About Tim

Principal Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Brighton

Mykonos ruined my bank account!

So, to end a full-on week of activities and drinking with ESN, the Mykonos trip came around and we were promised another four days of drinking, sightseeing and bonding with our fellow Erasmus students. We set sail (on a five-hour-long ferry) to the island most famous for its windmills, on Thursday morning waking up at 4am for a departure from the ESN office at 5am. With around 200 Erasmus students we set off.

Alex and I became members of hotel 7 and hotel 6 became home to Dejan. When we finally docked in Mykonos, we were subjected to a lot of waiting around as the coaches meaning to take us were all on Greek time (meaning they’d be roughly an hour later than they had said). However, once on the coaches we soon made it to our small hotel where 19 of us were staying for the 4 days. We were quick to make friends and started asking around about what everyone was planning on doing for the day, and minds automatically turned to food. With the ferry only taking cash a lot of us hadn’t eaten since yesterday dinner time, and it was now around 2pm. Us and a group of 7 others headed off in the direction of any restaurant. To our surprise a couple of the people within the group were ones we had previously met on a clubbing night and at the Greek dinner. We found a place along the front and ordered immediately.
With food in our belly’s we looked for the nearest beach and found one that was already host to multiple other Erasmus students. We decided this would be where we would spend the rest of the day.

​The evening called for pre-drinks with our new-found friends and a club night. A classic game of ‘Ring of Fire’ and a lot of laughing later and we decided it was time to head out. We ended up at ‘Scandinavian bar’ which was what was suggested by the ESN guides as we had free entry and a ‘discount’. We soon realised this would not be the best place to party. On arriving we got our free entry, however, for two drinks at the bar it was 18 euros – even with the discount. We learnt that this discount was in fact only 1 euro off. So being the smart students we are we decided best to go out to the kiosk around the corner and buy beer and mixed drinks from there for 2 euro and then go back in when we were ready to dance. (Little did we know this would become the schedule for each night out).

The next day was a group trip to ‘Super Paradise’ and being a bit hungover from the night before we didn’t pack accordingly. We forgot to pack drinks, food and therefore, became trapped in the beach club as it was in the middle of nowhere. Food cost 13 euros for a plate from a cafeteria-like setting and a soft drink (with our wristband). Alcoholic drinks were also expensive with it being 6 euros for a beer. This place we branded super paradise, but we soon relabelled it super * paradise (*expensive). However, we had a lovely time with the friends we had made, and the water was so clear as well as the beach being beautiful. This beach bar would have been a lot more fun had we not been students or even if we had been students with a lot more money. Little did we know that for 5 Euros we could have travelled back to the town centre at any point during the day. As soon as we found this out we soon travelled back to the town and got some cheap gyros to make up for the food we had in the beach club. This night was probably the most tired we were for the whole holiday; however, we refused to leave it on a bad note, and with a bit of group peer pressure we all managed to make it out to the club. The club we went to was ‘Argo’ this played better music than the other bars, but the drinks were still pretty expensive *que escape to the kiosk*. This was a good night, but we ended the night around 3am, with the other party-goers still going till 5am, as we needed our beds. Although, on our return home we sat on the rooftop by our apartments watching the stars and chatting which was an ideal end to the night. (Alea even managed to see a few shooting stars – to Alex’s annoyance he was always too late to see them).

The final full day was here, and we all felt refreshed as we hadn’t gone too hard on the previous night and got a relatively good night sleep, so we headed out to the windmills. The windmills weren’t that impressive, but the views of the little Venice and the white houses down the side towards the sea proved to be the main sight to see. The streets themselves of Mykonos were also incredibly beautiful as the alleys weave in and out. However, be careful as all the alleys look mostly the same, so it is good to gage some landmarks – like a shop or restaurant here and there, so you know you’re going along the right way. After this, another beach day was in need as we had a couple beers and watched the sunset over the sea. This evening, being the last evening on the island, we decided to party hard. This followed the same routine as the last couple of nights. However, we had all learnt not to buy drinks out apart from the kiosk, and this is what we did. This proved to be a good end to an eventful holiday.

