists record the exact time of pauses (to the tenth of a second!) – this is usually not that important for most ethnographic purposes, but use ellipses for short pauses, and give information on long pauses with approximate time in {curly brackets} or [square brackets].

5. If paralinguistic data is useful, indicate it in square or curly brackets e.g. [everyone laughs], [very rapid speech]. Notable volume increase or shouting can be indicated by using ALL CAPS.
Exclamations can be marked with exclamation points! and emphasis with italics.

6. Accent and "eye-dialect." One of the most difficult things to note is accent and dialect. This is particularly the case with non-standard English accents. There has been an evolving critique of the representation of non-standard accents in linguistics. Basically, it boils down to this: those whose speech is represented in writing as non-standard are generally those who occupy lower socioeconomic positions, or have racially marked identities.

One example might be the representation of the word "can't" spoken by a white British English speaker and a black Jamaican working class English speaker. While the white middle class British English speaker doesn't produce "can't" with the American standard English pronunciation (a flat "a"), her or his speech is much less likely to be noted as "deviant" by a (white, middle class) American transcriber than the Jamaican speaker. So, a white middle class British English speaker may be noted as saying, "I can't do it, man," while the Jamaican speaker is more likely to be recorded as "I cay-an't do it, mon." (This latter transcription technique has been called "eye-dialect," meaning that it attempts to reproduce non-standard accents through orthography). If the same standards were held to the British English speaker, her or his words would be recorded as "I cahn't do it, man." This points to the fact that certain kinds of accents are marked – and this marking is linked to judgements about racial identification and socioeconomic status.

The solution is not easy, and there is not much consensus on how to record non-standard varieties. In many cases, some non-standard forms are now widely shared and thus are not as politically loaded (e.g., the dropping of the final "g" as in "happenin'"; the use of words such as "ain't" or "gonna"). In other cases, non-standard uses, for example, in African American Vernacular English, are widespread and accepted uses and should be noted. The most obvious e.g. of this is "aks" for "ask." Likewise, you should not necessarily "correct" word order, grammar, or mispronunciations in your transcripts. But neither should you strive to represent non-standard accents with non-standard spellings.

The point is that you should look to your own assumptions when you transcribe non-standard speech. You may want to note explicitly that a person has a particular kind of accent – but in doing so, you should be aware of the politics of such a noting, highlighting the fact that some of your participants speak with standard accents/dialects. In short, you should avoid attempting to represent accents, and use standard English spellings in transcriptions. The overall question is: why is there a standard in the first place; whose interests does this serve; and why do some people get represented as non-standard (e.g. African American speakers) while others don't (e.g. British English speakers, speakers of the "Boston Brahmin" dialect)?

For a good discussion of this, see:

Preston, Dennis R.
1982 'Ritin 'Fowklower Daun 'Rong: Folklorists' failure in phonology. Journal of American Folklore 95(377):304-326.

D. Recording Theme/Context

Use this column to introduce the theme of the section, the questions you've asked, stuff going on around you, interactions that aren't evident from the transcriptions, new participants arriving or present ones leaving, your own thoughts, notes etc. This is also a useful place to sum up the general theme of the speech or conversation. Indicate a change of theme by creating a new table row, and give each one a title. I generally use ALL CAPS to indicate a general theme.

E. Logging the Location of Speech on the Tape

This is an important part of the process. Indicate the location of the beginning of the thematic section in the LOG column, and preferably, the entire range of the thematic section. Further, it is also very useful to record the tape range next to transcribed speech. Also, in a long thematic section, you may want to note in the LOG column where particular new sub-themes are introduced. Although this may seem pointless to you right now, you will find when you have to go back to your tapes that you are very grateful to yourself for having done this!

