Arthur Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing, p. 675.

And yet we see things such as this: ing.dk/artikel/135473-intelligens-er-mange-ting-bare-ikke-ven-med-alderen

which is about the study: - Hampshire, A., Highfield, R., Parkin, B., and Owen, A. (2012). ‘Fractionating Human Intelligence Neuron’, 76 (6), 1225-1237, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.06.022

The study even cites SJ Gould as an authority on testing. How retarded is that. I can’t imagine they actually read the Carroll book they cited (1993), because then they should know some more about factor analysis. Groan

Very interesting book!

—-

Game Theorists. The rivalry between Sherlock Holmes and the evil

genius Professor Moriarty illustrates how indeterminacy can arise as a

natural by-product of rational agents second-guessing each other. When

the two first met, Moriarty was eager, too eager, to display his capacity

for interactive thinking by announcing: “All I have to say has already

crossed your mind.” Holmes replied: “Then possibly my answer has

crossed yours.” As the plot unfolds, Holmes uses his superior “interac-

tive knowledge” to outmaneuver Moriarty by unexpectedly getting off

the train at Canterbury, thwarting Moriarty who had calculated that Paris

was Holmes’s rational destination. Convoluted though it is, Moriarty

failed to recognize that Holmes had already recognized that Moriarty

would deduce what a rational Holmes would do under the circum-

stances, and the odds now favored Holmes getting off the train earlier

than once planned.23

Indeterminacy problems of this sort are the bread and butter of behav-

ioral game theory. In the “guess the number” game, for example, con-

testants pick a number between 0 and 100, with the goal of making their

guess come as close as possible to two-thirds of the average guess of all

the contestants.

24 In a world of only rational players—who base their

guesses on the maximum number of levels of deduction—the equilib-

rium is 0. However, in a contest run at Richard Thaler’s prompting by

the Financial Times,

25 the most popular guesses were 33 (the right guess

if everyone else chooses a number at random, producing an average guess

of 50) and 22 (the right guess if everyone thinks through the preceding

argument and picks 33). Dwindling numbers of respondents carried the

deductive logic to the third stage (picking two-thirds of 22) or higher,

with a tiny hypereducated group recognizing the logically correct answer

to be 0. The average guess was 18.91 and the winning guess, 13, which

suggests that, for this newspaper’s readership, a third order of sophisti-

cation was roughly optimal.

interesting

-

Our reluctance to acknowledge unpredictability keeps us looking for

predictive cues well beyond the point of diminishing returns. 39 I witnessed

a demonstration thirty years ago that pitted the predictive abilities of a

classroom of Yale undergraduates against those of a single Norwegian

rat. The task was predicting on which side of a T-maze food would ap-

pear, with appearances determined—unbeknownst to both the humans

and the rat—by a random binomial process (60 percent left and 40 per-

cent right). The demonstration replicated the classic studies by Edwards

and by Estes: the rat went for the more frequently rewarded side (getting

it right roughly 60 percent of the time), whereas the humans looked hard

for patterns and wound up choosing the left or the right side in roughly

the proportion they were rewarded (getting it right roughly 52 percent of

the time). Human performance suffers because we are, deep down, de-

terministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that ac-

cept the inevitability of error. We insist on looking for order in random

sequences. Confronted by the T-maze, we look for subtle patterns like

“food appears in alternating two left/one right sequences, except after

the third cycle when food pops up on the right.” This determination to

ferret out order from chaos has served our species well. We are all bene-

ficiaries of our great collective successes in the pursuit of deterministic reg-

ularities in messy phenomena: agriculture, antibiotics, and countless other

inventions that make our comfortable lives possible. But there are occa-

sions when the refusal to accept the inevitability of error—to acknowledge

that some phenomena are irreducibly probabilistic—can be harmful.

indeed, but generally it is wise to not accept the unpredictability hypothesis about some fenomena. many things that were thought unpredictable for centures turned out to be predictable after all, or at least to some degree. i have confidence we will see the same for earthquakes, weather systems and the like in the future as well.

predictability (and the related determinism) hypothesis are good working hypotheses, even if they turn out to be wrong some times.

this is what i wrote about years ago on my danish blog here. basically, its a 2×2 table:

The above is assuming that indeterminism implies total unpredictability. This isnt true, but in the simplified case where were dealing with completely random fenomena and completely predictable fenomena, this is a reasonable way of looking at it. IMO, it is much better to waste time looking for explanations for things that are not orderly (after all), than risk not spotting real patterns in nature.

Finally, regardless of whether it is rash to abandon the meliorist search

for the Holy Grail of good judgment, most of us feel it is. When we weigh

the perils of Type I errors (seeking correlates of good judgment that will

prove ephemeral) against those of Type II errors (failing to discover

durable correlates with lasting value), it does not feel like a close call. We

would rather risk anointing lucky fools over ignoring wise counsel. Radi-

cal skepticism is too bitter a doctrinal pill for most of us to swallow.

exactly

-

But betting is one thing, paying up another. Focusing just on reactions

to losing reputational bets, figure 4.1 shows that neither hedgehogs nor

foxes changed their minds as much as Reverend Bayes says they should

have. But foxes move more in the Bayesian direction than do hybrids and

hedgehogs. And this greater movement is all the more impressive in light

of the fact that the Bayesian updating formula demanded less movement

from foxes than from other groups. Foxes move 59 percent of the pre-

scribed amount, whereas hedgehogs move only 19 percent of the pre-

scribed amount. Indeed, in two regional forecasting exercises, hedgehogs

move their opinions in the opposite direction to that prescribed by Bayes’s

theorem, and nudged up their confidence in their prior point of view after

the unexpected happens. This latter pattern is not just contra-Bayesian; it

is incompatible with all normative theories of belief adjustment.8

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backfire_effect#Backfire_effect

-

]]> http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?feed=rss2&p=3800 0 http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3791 http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3791#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 01:13:16 +0000 Emil Kirkegaard http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3791 I have/had this conversation on OKCupid. It seemed shareworthy. I’m red, and the other person is blue.

–

-

-

-

There is already social stratification because of better genes among different groups. Indeed, this is the topic of The Bell Curve. :)

Of course, in the beginning this technology will be for the rich people, who will by that have even smarter+healthier children than they already have. The same is true for better schools. But such biotech falls quickly in price (say, logarithmic speeds cf. price of genome sequencing) and will soon benefit large parts of society, in the sense that people can have smarter and more healthy kids. But even when only the rich will get it, this will also benefit the rest, since society as a whole benefits from having smarter+more healthy people (to begin with, it will give society a larger pool of potential leaders).

In practice, one would start by expanding the battle against hereditary diseases for the simple reason that these are the easiest to find the genes for. For instance, screening for certain diseases during pregnancy is already widely practiced, e.g. Down’s syndrome. In Denmark 99% of women who are diagnosed as being pregnant with a Down’s syndrome fetus abort it. This has dramatically lowered the number of Down’s syndrome people in Denmark, thus saving parents from the hassle, and saving society (=everybody) from the economic disadvantage such a person is/would be.

We already know of many such genes for diseases/disease risks, while we don’t know of a single well-confirmed case for intelligence. We will find them in the next few decades. The reason they are hard to find is that there are probably 1000s of genes that affect intelligence, but a single gene has only a tiny effect (positive or negative), say 0.5 IQ. This means that one needs a huge sample to spot them from statistical noise (i.e. high powered studies).

Of course, USA is really fucked up in the relative wealth department. :) I particularly liked this video about that problem: www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oOwjN9qV2ls

-Emil :)

-

I’m curious about your interpretation of “better genes” and exactly in what way they contribute to one’s social standing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but your perspective sounds a bit deterministic if you’re convinced that the dominant influence on where you end up in the hierarchy is genetics, especially if your interpretation of “better genes” is centered around IQ (considering IQs in the very highest ranges are actually negatively correlated with success). It also sounds like you don’t believe environmental factors make much of a dent overall, am I correct?

Tangent: it seems you’re pretty focused on meritocracy, and while that’s a noble sentiment and a nice idea (like Marxist communism), it unfortunately doesn’t exist in the wild (also like Marxist communism). It’s been my observation that under the facade of well-meaning plans, every large community, social structure, organization, etc. is essentially based on a Hollywood mentality: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I’m not arrogant enough to assume that my own experience is representative of the entire range of experiences, but I have yet to find a self-proclaimed “meritocracy” that truly *was* that.

But back on the topic of social stratification, assuming we were able to influence the leadership potential of a given group, is it not true that when an individual or group acquires power they are unlikely to give that power up voluntarily? And will, generally speaking, restrict the ability of other individuals or groups to attain power as well?

And yes, the USA is fucked up in a lot of areas, but wealth is a pretty big one. Also, sorry if I seem a bit contentious, devil’s advocacy is just a beloved pastime of mine. And the better informed your conversation partner, the more fun it tends to be. I don’t need attribution, but if the anonymity was bothering you, my name’s ****** :)

-

It is a pretty interesting book especially becus it covers some areas of science not usually covered in popsci (geology, meteorology), and i learned a lot. it is also clearly written and easy to read, which speeds up reading speeds, making the 450ish pages rather quickly to devour. From a learning perspectiv this is awesome as it allows for faster learning. it shud also be mentioned that it has a lot of very useful illustrations which i shared on my social networks while reading it.

—

“Fortunately, Dustin is really cocky, because if he was the kind of person

who was intimidated—if he had listened to those people—it would have ruined

him. He didn’t listen to people. He continued to dig in and swing from his heels

and eventually things turned around for him.”