These events – even if they don’t turn out the way you had set in your mind – are amazing ways to make friends and socialise with people who are in the same boat as you are. It definitely makes you feel more connected to the other people on Erasmus, and now we have a whole new group of friends from different backgrounds to socialise with and learn from.

Meeting Unknown Gods, by Gemma Williams

The week preceding my trip to Seville was one full of intense angst and apprehension. Gemma of the past had thought it a good idea to submit an abstract to present at the 8th International Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics (EPICS VIII), if only as a helpful exercise in ordering my ideas as concisely as possible, with little expectation of being accepted. Gemma of the present was freaking out.

I’d had the pleasure of attending my first academic conference—‘Beyond Meaning’, co-organised by my supervisor Tim Wharton—purely as a consumer of knowledge, in Athens the previous summer so I had some idea of what to expect in terms of conference mechanics, but as the date approached my nerve gradually evaporated as the reality of standing before experts in the field and touting my fledgling ideas loomed increasingly. Something about deciding to put myself among these knowledge-shapers suddenly seemed incredibly ‘bold’, though perhaps, I tried to reassure myself, this thinking was simply a result of good old Imposter Syndrome. In order to quell the fear a little, I gave myself a mind-trick. I would see it all as a symbolic act. My talk would be my offering at the feet of unseen knowledge-keepers, and the room a temple of knowledge. Clearly bonkers, but somehow this felt less frightening than facing a room of potentially hostile, and certainly very clever humans.

I arrived the evening before the conference began, and took myself out for a romantic stroll in large central park, packed with parrots mimicking the traffic crossing signal and a meal of tapas and beer, kept company by my book (note to solo travellers, always have a good book). People were out late, the rain spell rolled elsewhere to allow a warm sunny evening to break through and it was true! Seville does smell of oranges. I was enjoying myself. How did this happen? (Draw your own conclusions as to whether a pre-conference beer is advisable.)

The venue for the conference was the old 18thCentury Royal Tobacco Factory in the centre of Seville, now part of the university, and allowed my temple fantasy to run wild. The high, ornate brick building threaded through with open courtyards and fountains provided a most exquisite backdrop to all the coffee-break chats and encounters that really make a conference. I was happy to see some familiar faces from the conference I’d attended last year, and most people I spoke to seemed to know my supervisor in one way or another. I found myself out for dinner the first night with a lovely bunch of individuals from different countries and specialisms, several of whom will be at the next conference I plan to attend too. People were friendly, supportive when they heard I was giving my first talk, and open to conversation. The impression I came away with was one of a network of warm, intelligent and curious people that wasn’t in anyway clique-y.

When I came to my talk itself, I can’t say I fully tricked myself out of the nerves. My advice would be, if you too are prone to anxiety, don’t drink the free and delicious conference coffee on the day of your talk. The audience wasn’t huge, but not too small- just the right number really, to allow for a convivial Q & A session post-talk. Unlike in my fearful imaginings, the questions and feedback that came were both insightful and encouraging. I found myself really enjoying the back-and-forth, and being able to enthuse about something I’m passionate about with others with knowledge and experience in the field. One audience member asked some particularly helpful questions which I took in the same relaxed way as the whole questions session had gone, only later realising that she was in fact one of the plenary speakers and someone who’s work I’d read and admired! Unknown gods indeed.

Ambiguity, eh?

Early this summer, I received an email containing the invitation below:

INVITATION TO EVENT:

A DISCUSSION OF THE JOY OF SEX WITH DR FIONA BOULDER

Checkland E513, Wednesday 27 July, 17.00-19.00

I contacted the organisers suggesting they might have worded the title of the session slightly differently, but it was too late. The mail had already gone out to over 7000 Brighton University staff.