F. Idiosyncracies

There are plenty of other conventions for transcription, but these are the ones that are most likely of use to most ethnographers. You will most likely find that you develop your own style as you transcribe (e.g. I choose to embolden the text I think will be most important for me, or the issues I find most important). If there are other issues you want to note, choose a convention. Most important of all, note the conventions that you have chosen to transcribe your tapes. This is important because you will not remember what they are a year or two later! A good place to do this is at the top of the tape log, where they will be the most likely to be seen.

iii. Conclusion

Again, transcription is an arduous process, but it is also very important. In representing people's voices in text, you are taking on a complex task, but as an ethnographer, this is perhaps the strongest data you will have to make your arguments and to give voice to your study participants.
One final -- and vital -- thing to remember: for all the work you're going to put into transcribing your tapes, transcriptions are still only ever representations. Even if you accurately record every single pause, every intonation, pitch, and volume change, every overlap and interjection, what you have produced is still a representation – it is not the "truth." You can never completely and accurately record the gestalt of the event. But it is an important step in attempting to represent, as accurately as possible, the speech (and by extension, the self-representations) of the people with whom you have been privileged to work as an ethnographer.

Sth. about the codes

2009-06-25T21:37:00.000+02:00

Today, when doing a questionnaire for the little kid, Vincent asked me how to say "Zhuangyan" in English. I was suddenly stopped, feeling blank-absence. There's no such word in my English dictionary, I mean, in my mind. It seemed that I have never read some description about any architecture with such a word. Actually, this was heard a lot all over China, of course in the language of Chinese. Then, I couldn't help asking myself, is this word special in communism? If so, then is such kind of case "code-switching"? Say, Vincent has just switched the "political systemic" codes into another language?

Von „kaffeklatsching“ bis „wischi-waschi“ – wenn deutsche Wörter auf Weltreise gehen

2009-06-23T22:35:00.000+02:00

In Kanada treffen sich Frauen zum „kaffeklatsching", die Australier tanzen zur „Oom Pah pah" Music und die Japaner gehen ihrer „arbeito" nach. Das Projekt Ausgewanderte Wörter zeigt deutsche Wörter in aller Welt.

Wir surfen mit sicherer Firewall durchs Internet, sagen „sorry“ statt „Entschuldigung“ und sind erstaunt, wenn unsere Kinder anstatt „megacool“ einfach nur „super“ sagen. Immer mehr Anglizismen erobern die deutsche Alltagssprache. Doch was vielen wie selbstverständlich erscheint, beklagen Linguisten und engagierte Sprachhüter: Gefährdet der starke Einfluss des Englischen die deutsche Sprache? Genug des Jammerns, befand die Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache e.V. (GfdS) und startete 2004 eine Gegenbewegung. Das Projekt Ausgewanderte Wörter war geboren.

„Wir wollten herausfinden, welche deutschen Wörter im Ausland alltäglich benutzt werden,“ so Professor Dr. Rudolf Hoberg von der GfdS. Wörter wie „Kindergarten", „Gemütlichkeit", „Sauerkraut" und „Bratwurst" waren längst als deutsche Importe bekannt. Die zentralen Fragen waren: Gibt es da noch mehr? Wie weit sind deutsche Wörter tatsächlich gereist? Haben sie dort die gleiche Bedeutung oder eine gänzlich andere? „Die Resonanz auf die erste Ausschreibung des Projekts war gewaltig“, sagt Hoberg. So gewaltig, dass in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Deutschen Sprachrat die Suche nach den ausgewanderten Wörtern international bekannt gemacht wurde: Über 6000 Wörter deutschen Ursprungs, die in alle Welt ausgewandert sind und dort eine neue sprachliche Heimat gefunden haben, wurden eingesandt. Das Sammelsurium der vielen lustigen, erstaunlichen und verblüffenden Erzählungen, Anekdoten und Berichte ist nun nachzulesen in der begleitenden, gleichnamigen Publikation Ausgewanderte Wörter, erschienen im November 2006 beim Hueber Verlag.

I don't want to schlepp!