Pedroia has what John Sanders calls a “major league memory”—which is to

say a short one. He isn’t troubled by a slump, because he is damned sure that

he’s playing the game the right way, and in the long run, that’s what matters.

Indeed, he has very little tolerance for anything that distracts him from doing

his job. This doesn’t make him the most generous human being, but it is ex­

actly what he needs in order to play second base for the Boston Red Sox, and

that’s the only thing that Pedroia cares about.

“Our weaknesses and our strengths are always very intimately connected,”

James said. “Pedroia made strengths out of things that would be weaknesses for

other players.”

This sounds like low agreeableness to me. I wonder if Big Five can predict baseball success?

-

The statistical reality of accuracy isn’t necessarily the governing paradigm

when it comes to commercial weather forecasting. It’s more the perception of

accuracy that adds value in the eyes of the consumer.

For instance, the for-profit weather forecasters rarely predict exactly a

50 percent chance of rain, which might seem wishy-washy and indecisive to

consumers.41 Instead, they’ll flip a coin and round up to 60, or down to 40, even

though this makes the forecasts both less accurate and less honest.42

Floehr also uncovered a more flagrant example of fudging the numbers,

something that may be the worst-kept secret in the weather industry. Most com­

mercial weather forecasts are biased, and probably deliberately so. In particu­

lar, they are biased toward forecasting more precipitation than will actually

occur43—what meteorologists call a “wet bias.” The further you get from the

government’s original data, and the more consumer facing the forecasts, the

worse this bias becomes. Forecasts “add value” by subtracting accuracy.

thats interesting. never heard of this.

-

This logic is a little circular. TV weathermen say they aren’t bothering to

make accurate forecasts because they figure the public won’t believe them any­

way. But the public shouldn t believe them, because the forecasts aren’t accurate.

This becomes a more serious problem when there is something urgent—

something like Hurricane Katrina. Lots of Americans get their weather infor­

mation from local sources49 rather than directly from the Hurricane Center, so

they will still be relying on the goofball on Channel 7 to provide them with

accurate information. If there is a mutual distrust between the weather fore­

caster and the public, the public may not listen when they need to most.

Nicely illustrating for importance of honesty in reporting data, even on local TV.

-

In fact, the actual value for GDP fell outside the economists’ prediction

interval six times in eighteen years, or fully one-third of the time. Another

study,18 which ran these numbers back to the beginnings of the Survey of Pro­

fessional Forecasters in 1968, found even worse results: the actual figure for

GDP fell outside the prediction interval almost h a l f the time. There is almost

no chance19 that the economists have simply been unlucky; they fundamentally

overstate the reliability of their predictions.

In reality, when a group of economists give you their GDP forecast, the

true 90 percent prediction interval—based on how these forecasts have actually

performed20 and not on how accurate the economists claim them to be—spans

about 6.4 points of GDP (equivalent to a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2

percent).*

When you hear on the news that GDP will grow by 2.5 percent next year,

that means it could quite easily grow at a spectacular rate of 5.7 percent instead.

Or it could fall by 0.7 percent—a fairly serious recession. Economists haven’t

been able to do any better than that, and there isn’t much evidence that their

forecasts are improving. The old joke about economists’ having called nine out

of the last six recessions correctly has some truth to it; one actual statistic is that

in the 1990s, economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world

a year ahead of time.21

and this is why we cant have nice things, i mean macroeconomics

-

I have no idea whether I was really a good player at the very outset. But the

bar set by the competition was low, and my statistical background gave me an

advantage. Poker is sometimes perceived to be a highly psychological game, a

battle of wills in which opponents seek to make perfect reads on one another by

staring into one another’s souls, looking for “tells” that reliably betray the con­

tents of the other hands. There is a little bit of this in poker, especially at the

higher limits, but not nearly as much as you’d think. (The psychological factors

in poker come mostly in the form of self-discipline.) Instead, poker is an incred­

ibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid

uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.

The obvious idea is to program computers to play poker for u online. If they play against bad humans, they shud bring in a steady flow of cash for almost free.

-

“Fortunately, Dustin is really cocky, because if he was the kind of person

who was intimidated—if he had listened to those people—it would have ruined

him. He didn’t listen to people. He continued to dig in and swing from his heels

and eventually things turned around for him.”

Pedroia has what John Sanders calls a “major league memory”—which is to

say a short one. He isn’t troubled by a slump, because he is damned sure that

he’s playing the game the right way, and in the long run, that’s what matters.

Indeed, he has very little tolerance for anything that distracts him from doing

his job. This doesn’t make him the most generous human being, but it is ex­

actly what he needs in order to play second base for the Boston Red Sox, and

that’s the only thing that Pedroia cares about.

“Our weaknesses and our strengths are always very intimately connected,”

James said. “Pedroia made strengths out of things that would be weaknesses for

other players.”

This sounds like low agreeableness to me. I wonder if Big Five can predict baseball success?

-

The statistical reality of accuracy isn’t necessarily the governing paradigm

when it comes to commercial weather forecasting. It’s more the perception of

accuracy that adds value in the eyes of the consumer.

For instance, the for-profit weather forecasters rarely predict exactly a

50 percent chance of rain, which might seem wishy-washy and indecisive to

consumers.41 Instead, they’ll flip a coin and round up to 60, or down to 40, even

though this makes the forecasts both less accurate and less honest.42

Floehr also uncovered a more flagrant example of fudging the numbers,

something that may be the worst-kept secret in the weather industry. Most com­

mercial weather forecasts are biased, and probably deliberately so. In particu­

lar, they are biased toward forecasting more precipitation than will actually

occur43—what meteorologists call a “wet bias.” The further you get from the

government’s original data, and the more consumer facing the forecasts, the

worse this bias becomes. Forecasts “add value” by subtracting accuracy.

thats interesting. never heard of this.

-

This logic is a little circular. TV weathermen say they aren’t bothering to

make accurate forecasts because they figure the public won’t believe them any­

way. But the public shouldn t believe them, because the forecasts aren’t accurate.

This becomes a more serious problem when there is something urgent—

something like Hurricane Katrina. Lots of Americans get their weather infor­

mation from local sources49 rather than directly from the Hurricane Center, so

they will still be relying on the goofball on Channel 7 to provide them with

accurate information. If there is a mutual distrust between the weather fore­

caster and the public, the public may not listen when they need to most.

Nicely illustrating for importance of honesty in reporting data, even on local TV.

-

In fact, the actual value for GDP fell outside the economists’ prediction

interval six times in eighteen years, or fully one-third of the time. Another

study,18 which ran these numbers back to the beginnings of the Survey of Pro­

fessional Forecasters in 1968, found even worse results: the actual figure for

GDP fell outside the prediction interval almost h a l f the time. There is almost

no chance19 that the economists have simply been unlucky; they fundamentally

overstate the reliability of their predictions.

In reality, when a group of economists give you their GDP forecast, the

true 90 percent prediction interval—based on how these forecasts have actually

performed20 and not on how accurate the economists claim them to be—spans

about 6.4 points of GDP (equivalent to a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2

percent).*

When you hear on the news that GDP will grow by 2.5 percent next year,

that means it could quite easily grow at a spectacular rate of 5.7 percent instead.

Or it could fall by 0.7 percent—a fairly serious recession. Economists haven’t

been able to do any better than that, and there isn’t much evidence that their

forecasts are improving. The old joke about economists’ having called nine out

of the last six recessions correctly has some truth to it; one actual statistic is that

in the 1990s, economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world

a year ahead of time.21

and this is why we cant have nice things, i mean macroeconomics

-

I have no idea whether I was really a good player at the very outset. But the

bar set by the competition was low, and my statistical background gave me an

advantage. Poker is sometimes perceived to be a highly psychological game, a

battle of wills in which opponents seek to make perfect reads on one another by

staring into one another’s souls, looking for “tells” that reliably betray the con­

tents of the other hands. There is a little bit of this in poker, especially at the

higher limits, but not nearly as much as you’d think. (The psychological factors

in poker come mostly in the form of self-discipline.) Instead, poker is an incred­

ibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid

uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.

The obvious idea is to program computers to play poker for u online. If they play against bad humans, they shud bring in a steady flow of cash for almost free.

-

]]> http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?feed=rss2&p=3786 0 http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3781 http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3781#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:48:41 +0000 Emil Kirkegaard http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3781 I recently got interested in a new field en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology

Cognitive epidemiology is a field of research that examines the associations between intelligence test scores (IQ scores or extracted g-factors) and health, more specifically morbidity (mental and physical) and mortality. Typically, test scores are obtained at an early age, and compared to later morbidity and mortality. In addition to exploring and establishing these associations, cognitive epidemiology seeks to understand causal relationships between intelligence and health outcomes. Researchers in the field argue that intelligence measured at an early age is an important predictor of later health and mortality differences.^[1][2]

-

I decided to scout the academic literature. Here’s some for those also curious.

Special issue of Intelligence, 2009, about cognitive epidemiology.