I have no idea how the evening went.

Ambiguity is the word linguists (and non-linguists) use to describe this kind of phenomenon. It’s all around us. Pretty much every utterance you hear will have more than one possible meaning, and often it’s the presence of an ambiguous word or an ambiguous structure that is responsible. Here are a few of my favourite ambiguous newspaper headlines. Can you get the different possible meanings?

  • Stolen painting found by tree.
  • Police found drunk in shop window.
  • The explosion was attributed to a build up of gas by one town official.

I had no intentions of blogging about ambiguity today (in fact, I had no intention of blogging about anything), but when I picked up my youngest daughter from school, she said something that interested me. She’s just started school. Literally, just three weeks ago. She has a good friend, Juliet, with whom she shares a birthday. They’ve bonded and have become inseparable. This is what Luna said:

  • Juliet and me don’t like the same things.

I was surprised. Luna and Juliet are so, so close. I would have presumed that they would spend a lot of time talking about all the things they have in common, rather than the things they don’t. She then continued:

  • We don’t like cabbage. We don’t like tomatoes. We don’t like broccoli…

Ambiguity, eh?

Luna in the Taliban

I was worried at first. Islamic fundamentalism at one of Luna’s innocent-looking playgroups? (I suspected the one in the local Church Hall…) Sharia Law in Worthing by 2025?

Of course, I needn’t have. It was just Luna’s mangled pronunciation of ‘Camper Van’, although I haven’t worked out exactly why. Other slips, which I blogged about before Christmas, are more predictable. There’s still recognizable vocalic and consonantal harmony in the odd word. And ‘Milk’ is still /mʊk/ – the dark [l] causes the front vowel to move back – which provides an amusing version of Bob the Builder, which, in another of Luna’s religious moments, becomes Bob the /bʊdə/ (Buddha). We even have our own lyrics to the theme song:

“Bob the Buddha, Can he fix it? The greatest achievement is selflessness…”

But, of course, her linguistic skills are moving on in leaps and bounds. As far as I can tell, she understands pretty much everything we tell her, and her speech is vastly more developed than it was a mere four months ago. I’m observing it entirely unscientifically, but if I’d say the average length of Luna’s utterances (Mean Length of Utterance is a scientific term used to get a rough idea of children’s syntactic ability) is between 2 and 3 words. ‘Luna happy’ is thankfully, and to my eternal joy, something she says often (though is it, I wonder, because of the kind of stuff she’s discovered at the Church Hall playgroup?). ‘Doors (outdoors) windy’ is another. Three word utterances she’s come up are ‘Mummy play farm?’, ‘Danma (Grandma) come here!’ and ‘Peppa kissing George’.

Notice a couple of things. Firstly, Luna already got some means of communicating, and therefore must have some underlying knowledge of, different moods or illocutionary force indicators. She uses very pronounced question intonation in the interrogative example, and appears to already have English imperative and declarative word order. Secondly, notice the absence of auxiliary verbs, which indicate the absence of functional categories in Luna’s syntax. When I put her Wellies on at the weekend, Luna said ‘Daddy! Luna feet hiding!’ Again, no auxiliary, and no genitive ‘s’. What do they teach them at playgroup?

Don’t answer that…

Actually, this morning she crossed some kind of boundary and actually produced a five-word sentence. It was 5.45 am and she rolled over the bed to my partner (Luna had only moments before greeted me with a playful Karate chop to the larynx) and said ‘Read Luna book in bed?’

It’s no exaggeration to say that her vocabulary is expanding hugely, and very quickly. The ease with which children acquire word meanings is something that amazes me constantly, and if you fancy a good read over the Easter hols, I point you in the direction of Paul Bloom’s masterly ‘How Children Learn the Meanings of Words’. A beautiful book.

And me? I’m spending Easter in the Taliban.