Wer in Polen eine Schifffahrt machen will, geht auf die „Rejs“. Ein Bulgare packt für den Urlaub als erstes seinen „Kufar“. Die Engländer hingegen bevorzugen kleines Handgepäck, denn "they don't want to schlepp too much around.“ Seit 1913 mit deutscher Hilfe die türkische Eisenbahn ihren Anfang fand, rufen türkische Zugbegleiter „fertik“, wenn der Zug losfahren soll. In Kamerun heißt dank deutsch-kamerunischer Zusammenarbeit der Bahnhof bis heute „banop“.
„Die Wörter der deutschen Sprache sind im Ausland viel bekannter als wir dachten“, sagt Professor Hoberg. Auch wenn sich die Reiseziele deutscher Wörter quer über den Globus erstrecken: Die meisten Einsendungen stammen aus dem osteuropäischen und englischen Raum. „In beiden Räumen gibt es lange deutsche Traditionen, folglich sprechen dort viele Menschen unsere Sprache“, erläutern Dr. Karin Eichhoff-Cyrius und Dr. Lutz Karnisch von der GfdS.

Erdbeer-Schmier aufs Brot

Wenn in Québec etwas nicht mehr funktioniert oder keinen Spaß mehr macht, ist es „kaputt“. In Tansania ist man bei einer Narkose tatsächlich „nusu kaput“, was soviel wie halb kaputt, bedeutet. Sehr amüsant auch, wie in Afrikaans deutsche Wörter versinnbildlicht werden. Ein ungeduldiger Deutscher ist ein „Aberjetze“. Ein U-Boot hat im Afrikaans den schönen Namen „kanitzeen Boot". Dinge, deren Name uns nicht einfällt, nennen wir Dingsbums, in der polnischen Sprache wird dafür das Wort „wihaister“ benutzt. Ein Mensch, der immer seine Meinung äußert und dabei die Ideen anderer als albern hinstellt, ist in Finnland ein „besservisseri“. Wer in Brasilien Marmelade kaufen möchte, sollte nach „Schmier“ fragen. Genauso überraschte 2004 die Formulierung eines amerikanischen Präsidentschaftskandidaten: In seiner Rede bezeichnete er seinen Herausforderer als zu „wischi-waschi“.

Von Katzenjammer und Brüderschaft

Manche deutsche Wörter scheinen einfach zu überzeugen. So bezeichnet ein „Katzenjammer“ im Englischen eine verzweifelte, depressive Stimmung. Wer in den USA nicht das religiöse „bless you“ nutzen will, sagt einfach „Gesundheit“ zum Nieser des Nachbarn. In Russland lädt man mit dem Wort „Brüderschaft“ (das ü wird als u gesprochen) zu einem aus Freundschaft getrunkenen Glas Wein oder Gläschen Wodka ein.

Doch manche Wörter verlieren beim Weltenbummeln auch ihre ursprüngliche Bedeutung. So ist kaum zu erklären, warum die britische Jugend ausgerechnet das deutsche Wort „uber“ (von über) als Steigerungsform von „super“ oder „mega“ benutzt. Auch das am häufigsten eingesandte Wort der Ausschreibung, das französische „Vasistas“ (Dachfenster, Oberlicht), lässt (noch) viele Fragen offen. „Das Projekt bietet keine linguistische Untersuchung. Manche Wörter, die uns zugesandt worden sind, können auch nur eine Eintagsfliege sein“, erklärt Professor Dr. Hoberg.
Fest steht aber allemal: So viel Spaß wie die ausgewanderten Wörter macht Sprache selten. Im Zuge der Globalisierung, und durch Bücher, Fernsehen und Internet wandert die deutsche Sprache unaufhaltsam und wird ganz sicher immer weitere neue (Stil-)Blüten treiben. Genau wie alle anderen Sprachen auch, denn: Sprachen kennen keine Grenzen, sie packen ihre Koffer und ziehen einfach los. Wir wünschen gute Reise!

Bettina Levecke
ist freie Journalistin.

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Dezember 2006