1. Introduction to the special issue on cognitive epidemiology

2. The association of childhood intelligence with mortality risk from adolescence to middle age Findings from the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s cohor

3. Cognition and incident coronary heart disease in late midlife The Whitehall II study

4. Can we understand why cognitive function predicts mortality Results from the Caerphilly Prospective Study (CaPS)

5. Cognition and survival in a biracial urban population of old people

6. Fluid intelligence is independently associated with all-cause mortality over 17 years in an elderly community sample

7. Reaction time and established risk factors for total and cardiovascular disease mortality

8. IQ in childhood and the metabolic syndrome in middle age Extended follow-up of the 1946 British Birth Cohort Study

9. The association between IQ in adolescence and a range of health outcomes at 40 in the 1979 US National Longitudinal Study of Youth

10. Does a fitness factor contribute to the association between intelligence and health outcomes

11. Intelligence in childhood and risk of psychological distress in adulthood The 1958 National Child Development Survey and the 1970 British Cohort S

12. Level of cognitive performance as a correlate and predictor of health behaviors that protect against cognitive decline in late life The path through life study

13. Intelligence and persisting with medication for two years Analysis in a randomised controlled trial

14. How intelligence and education contribute to substance use Hints from the Minnesota Twin family study

15. Cognitive epidemiology With emphasis on untangling cognitive ability and socioeconomic status

—

Some other papers that i found:

Why is intelligence correlated with semen quality Biochemical pathways common to sperm and neuron function and their vulnerability to pleiotropic mutations

Why do intelligent people live longer

The relationships between cognitive ability and dental status in a national sample of USA adults

Rare Copy Number Deletions Predict Individual Variation in Intelligence

Looking for ‘System Integrity’ in Cognitive Epidemiology

Intelligence and semen quality are positively correlated

Intelligence Is It the Epidemiologists’ Elusive Fundamental Cause of Social Class Inequalities in Health

Does IQ explain socioeconomic inequalities in health Evidence from a population based cohort study in the west of Scotland

Cognitive epidemiology J Epidemiol Community Health-2007-Deary-378-84

Bonaparte” : “Men make their own history, but they do not make it

just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by

themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and trans­

mitted from the past” (Marx 1978[1852]:595). In place o f the word

“history” in this remark, one could easily substitute “ language,” “soci­

ety,” or “ culture,” and the statement would remain equally insightful.

At the core o f what is known as “practice theory” is this seeming

paradox: that language, culture, and society all apparently have a pre­

existing reality but at the same time are very much the products ot

individual humans’ words and actions.12 Many linguistic anthropolo­

gists explicitly or implicitly draw upon practice theory in their work.

Correct. Equally insightless.

-

In sum, as important as the interview is as a research method, it is

often mistakenly assumed to provide a simple, straightforward path

toward “ the facts” or “the truth.” Interviews can indeed provide rich

insights, but they must be appreciated as the complex, culturally

mediated social interactions that they are.

I cringe every time I read ”the truth” and ”the facts”. Social constructivism -_-

-

A researcher interested in language ideologies might conduct a

matched guise test, a process that involves recording individuals as

they read a short passage in two or more languages or dialects

(“guises”). In other words, if four people are recorded, eight (or more)

readings o f the same passage might be produced. For example, a

researcher interested in whether listeners judge people who speak

African American English differently from those who speak standard

American English might choose four individuals who can code-switch

fluently between these two ways o f speaking. Each o f these four

individuals would record two readings o f the same passage, one in

African American English, the other in standard American English.

These eight readings would then be shuffled up and played back to

other people who do not know that there were only four readers

instead o f eight. The listeners would be asked to rank each o f the eight

readings, rating each according to how honest, intelligent, sophisti­

cated, likable, and so on, they thought the reader was. By comparing

the scores listeners give to the same speaker reading in African

American English vs. standard American English, it is possible to hold

a person’s other voice qualities constant and thereby determine how

much influence simply speaking one or the other o f these language

variants has on listeners’ attitudes toward the speaker. In other words,

matched guise tests can provide a measure o f people’s unconscious

language ideologies – which can be related to racial prejudices.6

It is telling that the author uses ”prejudices” instead of, say, ”beliefs”. Since it is well known that american blacks ARE less intelligent, and that there is a certain dialect used mostly by black americans, this the usage of this dialect can hence be used as a diagnostic tool for identifying american blacks. This in turn makes it a useful proxy for low intelligence (white american standards). Indeed, not using the information for that purpose if one knows about these correlations, would be to ignore relevant data.

-

The message to scholars interested in language acquisition, therefore, is

that they should consider cultural values and social practices to be

inseparable from language and its acquisition (Slobin 1992:6). And the

message to cultural anthropologists and other social scientists interested

in processes o f childhood social practices, education, apprenticeship, or

other ways o f learning or entering into new social groups is that they

should look closely at linguistic practices. In other words, learning a first

language and becoming a culturally competent member o f a society are

two facets ot a single process. It is virtually impossible for a child to learn

a language without also becoming socialized into a particular cultural

group, and, conversely, a child cannot become a competent member o f

such a group without mastering the appropriate linguistic practices.

What about learning foreign languages? Especially dead foreign languages. Or constructed languages? Does one become a member of the nonexistent Klingon soceity if one learns that as a child? They must have some other way of thinking about this, if these obvious counter-examples do not work.

-

Franz Boas (1858-1942) is often considered the father o f anthropology

in the United States. An important part o f Boas’s research agenda

involved disproving racist assertions about the existence o f so-called

“primitive” languages, races, and cultures. At the turn o f the twentieth

century, when Boas was writing, some scholars were arguing that

people in certain societies were incapable o f complex, abstract, “scien­

tific” thought because o f the seeming lack o f “logical” grammatical

categories in their languages. Boas, who was keen on demonstrating

the essential equality and humanity o f all people despite their tremen­

dous linguistic and cultural diversity, disputed this interpretation,

proposing instead that all linguistic and cultural practices were equally

complex and logical. The particular language spoken by a group o f

people merely tended to reflect their habitual cultural practices, Boas

maintained. Language might facilitate certain types o f thinking and

could provide a valuable way o f understanding unconscious patterns

o f culture and thought, Boas declared, but it would not prevent people

from thinking in a way that differed from the categories presented

most conveniently in their language.

I found it difficult to believe that there is nothing to this general idea. I expect there to be some correlations between population IQ and their language. And just trivial things like that indo-european and chinese languages are associated with high IQ. Something like that high IQ is associated with some measure of the advancedness of the language in question. But perhaps it’s not true. In any case, I don’t presume to know to begin with and am willing to look at the data. Apparently, this wasn’t true for Boas.

-

Another possible way o f researching the influence o f language-in-

general on thought is studying children who have not yet learned a

language. Clearly, it would be highly unethical to deprive a child o f

access to a language; furthermore, studies o f abused children who have

not been exposed to any language involve so many complicating fac­

tors that the causes o f cognitive differences are impossible to ascertain.

Researchers interested in the effects o f language-in-general on human

thought have therefore turned to subjects such as very young, prelin-

guistic infants, or deaf children who are raised in normal circum­

stances but who have been deprived o f early exposure to language

because they have hearing parents who do not use sign language. In

the case o f infants, as noted in chapter 3, the language socialization

process begins from day one (if not before), so it is impossible to study

a truly “prelinguistic” infant. [...]

It does begin before, at least, so claims this TED talk I saw a while back. www.ted.com/talks/annie_murphy_paul_what_we_learn_before_we_re_born.html

-

Much research remains to be conducted before a definitive under­

standing of the potential effects o f language-in-general on various

dimensions o f thought can be obtained. It may even turn out to be the

case that there is no such general effect, since no one actually learns

“language-in-general” but instead learns one (or more) particular lan­

guage. In this regard, additional research is needed to explore the timing

of theory o f mind development in children who speak languages other

than English. There are some studies o f Baka- and Japanese-speaking

children, among others, indicating that they are able to pass the stand­

ard false-belief tasks at the same age as English-speaking children, but

other children, such as those who speak Junin Quechua, seem not to

be able to pass the classic false-belief tasks until much later, perhaps

because o f the specific grammatical structures o f Junin Quechua or a

very different cultural context (Villiers and Villiers 2003:372—373).

Many linguistic anthropologists question whether standard experi­

ments devised in the United States can be exported, either in their

original form or in “culturally appropriate” versions, to be used with

children (or even adults) from very different linguistic and cultural

backgrounds. At the very least, what little research there is o f this sort

must be closely scrutinized for cultural and linguistic bias.

Knowing that the japanese are similar to whites in intelligence, and not knowing the intelligence of the people speaking the mentioned language, this immediately gives one the idea that it might be an intelligence thing. The crucial test for that is whether false-belief tests correlate with intelligence.

Nothing useful on Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-belief_task#False-belief_task

Did a brief search on GScholar, with terms: false-belief task, IQ. Result? IQ does predict better scores on false-belief tests. Cites:

• Hughes, Claire, et al. “Good test‐retest reliability for standard and advanced false‐belief tasks across a wide range of abilities.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 41.4 (2000): 483-490.
• Brüne, Martin. “Theory of mind and the role of IQ in chronic disorganized schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia Research 60.1 (2003): 57-64.
• Happé, Francesca GE. “Wechsler IQ profile and theory of mind in autism: a research note.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 35.8 (1994): 1461-1471.

The group seems to be this one: www.ethnologue.com/language/QVN

Lynn lists Peru’s population IQ at 90. So, this explanation might fit. Or it might not. Difficult to say about some specific subgroup of that population. Presumably, the indegenious peoples have lower IQ due to lesser admixture of white genes.