Because Chomsky

In a recent Guardian article Harry Ritchie asks the following question: ‘Why do we persist in thinking that Standard English is right, when it is spoken by only 15% of the population?’ It’s an interesting question. My observation is that, actually, fewer and fewer people do in fact persist in thinking this. But I’m not blogging in order to discuss the question. Rather, I’d like to draw attention to Ritchie’s truly mind-boggling answer to the question he poses: he blames Noam Chomsky.

I’ve read the article repeatedly now, and I have to say I’m still no closer to finding any real justification for Ritchie’s claim. Still, in the interests of cool-headed analysis as opposed to the vitriolic dismissal my emotions are screaming at me to write, let’s examine his case. As far as I can see, it rests on two related claims. Let’s examine them in turn:

Firstly, Chomsky (and his disciples, including Pinker) have been so convinced that language is partly innately-specified that the whole discipline has been (in Ritchie’s words) ‘hunting unicorns’ and ignoring matters such as language death, social and political factors in language use and environmental factors in language acquisition. Secondly (and I quote again), ‘Recent evidence from neurology, genetics and linguistics all points to there being no innate programming. Children learn language just as they learn other skills, by experience’.

Turning to the first claim, we can only take it seriously if it can be shown that Chomsky’s work has somehow prevented others from exploring language death, social and political factors in language use and environmental factors.[1] Has Ritchie ever visited a library devoted to language and linguistics? Over the past twenty years, there have been billions of words devoted to these areas of study. Does Ritchie really believe that if Chomsky hadn’t come along, there would have been more? Actually, I believe there would have been less. Without Chomsky there would be fewer, not more, departments of Linguistics.

Turning to the second, it is simply not true that all the evidence points against Chomsky’s claims of innateness. There is certainly some evidence from work on neural-nets in Connectionist frameworks that ‘minds’ can learn aspects of language from experience. But these rely on the highly controversial claim that neural-nets somehow model cognition. Equally, they conveniently ignore many of the linguistic data Chomsky had in mind that are patently unlearnable. Besides which, there is at least as much evidence in support of innateness claims as there is against it. (For those interested in Chomsky’s views, rather than take them from Ritchie I’d recommend the highly accessible introduction in ‘Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures’, published, I think, in 1978.)

Ritchie also criticizes Pinker’s excellent book The Language Instinct. It has, he claims, ‘…a very specific agenda – to support Noam Chomsky’s theories about our language skills being innate’. He goes on: ‘other areas of linguistics are glimpsed, if at all, fuzzily in the background.’ From here, Ritchie moves on to the kind of linguistics he’s interested in and discusses how the language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans laid the foundations upon which many modern languages have been built.

Interested readers might notice that this topic, far from being ignored in The Language Instinct, actually receives a whole chapter. Has Ritchie read it, I wonder?

And how any of this justifies Ritchie’s blaming Chomsky for the view that most people (if they, in fact, do) believe that Standard English is the correct version of English, I just don’t know. I welcome an explanation. It appears to me to be some convoluted argument resting on the two claims above. Since the two claims are fallacious, however, it simply can’t go through.

The study of language and linguistics is in far better shape now than it was fifty years ago. Why? Because Chomsky.

 

 

 

 



[1] We’ll ignore for the time being that (a) by far the lion’s share of Chomsky’s work is about politics, language and propaganda, and (b) that he has never denied the role of environmental factors in language acquisition.

ReadLing no. 2, by Mickey Grant

At four o’clock yesterday the Linguistics section held its second reading group. For some reason the turnout was significantly less than three weeks ago; in fact there were just four of us. Although this sounds like a complete disaster, I think it was actually a blessing in disguise. The four of us chose not to talk about the paper but rather general linguistics, university life and travelling. By the time we had left Checkland the meeting had lasted for longer than the first reading group.