-

Think o f all the taken-for-granted ways in which reading and writing

saturate our daily lives. Even if we put aside schooling, the most obvi­

ous realm in which literacy plays a central role, an average day in the

life o f a person living in the United States or any number o f other

countries in the twenty-first century will most likely involve more

interactions with written texts than can be counted. “ [M]ost social

interactions in contemporary society,” David Barton and Mary

Hamilton proclaim, “ are textually mediated” (Barton and Hamilton

2005:14). From cereal boxes, billboards, and newspapers to the inter­

net and words written on clothing, many people engage more fre­

quently with the written word than they realize. And even when

people are alone while reading and writing, they are engaged in social

activities because reading and writing are enacted and interpreted in

culturally and socially specific ways. Moreover, these activities are also

bound up with social differences and inequalities. Patricia Baquedano-

Lopez writes: “Literacy is less a set o f acquired skills and more an

activity that affords the acquisition and negotiation o f new ways o f

thinking and acting in the world” (2004:246). And since the social

world is not composed o f neutral, power-free interactions, Janies Gee

notes that we should therefore not expect this to be true o f literacy

practices: “The traditional meaning of the word ‘literacy’— the ‘ability

to read and write ’ — appears ‘innocent’ and ‘obvious.’ But, it is no such

thing. Literacy as ‘the ability to read and write ’ situates literacy in the

individual person, rather than in society. As such, it obscures the

multiple ways in which literacy interrelates with the workings of

power” (Gee 2008:31).

Garbage like this is found consistently throughout the book.

-

Junigau women’s literacy practices did not just facilitate a shift away

from arranged marriage toward elopement, therefore, but also reflected

and helped to shape the new ways in which villagers thought o f

themselves. Along with these changes, however, came some rein­

forcement o f pre-existing norms, especially in the area o f gender rela­

tions. While it might seem to readers used to having the right to

choose their own spouse that acquiring such a right would inevitably

improve someone’s life, in fact, the opposite was true for some Junigau

women who eloped after love-letter correspondences. In cases where

their husbands or in-laws turned out to be abusive, the women found

that they had no recourse and no support from their own parents.

If they had encountered these kinds o f problems after an arranged

marriage, most could have returned to their parents’home or expected

their parents to intervene on their behalf. Such was not the case tor

most women who had eloped. Indeed, because most o f these women

ended up moving into their husbands’ extended households as low-

status daughters-in-law, their social positioning and daily lives were

virtually identical to those o f women whose marriages had been

arranged – except that they did not have the same recourse if things

went poorly In some respects, therefore, the women’s new literacy

practices created new and different opportunities and identities, but in

other respects, long-standing gender inequalities remained or were

even exacerbated.

Interesting, even if sad.

-

An alternative source o f theoretical illumination for literacy

researchers, according to James Collins and Richard Blot (2003), is

French post-structuralist thought. Pierre Bourdieu,Michel de Certeau,

Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault all provide important analyses

o f the workings o f power in society in ways that are especially apt for

scholars interested in studying reading and writing. Drawing on these

theorists, Collins and Blot attempt to provide something they argue

has been lacking in NLS: “ an account o f power-in-literacy which

captures the intricate ways in which power, knowledge, and forms o f

subjectivity are interconnected with ‘uses o f literacy’ in modern

national, colonial, and postcolonial settings” (2003:66). Lewis et al.

(2007) draw upon some o f these post-structuralist theorists as well as

others to create a “ critical sociocultural theory” by focusing on con­

cepts such as. “activity,’’“history” and “communities o f practice,” which

they claim help literacy scholars to incorporate a better understanding

o f identity, agency, and power into their research.

Oh no. Not more of this garbage.

-

The challenge o f identifying the many possible interpretations and

emergent possibilities o f any given performance – or, indeed, any

social interaction — has been a central issue in some o f my own

research. In particular, I became intrigued by a specific woman’s festival

in Nepal known asTij. From my first experiences o f the yearly festival

in the early 1980s when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Nepali

village ot Junigau through my subsequent stints o f research there once

I became an anthropologist,Tij has always been o f interest.The festival

is based on Hindu rituals for married women that require them to

pray for the long lives o f their husbands (and even pray that they die

before their husbands). The rituals also require women to atone for

having possibly caused men to become ritually polluted by touching

them while the women were menstruating or recovering from child­

birth. In Junigau, however, the celebration ofTij goes far beyond these

rituals, extending weeks in advance and involving feasts for female

relatives and many formal and informal songfests at which women

sing, men play the drums, and both women and men dance, some­

times even together.

wtf

-

Mehl and his colleagues conducted a study of almost 400 college

students – the study mentioned at the outset o f this chapter – in order

to measure gender differences in the average number o f words spoken

over the course o f the research subjects’ waking hours (Mehl et al.

2007).The college students (divided roughly equally between women

and men) were rigged up with digital recorders that were programmed

to record for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes. The students could not

tell when they were being recorded. The researchers then transcribed

all the words spoken by the participants and extrapolated from these

figures to estimate the total number o f words spoken over the course

o f an average day for these individuals. The findings showed that

female college students spoke an average o f 16,215 words per day,

while men spoke an average o f 15,669 words per day – but this dif­

ference was not statistically significant. “Thus,” write Mehl and his

co-authors, “the data fail to reveal a reliable sex difference in daily

word use. Women and men both use on average about 16,000 words

per day, with very large individual differences around this mean . .. We

therefore conclude, on the basis o f available empirical evidence, that

the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talka­

tiveness is unfounded” (Mehl et al. 2007:82).

In the source referenced to just prior to this Language Log is mentioned a study about the talkativeness of the sexes, which found that females used 45% more words.

itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003420.html

I tried to find some more recent studies on Google Scholar, but didn’t find anything useful. Wrong key words?

-

It the realities o f language and gender are really so complex and varied,

however, why are the language ideologies concerning female talka­

tiveness or male verbal competitiveness that can be found in the

vignettes presented by Tannen (1990) and others so recognizable

to us? Cameron (2007b) explains that it happens because o f the

tendency o f all people to rely at least in part on stereotyping when

processing information. It is not just ignorant or prejudiced people

who stereotype, Cameron states, but everyone because stereotyping

provides us with convenient shortcuts in determining what people

are like and how we should treat them.The downside, however, is that

such stereotypes “can reinforce unjust prejudices, and make us prone

to seeing only what we expect or want to see” (Cameron 2007b: 14).

When we see someone who fits our preconceptions – say, a woman

who is extremely talkative, for example – we easily “supply the cultural

script that makes them meaningful a n d ‘typical’” (Cameron 1997:48).

When we encounter someone who does not fit a particular stereo­

type, however, we tend either not to notice or to explain the case

away as an aberration.

Why should we care i f one or more o f our gendered language

ideologies might be inaccurate or at least overly simplistic? There are

many real-world implications o f inaccurate language ideologies — in

the workplace, in family life, in court cases, and in interpersonal

relationships. Women, men, and children all suffer when gendered

assumptions regarding communicative styles and identities are inac­

curate or overly rigid. What the research described in this chapter

clearly demonstrates is that complexity and variability best character­

ize the relationship o f language to gender. We will come to a similar

conclusion in the next chapter after exploring the ways in which

language relates to race and ethnicity.

They are also useful in remembering base rates and making correct judgments. Cf. Jussim, Lee, et al. “10 The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes.” Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (2009): 199.

emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Todd_D._Nelson_Handbook_of_Prejudice_StereotypiBookos.org_.pdf

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Defining Race and Ethnicity

Many misconceptions surround the concept of race. Jane Hill, a

well-known linguistic anthropologist and the former President o f

the American Anthropological Association, maintains that most

white Americans share a largely inaccurate “ folk th eo ry ” ot race and

racism, one o f the main components o f which is a belief in “race” as

a basic category o f human biological variation, combined with a

belief that each human being can be assigned to a race, or some­

times to a mixture o f races (Hill 2008:6—7). Hill argues that this folk

theory is widespread and taken for granted – but mistaken in most

respects, according to the vast majority o f anthropologists and other

social scientists. Indeed, the official statement on race o f the

American Anthropological Association begins with these two

paragraphs:1

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been

conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions

within the human species based on visible physical differences.

With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century,

however, it has become clear that human populations are not unam­

biguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence

from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical

variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional

geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about

6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within

“racial” groups than between them. In neighboring populations

there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical)

expressions.Throughout history whenever different groups have come

into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic

materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather

than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are

inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one

trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color

varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in

the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape

or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair

or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different

indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt

to establish lines of division among biological populations both

arbitrary and subjective.

As definitive as the AAA’s statement is about the lack o f a consistent

biological basis for the concept o f race, it should not be read as argu­

ing that race does not exist. Race is clearly an important social cate­

gory that influences people’s life trajectories and identities. Many

scholars in fact view it as a, or even the, central organizing principle

in the United States. But the social fact o f race does not support the

folk theory described by Hill above.2 Reflect for a moment upon

the following paradox: because o f the so-called “one-drop rule,” a

white woman in the United States can give birth to a black child, but

a black woman cannot give birth to white child. Such reflection

should lead to an appreciation for the social foundations o f the con­

cept o f race (Ignatiev 1995:1).

This one was bound to happen. The usual socialconstructivism.

I refer to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin%27s_Fallacy

Edwards, Anthony WF. “Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy.” BioEssays 25.8 (2003): 798-801.

emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/A.W.F.-Edwards-Human-genetic-diversity-Lewontin’s-fallacy.pdf

As usual, these socialconstructivists attack strawman accounts of race. Who believes in an essentialist, clearly separate account of human races? No one. It’s biology, clear bounderies are a rarefind. :)

-

At one point in the history o f the United States, for example, many

groups now unquestioningly considered “w h i te ” were initially not

included in this privileged category.3 Benjamin Franklin, for example,

wrote in the eighteenth century that Swedes and Germans were

“swarthy,” and he did not include them among the “white people,”

who consisted, according to Franklin, solely o f the English and the

Saxons. “This example,” Jane Hill comments, “shows how what seem

to us today like fundamental perceptions may be o f very recent his­

torical origin . .. Contemporary White Americans can no longer see

‘swarthiness’ among Swedes, and find it astonishing that anyone ever

did so” (Hill 2008:14).

Never heard of this one. But it seems true. www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2008/02/ben-franklin-on.html

24. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely   white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is   black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new   Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians,   French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call   a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only   excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People   on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while   we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing   America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a   brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should   we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of   Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an   Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely   White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for   such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

Good old racism. In reality the Swedes are very white, and the British are partly Swedes due to Viking settlements… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age#England

Gene tests can surely confirm this, if they haven’t already done so.

-

The parameters and nuances o f racial classifications in countries

other than the United States have been studied by anthropologists and

other social scientists for many years. In Brazil, for example, scholarly

debates have focused on the meanings o f multiple Brazilian racial

categories that intersect in complicated ways with class, gender, and

sexuality.4 In Nepal, the country I know best ethnographically, there

is nothing like the black—white binary commonly attributed to the

United States, and until recently, the concept o f “race” was not men­

tioned in public debates at all. Instead, caste, ethnicity, and religion

have been the most salient forms o f social differentiation for Nepalis.

During the 1990s, however, a group o f activists from various Tibeto-

Burman ethnic groups drew upon outdated social science research

from the last century to posit three main races in the world (Hangen

2005, 2009). Susan Hangen, an anthropologist who has conducted

fieldwork on this topic in Nepal, reports that a politician in eastern

Nepal stated the following during one o f his speeches in 1997:

We are a M on go l community, we are n o t a caste either; we are Mongol .

For example, in this world there are three types o f people. O n e is

w h i te w i th w h i te skin like Americans, for example like sister here

[referring to me] . . . T h e o th e r has black skin and is called N e g ro .T h e

o th e r is called the red race like us: sh ort like us; stocky like us; with

small eyes and flat noses like us. (2005:49)

L5y invoking this outdated tripartite racial classification, the politician

was attempting to unite a number o f linguistically and culturally

diverse ethnic groups, such as Rais, Magars, Limbus, Gurungs, and

Sherpas, under the umbrella o f one political party, the Mongol

National Organization (MNO). The hope was that unifying these

disparate but similarly disadvantaged groups would help them oppose

Nepal’s high-caste Hindu ruling groups. One person told Hangen,

“We didn’t know that we were Mongols until the M N O came here”

(2005:49). Hangen’s research is a fascinating example o f the com­

plexities, contradictions, and cross-cultural differences involved in the

concept ot race.

Actually those three are the three superclusters found using modern methods and not a all wrong. They are however less informative than are the lesser clusters, say, the 10 clusters identified by Sforza (1994). Depending on how much data one has, and how much detail one wants, one can find a larger number of clusters, aka. races.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering

-

Bonnie Urciuoli approaches the process o f ethnicization differently

in her research on Puerto Ricans in New York City, contrasting

ethnicization with racialization and situating both within the context

of class and gender identities in the United States. According to

Urciuoli (1996), racial discourses “frame group origin in natural

terms.” Ethnic discourses, in contrast, “frame group origin in cultural

terms” (1996:15). Racialized people, Urciuoli writes, are considered

out of place; they are dirty, dangerous, and unwilling or unable to

participate constructively in the nation-state. In contrast, the cultural

differences said to be characteristic o f ethnicized people are consid­

ered safe, ordered, and “ a contribution to the nation-state offered by

striving immigrants making their way up the ladder o f class mobility”

(1996:16). Within this landscape o f social inequality and exclusion,

Urciuoli states that language differences are often racialized.That is, an

inability to speak English, or an inability to speak English “without an

accent” (cf. Lippi-Green 1997), marks someone as disorderly and

unlikely to experience social mobility – as someone, in other words,

who does not fully belong in the United States.

But the asians are doing just fine and speak with an accent. Likewise with other high IQ immigrants.

-

Some people argue that using two negatives is “illogical” because

two negatives is a positive according to formal logic or mathematical

principles. But if this were so, then the use o f three negatives, as in the

sentence, “ I can’t get n o th in ’ from nobody,” would go back to being

a negative and would no longer “violate” these principles. Clearly,

this sentence would be as objectionable as ones with only two nega­

tives to the prescriptivists who want to impose the grammatical rules

o f one dialect o f English (the standard one) on all other dialects.

While there may be many good reasons for preferring standard

English over other dialects o f English in certain instances, neverthe­

less, as Labov (1972a) famously demonstrated decades ago in his

classic article, “The Logic o f Nonstandard English,” logic and gram-

maticality are not among them. The preference o f one dialect over

another is one based on social, political, or economic factors – it

cannot be based on linguistic factors because all dialects are equally

logical and grammatical.

Nonsense. Some languages are more logical than others. The obvious case being lojban which is directly translateable to predicate logic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

In any case, the author seems to have no good understanding of formal logic, as she uses confusing simplistic terms. The sentence she uses as an example: I can’t get nothin’ from nobody.

I can’t get nothing from nobody.

I can get something from nobody.

I can’t get anything from anybody.

These are all equivalent in standard predicate logic.

¬(∃x)¬(∃y)¬CanGetFrom(I, x, y)

substitute ¬(∃x) for (∀x)¬

(∀x)¬¬(∃y)¬CanGetFrom(I, x, y)

Double negation elimination

(∀x)(∃y)¬CanGetFrom(I, x, y)

For any x, there is an y such that it is not the case that I can get x from y.

In other words, for every person, there is something I can’t get. I can’t get anything from anybody.

That’s using the internal negation interpretation. Using external negation, the situation is easier, and that is left for the reader as an exercise in logic. :)

-

Turning to the second question about how or whether AAE should

be used in schools to facilitate the acquisition among AAE-speaking

students o f the standard dialect o f English, it is important to note the

serious educational crisis that the Oakland Board o f Education was

trying to address (however ineffectively or controversially) in its

December 1996 resolution. As John Rickford (2005) reminds us, the

Oakland school district was not alone in experiencing extremely high

rates o f failure and drop-out among its African American population.

O th e r school districts throughout the United States faced similar

disparities in school performance at the time – and still do today.

The question remains how to address these educational disparities.

Although this issue is far beyond the scope o f this book, involving as

it does complex issues o f poverty, racial discrimination, and residential

segregation, among other possible contributing factors, the extent to

which speaking a nonstandard, stigmatized linguistic variant such as

AAE contributes to school problems deserves to be studied further

(cf. Labov 2010; Rickford 2005).

It is called intelligence.

-

Aside from the obvious racist slurs, what constitutes racist language?

Jane Hill (2008) argues that the language ideologies that are dominant

in the United States, combined with a widespread American folk

theory o f race, combine to ensure that the everyday talk produced by

average white, middle-class Americans and distributed in respected

media “ continues to produce and reproduce Whi te racism” (2008:47).

Far from being an element o f the past. Hill maintains, racism “is a vital

and formative presence in American lives, resulting in h ur t and pain

to individuals, to glaring injustice, in the grossly unequal distribution

o f resources along racially stratified lines, and in strange and damaging

errors and omissions in public policy both domestic and foreign”

(2008:47-48). And this racism, Hill suggests, is largely produced in

and through everyday talk – not through the obvious racist slurs that

most people today condemn (though these o f course contribute), but

through unintentional, indirect uses ot language that reinforce racist

stereotypes.

Ah, the racism theory of blacks problems. Obviously doesn’t work due to the fact that blacks in African countries perform likewise badly. And they have done so for the last 100 years, so far back as we have data.

Cf. Jensen’s discussion in The g Factor. emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-g-factor-the-science-of-mental-ability-Arthur-R.-Jensen.pdf

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In a similar set o f experiments, Rubin (1992) and Rubin and Smith

(1990) conducted matched guise tests with undergraduates (Hill

2008:12). All their research participants heard the same four-minute

tape-recorded lecture featuring a woman who was a native speaker ot

English, but half o f the students were shown a slide o f a white woman

while they listened to the lecture and were told that this was the

speaker, while the other half were shown a slide o f an East Asian

woman. The students in the latter group tended to report that the

speaker had a foreign accent, and they even did significantly worse on

a comprehension quiz on the material in the lecture — even though

these students had heard exactly the same lecture as the students who

were shown the photo o f a white woman while they listened to the

lecture! Clearly, racial categories and racialized language ideologies can

influence perceptions even without our being aware o f the process.

That sounds interesting. Inb4 small sample size and publication bias.

The cites are:

Rubin, D.L. (1992) Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education 33:51 1—53 I .

Rubin, D.L. and Smith, K.A. (1990) Effects of accent, ethnicity, and lecture

topic onundergraduates’ perceptions of non-native English-speaking teaching assistants. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 14:

337-353.

I looked into the newest one, from 1992. It had a sample size of 62 (with apparently, self-selection before that). And it reported non-significant results for the things the author of the book claims. Color me not impressed, although interesting study. The results did tend to go in the direction the author claims, but they had a huge variance.

emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Nonlanguage-factors-affecting-undergraduates’-judgments-of-nonnative-English-speaking-teaching-assistants..pdf

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What are the problematic assumptions underlying the desire to

count the number ot endangered languages, and the number o f speak­

ers each endangered language has? Jane Hill (2002:127-128;

cf. Duchene and Heller 2007) names several. First, although she

acknowledges that numbers can be powerful “ calls to action” that have

been used to mobilize activists to reverse the trend toward language

death, and although Hill herselt has been involved in such efforts, she

warns that journalists and the mass media are soundbite oriented and

cannot or will not devote enough time or space to explaining the dif­

ficulties or subtleties involved in quantifying languages or speakers.