We spoke about our experiences studying or, in Sandra’s case, teaching at Brighton University. I feel all four of us enjoy being part of the Linguistics department at Brighton and it’s testament to the department that the three students who came to the group – Connie, Justine and I – came to University primarily to study English Language but now all three of us are more interested in Linguistics. This seems to be a common trend amongst the English Language and Linguistics students at Brighton.

By speaking to Justine and Connie I got the impression that the third year linguistics group are close. The same can be said for the second years. Although we are 27 very different people, we get on really well and after over a year together I don’t think I have heard about any angry words being exchanged or a major falling out (*touch wood*). This isn’t the case with every course, which makes me think there must be something about studying a Linguistics degree at Brighton University that brings people together: the reason?  A common fear of a lecturer? Perhaps… A much needed outlet to complain about your housemates? Possibly… A shared passion for the subject? I’d like to think so. Whatever the reason I hope the first years are making the same effort with one another.

We also spoke about Sandra’s blog https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/linguistics/2013/11/30/losing-a-language/ and how sad it is that so many languages are dying out. Sandra felt the reason Low German has all but died out is due to the perception of the language amongst school children; it is seen as the language of farm folk and the uneducated. The same reason can be applied to the failed attempts of reviving Irish Gaelic. We came to the conclusion that in order for a language to be resurrected it must be seen as desirable by the children who are trying to learn it. We can see this in the revival of the Maori language in New Zealand which must be a result of the language’s association with the All blacks and the importance Kiwi culture places on the it’s rugby team. We also exchanged ideas about the course I found it surprising how often the four of us agreed about what was good and what needs improving on our course, this felt like an important exercise and in my experience it’s often the way issues are resolved.

If like me, you see your future career in Linguistics you are pretty limited in job choice; writer, speech therapist, teacher, lecturer, translator… that’s about it. These are all jobs where it helps to know people in the same line of work; either as a reference or someone to take advice from. For this reason I think it is a really good idea to get to know the students and lecturers in the Linguistics department because in my experience the world is indeed very small and the chances that you will encounter another Brightonian Linguist in your professional life are pretty high.

I see my future career in education and over the summer I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to teach English in Bratislava. One of the things that struck me is that in order for education to be effective it has to be built on good relationships amongst students and teachers. I don’t know if this was one of Tim and Sandra’s reasons for starting the reading group but if it was, he should be pleased because I think it’s starting to work.

Most of the people I know who study Linguistics think the reading group is a really good idea and I understand that people have lives outside Linguistics. But If you saw the demonstrations on Tuesday or have read about the five Sussex students who have been suspended from University for their involvement in an occupation you will understand just how important education is to people (myself included) and how it is fast becoming a commodity. With this in mind, I think we must recognise that when a group of people are willing to give away their time and knowledge for free, it is something really special.

Meanie!

Prof. Arnold Zwicky, commenting on six inclusions in my good friend (and gastronomic co-author) Richard Horsey’s book ‘101 Key Ideas in Linguistics’, writes:

‘OK, here’s Horsey’s list, in alphabetical order: Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Gottlob Frege, H. Paul Grice, Roman Jakobson, and Ferdinand de Saussure? Frege and Grice are the surprises, of course. Getting the other four is no great feat, but if you got both of these names, then you definitely have a Horsey take on things, and you get a dinner.’

Well, I’m afraid I’m busy tonight (and tomorrow, and…), but I do think Prof. Zwicky’s being a bit of a meanie begrudging a mention for Grice. Indeed, it seems to me that Grice’s contributions to modern day pragmatics – not forgetting his contributions to the philosophy of language, and the influence this work has had on modern-day psychology and even cognitive science – make him, well, impossible to leave out.