Second, Hill warns that numbers and statistics that are meant for one

kind of audience — speakers of dominant languages, perhaps, who have

the power to do something about the extinction o f smaller languages

— can have very negative effects when heard by a very different kind o f

audience – the speakers o f endangered languages themselves. Hill

reminds her readers that numbers have often been used by colonial

powers in the past as one means o f control, what Foucault would call

governmentality through enumeration. Speakers o f endangered lan­

guages are often fearful, she warns, that numbers can be (and have been)

held against them, and they can therefore become fearful or resentful.

wat

-

K. David Harrison, another linguist who works on endangered lan­

guages all over the world, lists three areas o f loss if we fail to safeguard

and document languages at risk o f extinction: (1) the erosion o f

the human knowledge base, especially local ecological knowledge;

(2) the loss o f cultural heritage; and (3) failure to acquire a full under­

standing o f human cognitive capacities (2007:15-19). With regard to

the first area o f loss, Harrison notes that an estimated 87 percent o f

the world’s plants and animals have not yet been identified or studied

by modern scientists. If we are to hope that a cure to cancer or other

horrible diseases might be found in the Amazon, or in Papua New

Guinea, or it we want to learn about more sustainable forms o f agri­

culture from people who have been living in harmony in their envi­

ronments for many hundreds o f years, then we should recognize,

Harrison writes, that “most o f what humankind knows about the

natural world lies completely outside o f science textbooks, libraries,

and databases, existing only in unwri tten languages in people’s

memories” — that is, mostly in unwri tten endangered languages

(2007:15). O f course, some o f this knowledge can be communicated

in a different language, assuming the person speaking the endangered

language is bilingual, but oftentimes there is a “massive disruption o f

the transfer o f traditional knowledge across generations” when a

group switches from an endangered language to a dominant language

(2007:16). Particular languages are often especially rich in certain

areas o f the lexicon, such as reindeer herding, botany, or fishing, that

are the most important to the speakers o f those languages, and a great

deal o f ecologically specific knowledge is encoded in that language

that goes along with those particular cultural practices. It is not sur­

prising, then, that much o f that knowledge is not passed on when the

language (and often the way o f life as well) dies.

I thought the point about loss of local knowledge was good. Although this is only relevant for useful local knowledge. Map knowledge, not useful. We have satelites. Properties of local plants. Might be very useful for medicine.

-

The third area o f loss Elarrison identifies is the ability to acquire a

full understanding o f the capabilities o f the human mind. Linguists

and cognitive scientists make assumptions about what the human

brain can and cannot do based on experiments and existing data. One

source o f such data is the group o f languages that have been studied

by linguists. Whenever a language is analyzed for the first time, schol­

ars look to see what patterns it shares grammatically with other lan­

guages in the world and which features it has that might be unique.

The more languages that die, the more likely it is that the conclusions

scholars draw about the limits o f human cognition might be mistaken.

For example, the language o f Urarina, which is spoken by only 3,000

people in the Amazon rainforest o f Peru, has a very unusual word

order for its sentences. Unlike English, which generally uses the

Subject -V e rb – Object (S-V-O) word order, as in sentences such as,

“The girl rode the bike,” Urarina uses the Object – Verb — Subject

(O-V-S) word order, which would have a literal translation for this

sentence as, “The bike rode the girl.” O-V-S word order is extremely

rare among the world’s languages. “Were it not for Urarina and a few

other Amazonian languages,” Harrison writes, “scientists might not

even suspect it were possible. They would be free to hypothesize —

falsely – that O-V-S word order was cognitively impossible, that the

human brain could not process i t” (2007:19).

Eh. It is obviously ‘cognitively possible’ since we just understood an English example with OVS order… Another route is just to make construct a language to test it with. Similarly for other candidates for impossibility.

Still useful, sure, but not that useful.

-

As a language is in the process o f dying out, it often undergoes

simplification in its grammar and lexicon. Speakers have fewer oppor­

tunities to use the language and so either forget or do not acquire a

large vocabulary. Grammatical structures can also be lost or simplified.

For example, in Dyirbal, an endangered Aboriginal language in

Australia, there used to be a four-part classification o f nouns. (See

chapter 4 for a discussion o f the four categories.) Nowadays, however,

young people are less familiar with the ancestral myths and cultural

practices that motivated the four-part classification, and they are less

fluent in Dyirbal, having attended school mostly in English, and so

they have replaced the four-part system o f noun classification with a

two-part one. It is still different from English and retains some of the

features o f the older system, hut it has become much simpler to use

(Nettle and Romaine 2000:66-69).

Now, if only all other languages would get rid of noun classes/genders… :)

-

The chapter on language extinction is really lacking in content. They don’t discuss the overall cause of the huge diversity of languages to begin with, why there is a lot of diversity some places, and others not. And they fail to mention one very good reason, which is indeed the primary reason to use a language at all, to have fewer languages: it makes communcating easier! The cause of diversity of languages is 1) lack of long distance communcation between groups of people. Consider it a proces similar to genetic drift. Those places where there is lots of language diversity, are exactly the kind of backward places with no decent technology to facilitate long distance communication. When we use introduce it, they need to use a different language to talk with other people, and hence switch from their now not very useful language to one more useful. Nothing mysterious here.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift

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Hegemony

One o f the most useful terms for our purposes in understanding how

power intersects with language is hegemony. According to Raymond

Williams, a cultural Marxist who builds on the work o f Antonio

Gramsci, hegemony refers to a dynamic system o f domination based

not so much on violence or the threat o f violence, or merely on the

economic control o f the means o f production, but rather on political,

cultural, and institutional influence. “That is to say,” Williams writes,

“it is not limited to matters o f direct political control but seeks to

describe a more general predominance which includes, as one o f its

key features, a particular way o f seeing the world and human nature

and relationships” (1983:145). Having military power or economic

wealth can certainly lead to power, but social status and cultural dom­

inance can also come from other sources, and hegemony is a term that

helps us understand this process. Hegemony is saturated with the spe­

cific forms o f inequality belonging to particular societies at particular

historical moments, according to Williams, and is “ . . . in the strongest

sense a ‘culture’, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived

dominance and subordination o f particular classes” (1977:110).

Emphasizing the dynamic nature o f any “ lived hegemony,” Williams

reminds us that “it does not just passively exist as a form o f domi­

nance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and

modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by

pressures not all its own” (1977:112). In other words, Williams con­

cludes, while any lived hegemony is always by definition dominant, it

is never total or exclusive (1977:113).

Oh boy here we go…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci (Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo ˈɡramʃi]; 22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian writer, politician, political theorist, philosopher, sociologist, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini‘s Fascist regime.

Gramsci was one of the most important Marxist thinkers in the 20th century. His writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership and he is notable as a highly original thinker within modern European thought. He is renowned for his concept of cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society.

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In a contribution that ties in nicely with one o f this b o o k ’s key

concepts, that o f language ideologies, Bourdieu describes how differ­

ent levels o f symbolic capital can turn into symbolic dominance and even

symbolic violence. When individuals in a society are not proficient in

the most highly valued ways o f speaking (such as English in the

United States, especially Standard American English), they do not

benefit from the access such proficiency often provides to prestigious

schools, professions, or social groups (cf. Lippi-Green 1997). And yet,

speakers o f stigmatized variants (for example, in the United States

these might include speakers o f nonstandard varieties o f English

such as African American English or Appalachian English) frequently

buy into the system o f evaluation that ranks Standard American

English as superior. These people’s own language ideologies, in other

words, stigmatize the ways in which they themselves speak. This

acceptance o f differing social values accorded various ways ot speak­

ing is in actuality a misrecognition, according to Bourdieu, because the

differential levels o f prestige constitute an arbitrary ranking. Every

language or dialect is as good linguistically, even though not socially, as

every other.

It just isn’t true. Languages differ in many relevant linguistic properties. Good luck discussing advanced physics in some amerindian language with no words for the relevant physics terms. This is even the case for a large language such as Danish. This is one of the reason we see what is called domain loss – a domain of life is spoken about in a different language because no suitable terms exist in the standard language. Cf. ex. sprogmuseet.dk/sprogpolitik/ingen-fare-for-dom%C3%A6netab-naturvidenskabelige-forskere-vil-altid-have-brug-for-dansk/

And some are easier to learn than others, due to grammar or phonology (ex. English <th> sounds are difficult to learn).

And so on.

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Why such a change in the understanding o f these languages? Irvine

and Gal argue that the answer it was not so much because o f better

scholarship or improved data but instead because, “There have also

been changes in what observers expected to see and how they inter­

preted what they saw” (2000:48). Nineteenth-century linguists and

ethnographers assumed that linguistic classifications could be used to

judge evolutionary rankings o f groups. (White Europeans were of

course at the top o f this ranking, and various African groups clustered

toward the bottom.) They also assumed that ethnic groups were

monolingual and that a “primordial relationship” existed that linked

languages with territories, nations, tribes, and peoples. In the case o f

Fula, Wolof, and Sereer, racial and linguistic ideologies led nineteenth-

century linguists to consider the Fula language and its speakers (who

were often lighter skinned than the others and who tended to espouse

a more orthodox Islam) to be o f higher status and intelligence. The

Wolof language was deemed “less supple, less handy” than Fula, and its

speakers less intelligent. The Sereer language, nineteenth-century lin­

guists claimed, was “the language o f primitive simplicity” (Irvine and

Gal 2000:55).

Never heard of them, but lightness of skin does correlate well with population intelligence world wide.

They might be smarter than their neighbours. At least, there is a list of prominent fula people. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fula_people#Notable_Fulani_people_by_country

Googling “fule people intelligent” yields 13.1e6 results.

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Overall, there is nothing much to say about this book. It covers most stuff. Neither particularly good, or interesting, or particularly bad or uninteresting, IMO.