I wonder why Grice’s importance is so often over-looked. I never met him (though my PhD supervisor Deirdre Wilson knew him well), but he does seem to have been a fairly diffident, restrained chap. Perhaps that somehow lingers on in his legacy. He wrote his ground-breaking paper ‘Meaning’ (1957), for example, in 1948, but he didn’t deem it worthy of publication. Reliable reports (from Richards Grandy and Warner, who worked closely with Grice in his later years) have it that Peter Strawson had the article typed out (9 years later) by his wife, Lady Anne Strawson, and then submitted it without his knowledge, only informing him once it had been accepted by Philosophical Review.

Much of Grice’s work was, quite simply, ahead of its time. Philosophers of language and pragmatists continue to build on the foundations he laid (still, perhaps, underestimating the extent of those foundations – more excavation required… I think). I recall psychologist Alan Leslie revealing at a workshop in Oxford ten or so years ago that it was ‘Meaning’ (1948, 1957) that sparked his interest in belief-desire psychology and Theory of Mind. Many of Grice’s ideas on reason and rationality are reflected (not to say retrospectively endorsed) in recent work in cognitive science, particularly that by Gerd Gigerenzer. Moreover, Mike Tomasello and colleagues have argued that it was ‘shared intentionality’ and ‘cooperation’ that were the central factors in the evolution of human cognition. I must say that makes a nice change from cheating, deceiving and outmanoeuvering (of which there’s enough around…).

Grice’s Cooperative Principle anyone?

Puzzles…

As Raf pointed out in his post, the kind of mistakes young children make in their speech are systematic and rule-based. There’s always an explanation. Equally interestingly, these mistakes are often about much more than simply not being to recognise a particular sound.

In an experiment now so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page (search for ‘Fis phenomenon’), Jean Berko and Robert Brown demonstrated that children’s speech perception is a long way ahead of their speech production. Consider the following dialogue, which takes place between an father and his child, both looking at toy plastic fish:

Child: There’s a fis in there.

Father: You mean there’s a fish in there.

Child: Yes, a fis.

Father: There’s a fis in there?

Child: No, there’s a FIS in there.

Even more startling evidence of the mismatch between perception and production can be seen in a wonderful study by my old colleague (and teacher) at UCL, Neil Smith. Neil studied the acquisition process in his son, Amahl. At a particular time in his development, Amahl would point at a puddle and say ‘puggle’. Perhaps, Neil puzzled, Amahl simply couldn’t pronounce the word ‘puddle’. Imagine his astonishment when, a few days later (and still calling puddles ‘puggles’) Amahl pointed at a puzzle in his room and said…

‘Puddle’!

 

Luna

I was wondering what to write our first blog about and the answer came running into my bedroom shouting ‘Mama Nina door, Mama Nina door!’: Luna (Nina), my  2-year-old daughter was going out with her Mum.

A child’s acquisition of language is an astonishing thing to behold. From her earliest expressive sounds, Luna has progressed, as all children do, through a pretty ordered set of stages to where she is at the moment. Verbs are beginning to appear, and she is starting to string sentences together. Yesterday evening she picked up her toy shopping basket, adopted a very serious facial expression, and said ‘Sop!’ (shop): ‘Nina buy woin (wine)’. I told her she’d probably need some ID.

The cute mistakes children make in pronunciation are interestingly predictable. Luna can’t make any consonant clusters (‘sp’, ‘tr’ etc.), she has a marked preference for beginning words with consonants and her speech still exhibits both consonantal and vocalic harmony. This is the process whereby a word-initial consonant or vowel influences consonants and vowels later in the word. For example, she calls her best friend Ethan, ‘Deedee’. She’s got the first vowel, but the second harmonises with it. The consonant ‘th’, incidentally, is typically late-acquired in English children. She replaces it with ‘d’ (an early-acquired one) and the second consonant harmonises with that too. Her eldest sister – Xanthe – she calls ‘Nana’, and her middle sister – Zoe – is ‘Roro’. Again, both consonantal and vocalic harmony.

I’d like to think that language acquisition is as interesting for Linguistics students as it is for parents, so, if you don’t mind, I’ll blog occasionally about Luna.

Peace.