–

Forexample, what is the meaning of the word hello? What information

does it convey? It is a very difficult word to define, but every speaker of

English knows how to use it: for greeting an acquaintance, answering the

telephone, etc. We might say that hello conveys the information that the

speaker wishes to acknowledge the presence of, or initiate a conversation

with, the hearer. But it would be very strange to answer the phone or greet

your best friend by saying “I wish to acknowledge your presence” or “I

wish to initiate a conversation with you.”What is important about the word

hello is not its information content (if any) but its use in social interaction.

In the Teochew language (a “dialect” of Chinese), there is no word for

‘hello’. The normal way for one friend to greet another is to ask: “Have you

already eaten or not?” The expected reply is: “I have eaten,” even if this is

not in fact true.

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In our comparison of English with Teochew, we saw that both languages

employ a special formof sentence for expressing Yes–No questions. In fact,

most, if not all, languages have a special sentence pattern which is used for

asking such questions. This shows that the linguistic form of an utterance

is often closely related to its meaning and its function. On the other hand,

we noted that the grammatical features of a Yes–No question in English

are not the same as in Teochew. Different languages may use very different

grammatical devices to express the same basic concept. So understanding

the meaning and function of an utterance will not tell us everything we need

to know about its form.

interesting for me becus of my work on a logic of questions and answers.

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Both of the hypotheses we have reached so far about Lotuko words are

based on the assumption that themeaning of a sentence is composed in some

regular way from the meanings of the individual words. That is, we have

been assuming that sentence meanings are compositional.Of course,

every language includes numerous expressions where this is not the case.

Idioms are one common example. The English phrase kick the bucket can

mean ‘die,’ even though none of the individual words has this meaning.

Nevertheless, the compositionality of meaning is an important aspect of the

structure of all human languages.

for more on compositionality see: plato.stanford.edu/entries/compositionality/

emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3233

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We have discussed three types of reasoning that can be used to

identify the meaningful elements of an utterance (whether parts of a word

or words in a sentence): minimal contrast, recurring partials, and pattern-

matching. In practice, when working on a new body of data, we often use

all three at once, without stopping to think which method we use for which

element. Sometimes, however, it is important to be able to state explicitly

the pattern of reasoning which we use to arrive at certain conclusions. For

example, suppose that one of our early hypotheses about the language is

contradicted by further data. We need to be able to go back and determine

what evidence that hypothesis was based on so that we can re-evaluate

that evidence in the light of additional information. This will help us to

decide whether the hypothesis can be modified to account for all the facts,

orwhether it needs to be abandoned entirely.Grammatical analysis involves

an endless process of “guess and check” – forming hypotheses, testing them

against further data, andmodifying or abandoning those which do not work.

quite a lot of science works like that. conjecture and refutation, pretty much (Popper)

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What do we mean when we say that a certain form, such as Zapotec ka–,

is a “morpheme?” Charles Hockett (1958) gave a definition of this term

which is often quoted:

Morphemes are the smallest individually meaningful elements in the utter-

ances of a language.

There are two crucial aspects of this definition. First, a morpheme is mean-

ingful.A morpheme normally involves a consistent association of phono-

logical formwith some aspect ofmeaning, as seen in (7) where the form ˜ nee

was consistently associated with the concept ‘foot.’ However, this associ-

ation of form with meaning can be somewhat flexible. We will see various

ways in which the phonological shape of a morpheme may be altered to

some extent in particular environments, and there are some morphemes

whose meaning may depend partly on context.

obviously does not work for en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry_morpheme

what is the solution to this inconsistency in terminology?

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In point (c) above we noted that a word which contains no plural marker

is always singular. The chart in (17) shows that the plural prefix is optional,

and that when it is present it indicates plurality; but it doesn’t say anything

about the significance of the lack of a prefix. One way to tidy up this loose

end is to assume that the grammar of the language includes a default

rule which says something like the following: “a countable noun which

contains no plural prefix is interpreted as being singular.”

Another possible way to account for the same fact is to assume that sin-

gular nouns carry an “invisible” (or null) prefix which indicates singular

number. That would mean that the number prefix is actually obligatory for

this class of noun. Under this approach, our chart would look something

like (18):

the default theory with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness is more plausible than positing invisible morphemes.

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since the book contiues to use Malay as an ex. including the word <orang> i’m compelled to mention that it is not a coincidence that it is similar to <orangutan>. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan#Etymology

The name “orangutan” (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning “person” and hutan meaning “forest”,[1] thus “person of the forest”.[2]Orang Hutan was originally not used to refer to apes, but to forest-dwelling humans. The Malay words used to refer specifically to the ape is maias and mawas, but it is unclear if those words refer to just orangutans, or to all apes in general. The first attestation of the word to name the Asian ape is in Jacobus Bontius‘ 1631 Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis – he described that Malaysians had informed him the ape was able to talk, but preferred not to “lest he be compelled to labour”.[3] The word appeared in several German-language descriptions of Indonesian zoology in the 17th century. The likely origin of the word comes specifically from the Banjarese variety of Malay.[4]

The word was first attested in English in 1691 in the form orang-outang, and variants with -ng instead of -n as in the Malay original are found in many languages. This spelling (and pronunciation) has remained in use in English up to the present, but has come to be regarded as incorrect.[5][6][7] The loss of “h” in Utan and the shift from n to -ng has been taken to suggest that the term entered English through Portuguese.[4] In 1869, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-creator of modern evolutionary theory, published his account of Malaysia’s wildlife: The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise.[3]

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Traditional definitions for parts of speech are based on “notional”

(i.e. semantic) properties such as the following:

(17) A noun is a word that names a person, place, or thing.

A verb is a word that names an action or event.

An adjective is a word that describes a state.

However, these characterizations fail to identify nouns like destruction,

theft, beauty, heaviness. They cannot distinguish between the verb love and

the adjective fond (of),or between the noun fool and the adjective foolish.

Note that there is very little semantic difference between the two sentences

in (18).

(18) They are fools.

They are foolish.

it is easy to fix 17a to include abstractions. all his counter-examples are abstractions.

<love> is both a noun and a verb, but 17 definitions, which is right.

the 18 ex. seems weak too. what about the possibility of interpreting 18b as claiming that they are foolish. this does not mean that they are fools. it may be a temporary situation (drunk perhaps), or isolated to specific areas of reality (ex. religion).

not that i’m especially happy about semantic definitions, it’s just that the argumentation above is not convincing.

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Third, the head is more likely to be obligatory than the modifiers or other

non-head elements. For example, all of the elements of the subject noun

phrase in (22a) can be omitted except the head word pigs.If this word is

deleted, as in (22e), the result is ungrammatical.

(22) a [The three little pigs] eat truffles.

b [The three pigs] eat truffles.

c [The pigs] eat truffles.

d [Pigs] eat truffles.

e *[The three little] eat truffles.

not so quick. if the context makes it clear that they are speaking about pigs, or children, or whatever, 22e is perfectly understandable, since context ‘fiils out’ the missing information, grammatically speaking. but the author is right in that it is incomplete and without context to fill in, one would be forced to ask ”three little what?”. but still, that one will actually respond like this shows that the utterance was understood, at least in part.

-

Of course, English noun phrases do not always contain a head noun. In

certain contexts a previously mentioned head may be omitted because it is

“understood,” as in (23a). This process is called ellipsis . Moreover, in

English, and in many other languages, adjectives can sometimes be used

without any head noun to name classes of people, as in (23b,c). But, aside

from a few fairly restricted patterns like these, heads of phrases in English

tend to be obligatory.

(23) a [The third little pig] was smarter than [the second ].

b [the good], [the bad] and [the ugly]

c [The rich] get richer and [the poor] get children.

i was going to write the author doesn’t seem to understand the word ”obligatory”, but it another interpretation dawned upon me. i think he means that under must conditions, one cannot leave out the noun in a noun phrase (NP), but sometimes one can. confusing wording.

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As we can already see from example (5), different predicates require

different numbers of arguments: hungry and snores require just one, loves

and slapping require two. Some predicates may not require any arguments

at all. For example, in many languages comments about the weather (e.g. It

is raining,or It is dark,or It is hot) could be expressed by a single word, a

bare predicate with no arguments.

it is worth mentioning that there is a name for this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun

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It is important to remember that arguments can also be optional. For exam-

ple,many transitive verbs allowan optional beneficiary argument (18a), and

most transitive verbs of the agent–patient type allow an optional instrument

argument (18b). The crucial fact is that adjuncts are always optional. So

the inference “if obligatory then argument” is valid; but the inference “if

optional then adjunct” is not.

strictly speaking, this is using the terminology incorrectly. conditionals are not inferences. the author should have written ex ”the inference “obligatory, therefore, argument” is valid.”, or alternatively ”the conditional “if obligatory, then argument” is true.”.

confusing inferences with conditionals leads to all kinds of confusions in logic.

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Another way of specifying the transitivity of a verb is to ask, how many

term (subject or object) arguments does it take? The number of terms, or

direct arguments, is sometimes referred to as the valence of the verb.

Since most verbs can be said to have a subject, the valence of a verb is

normally one greater than the number of objects it takes: an intransitive

verb has a valence of one, a transitive verb has a valence of two, and a

ditransitive verb has a valence of three.

the author is just talking about how many operands the expressed predicate has. there are also verbs which can express predicates with four operands. consider <transfer>. ex. ”Peter transfers 5USD from Mike to Jim.”. There Peter, subject, agent; 5USD, object, theme, a repicient, Jim, ?; Mike, antirecpient?, ?.

The distinctions between OBJ₂ and OBL make little to no sense to me.

It is important to notice that the valence of the verb (in this sense) is not

the same as the number of arguments it takes. For example, the verb donate

takes three semantic arguments, as illustrated in (8).However, donate has70 Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction

avalence of two because it takes only two term arguments, SUBJ and

OBJ. With this predicate, the recipient is always expressed as an oblique

argument.

(8) a Michael Jackson donated his sunglasses to the National Museum.

b donate < agent, theme, recipient >

|| |

subj obj obl

Some linguists use the term “semantic valence” to refer to the number of

semantic arguments which a predicate takes, and “syntactic valence” to

specify the number of terms which a verb requires. In this book we will use

the term “valence” primarily in the latter (syntactic) sense.

doens’t help.

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We have already seen that some verbs can be used in more than

one way. In chapter 4, for example, we saw that the verb give occurs in

two different clause patterns, as illustrated in (10).We can now see that

these two uses of the verb involve the same semantic roles but a different

assignment of Grammatical Relations, i.e. different subcategorization. This

difference is represented in (11). The lexical entry for give must allow for

both of these configurations.3

(10) a John gave Mary his old radio.

b John gave his old radio to Mary.

(11) a give < agent, theme, recipient >

|| |

subj obj2 obj

b give < agent, theme, recipient >

|| |

subj obj obl

it seems to me that there is something wholly wrong with a theory that treats 10a-b much different. those two sentences mean the same thing, and their structure is similar, and only one word makes the differnece. this word seems to just have the function of allowing for another order of the operands of the verb.

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A number of languages have grammatical processes which, in effect,

“change” an oblique argument into an object. The result is a change in

the valence of the verb. This can be illustrated by the sentences in (19).

In (19a), the beneficiary argument is expressed as an OBL, but in (19b)

the beneficiary is expressed as an OBJ. So (19b) contains one more term

than (19a), and the valence of the verb has increased from two to three;

but there is no change in the number of semantic arguments. Grammatical

operations which increase or decrease the valence of a verb are a topic of

great interest to syntacticians. We will discuss a few of these operations in

chapter 14.

(19) a John baked a cake for Mary.

b John baked Mary a cake.

IMO, these two have the exact same number of operands, both have 3. for word <for> allows for a different ordering, i.e., it is a syntax-modifier.

at least, that’s one reading. 19a seems to be a less clear case of my alternative theory. one reading of 19a is that Mary was tasked with baking a cake, but John baked it for her. another reading has the same meaning as 19b.

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(20) a #The young sausage likes the white dog.

b #Mary sings a white cake.

c #A small dog gives Mary to the young tree.

(21) a *John likes.

b *Mary gives the young boy.

c *The girl yawns Mary.

The examples in (20) are grammatical but semantically ill-formed –

they don’tmake sense.4

the footnote is: One reason for saying that examples like (20) and (22) are grammatical, even though

they sound so odd, is that it would often be possible to invent a context (e.g. in a fairy

tale or a piece of science fiction) in which these sentences would be quite acceptable.

This is not possible for ungrammatical sentences like those in (21).

i can think about several contexts where 21b makes sense. think of a situation where everybody is required to give something/someone to someone. after it is mentioned that several other people give this and that, 21b follows. in that context it makes sense just fine. however, it is because the repicient is implicit, since it is unnecessary (economic principle) to mention the recipient in every single sentence or clause.

21c is interpretable with if one considers ”the girl” an utterance, that Mary utters while yawning.

21a is almost common on Facebook. ”John likes this”, shortened to ”John likes”.

not that i think the author is wrong, i’m just being creative. :)

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The famous example in (23) was used by Chomsky (1957) to show how

a sentence can be grammatical without being meaningful. What makes this

sentence so interesting is that it contains so many collocational clashes:

something which is green cannot be colorless; ideas cannot be green,or

any other color, but we cannot call themcolorless either; ideas cannot sleep;

sleeping is not the kind of thing one can do furiously; etc.

(23) #Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

it is writings such as this that result in so much confusion. clear the different <cannot>’s in the above are not about the same kind of impossibility. let’s consider them:

<something which is green cannot be colorless> this is logical impossibility. these two predicates are logically incompatible, that is, they imply the lack of each other, that is, ∀xGreen(x)→¬Colorless(x). but actually this predicate has an internal negation. we can make it more explicit like this: ∀xGreen(x)→Colorful(x), and ∀xColorful(x)↔¬Colorless(x).

< ideas cannot be green,or any other color, but we cannot call themcolorless either; ideas cannot sleep;

sleeping is not the kind of thing one can do furiously> this is semantic impossibility. it concerns the meaning of the sentence. there is no meaning, and hence nothing expressed that can be true or false. from that it follows that there is nothing that can be impossible, since impossibility implies falsity. hence, if there is something connected with that sentence that is impossible, it has to be something else.

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This kind of annotated tree diagramallows us to see at oncewhat iswrong

with the ungrammatical examples in (21) above: (21b) is incomplete, as

demonstrated in (34a), while (21c) is incoherent, as demonstrated in (34b).

a better set of terms are perhaps <undersaturated> and <oversaturated>.

there is nothing inconsistent about the second that isn’t also inconsitent in the first, and hence using that term is misleading. <incomplete> does capture an essential feature, which is that something is missing. the other ex. has something else too much. one could go for <incomplete> and <overcomplete> but it sounds odd. hence my choice of different terms.

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The pro-formone can be used to refer to the head nounwhen it is followed

by an adjunct PP, as in (6a),but not when it is followed by a complement

PP as in (6b).

(6) a The [student] with short hair is dating the one with long hair.

b ∗The [student] of Chemistry was older than the one of Physics.

6b seems fine to me.

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There is no fixed limit on howmanymodifiers can appear in such a sequence.

But in order to represent an arbitrarily long string of alternating adjectives

and intensifiers, it is necessary to treat each such pair as a single unit.

The “star” notation used in (15) is one way of representing arbitrarily

long sequences of the same category. For any category X, the symbol “X∗”

stands for “a sequence of any number (zero or more) of Xs.” So the symbol

“AP∗” stands for “a sequence of zero or more APs.” It is easy to mod-

ify the rule in (12b) to account for examples like (14b); this analysis is

shown in (15b). Under the analysis in (12a),wewould need to write a more

complex rule something like (15a).3 Because simplicity tends to be favored

in grammatical systems, (12b) and (15b) provide a better analysis for this

construction.

(15) aNP → Det ((Adv) A)

∗ N (PP)

bNP → Det AP∗ N (PP)

for those that are wondering where this use of asterisk comes from, it is from here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

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In English, a possessor phrase functions as a kind of determiner. We

can see this because possessor phrases do not normally occur together with

other determiners in the same NP:

(19) a the new motorcycle

b Mary’s new motorcycle

c ∗Mary’s the new motorcycle

d ∗the Mary’s new motorcycle

looks more like it is because they are using proper nouns in their example. if one used a common noun, then it works just fine:

19e: The dog’s new bone.

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Another kind of evidence comes fromthe fact that predicate complement

NPs cannot appear in certain constructions where direct objects can. For

example, an objectNP can become the subject of a passive sentence (44b) or

of certain adjectives (like hard, easy, etc.) which require a verbal or clausal

complement (44c).However, predicate complement NPs never occur in

these positions, as illustrated in (45).

(44) a Mary tickled an elephant.

b An elephant was tickled (by Mary).

c An elephant is hard (for Mary) to tickle.

(45) a Mary became an actress.

b *An actress was become (by Mary).

c *An actress is hard (for Mary) to become.

45c is grammatical with the optional element in place: An actress is hard for Mary to become. Altho it is ofc archaic in syntax.

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mi amamas. ‘I am happy.’

yu amamas. ‘You (sg) are happy.’

em i amamas. ‘He/she is happy.’

yumi amamas. ‘We (incl.) are happy.’

mipela i amamas. ‘We (excl.) are happy.’

yupela i amamas. ‘You (pl) are happy.’

ol i amamas. ‘They are happy.’

it is difficult not to like this system, except for the arbitrary requirement of ”i” some places and not others. its clearly english-inspired. inclusive ”we” is interesting ”youme” :D

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This constituent is normally labeled S’or S (pronounced “S-bar”). It con-

tains two daughters: COMP (for “complementizer”) and S (the complement

clause itself). This structure is illustrated in the tree diagram in (15), which

represents a sentence containing a finite clausal complement.

how to make this fit perfectly with the other use of N-bar terminology. in the case of noun phrases, we have NP on top, then N’ (with DET and adj) and then N at the bottom. it seems that we need to introduce some analogue to NP with S. the only level left is the entire sentence. SP sounds like a contradiction in terms or oxymoron though, ”sentence phrase”.

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Abstract

For some decades now in the West, there has been
a growing social anxiety with regard to a phenomenon which
has become known as child sexual abuse (CSA). This anxiety
is fed by scientific theories whose cornerstone is the assess-
ment of these experiences as necessarily harmful, due to their
presumed serious consequences for the present and future
lives of the minors involved in them. This principle, widely
held by experts and laypersons alike,was also part and parcel
of the danger presumably posed by Onanism, a phenomenon
which occupied a similar position in society and medical
science in the West during the eighteenth through twentieth
centuries. The present work is a comparative review of these
two hypotheses and the central objective was to compare the
evolution and fundamental elements of the two hypotheses
in light of what history tells us about Onanism theory. This
comparative analysiswill allow a critical look at the assump-
tions of the CSA hypothesis in order to make evident the
similarities to the conceptual model that enabled the Onan-
ism hypothesis in the past.
Keywords Child sexual abuse
Masturbation
Onanism