Classifying click consonants

I'm sorry that no new content has been added here in month. It's not that I've stopped thinking about linguistic anthropology, it's just that I'm getting really close to completing a draft of my dissertation.

In lieu of me saying anything interesting, please accept this link to a piece in Science Daily on attempts to use ultrasound to classify click consonants (presumably by making the place of articulation more clear, thought the article doesn't quite specify).

Classifying 'Clicks' In African Languages To Clear Up 100-year-old Mystery


Hat tip to Lise Menn, my friend and teacher from the University of Colorado and Secretary of the Language and Linguistics Section at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Universities offering graduate programs in Linguistic Anthropology

Over the past few weeks I have received email from a number of recent or soon-to-be college graduates asking for my recommendations for graduate programs in linguistic anthropology. I assume that my post regarding Getting started in (linguistic) anthropology has left readers in need of more concrete information.

Unfortunately, I don't really feel qualified to give advice on such schools, having attended only one myself. I do recognize the lack of good advice, though, so I'll offer this much: a list links to the web pages of programs you might want to check in to.

The schools listed here come from the Linguistic Society of America's directory of linguistics departments or programs, limited to those offering "Anthropological Linguistics," and from the American Anthropological Association's directory of anthropology departments, limited to those offering a PhD degree and featuring one or more faculty members who list "Linguistics" as an area of interest. These are mostly schools in the United States, with some in Canada, and a few from other English-speaking parts of the world.

This is not intended as an endorsement of any particular program. I'm sure there are many quality programs that I have missed. Additions, corrections, and comments are welcome.

Linguistics departments or programs offering Anthropological Linguistics (per LSA)
California State University, Fullerton
California State University, Long Beach
Cleveland State University
Emory University
First Nations University of Canada
Northern Illinois University
Reed College
Tulane University
University of Arizona
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Hawaii at Manoa
University of Mary Washington
University of South Carolina
University of Tennessee
University of Virginia
University of Western Ontario
Western Washington University

Anthropology departments that offer PhD and have faculty interested in Linguistics (per AAA)
Arizona State University
Australian National University
Binghamton University, State University of New York
Boston University
Brown University
California Institute of Integral Studies
Cornell University
Duke University
Emory University
Harvard University
Indiana University
Kent State University
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
McMaster University
Michigan State University
Purdue University
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Southern Methodist University
Stanford University
Syracuse University
Temple University
Texas A&M University
The George Washington University
Tulane University
University at Albany/SUNY
University of Alabama
University of Alaska Fairbanks
University of Alberta
University of Arizona
University of Auckland
University of British Columbia
University of Calgary
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Davis
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Riverside
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of Chicago
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of Hawaii At Manoa, Honolulu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
University of Kansas
University of Manitoba
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
University of Montreal
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
University of Nevada, Reno
University of New Mexico
University of Oklahoma
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
University of Texas, Austin
University of Virginia
University of Western Ontario
University of Wisconsin, Madison
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
University of Wyoming
Vanderbilt University
Washington State University
Washington University
Yale University

LSA Ethics Statement and Blog

[This is a guest post by Claire Bowern, LSA Ethics committee member and blog co-webmaster]

The Linguistic Society of America recently finalized and released a
statement of professional ethics. The statement was approved at the May
Executive Committee meeting after extensive discussion and consultation
with members through a blog site (lsaethics.wordpress.com). A pdf of the
statement can be found at http://lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/Ethics_Statement.pdf


While the impetus for the ethics statement was the complexity of
interaction that arises in fieldwork, the statement addresses more than
fieldwork ethics alone. It does have a section on work with (fieldwork)
research participants, but it also covers experimental work,
faculty/student interaction, the general public, dissemination of
research results, and scholarly ethics such as plagiarism. The ethics
committee felt strongly that the statement should be a framework for
ethical decision-making rather than either a list of "do's and don'ts"
or something that was narrowly applicable (e.g. to fieldworkers or
experimental linguists alone). This makes the statement somewhat
different from a good practice statement (such as that released by the
British Association for Applied Linguistics).

Because a broad and general statement leaves considerable room for
interpretation (some would say it's too vague on certain points), the
Ethics Committee will be developing a series of case studies over the
coming years. They will be posted on the Ethics Committee's blog:
http://lsaethics.wordpress.com/category/case-studies/ as they are
developed. We would also welcome feedback for topics that readers would
like to see addressed. The case studies will address in more detail some
of the specifics of certain ethical issues (such as experimental design
involving students, fieldwork in fourth-world communities, anonymization
of data, and the like).

There has been some online coverage of the statement's release. Inside
Higher Ed published an article including an interview with committee
chair Lise Dobrin (U Virginia) on June 2 (see http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/02/ethics); this article provides some further background to the statement.

The Ethics committee is now a permanent fixture for the LSA and we are
looking forward to hearing more from LSA members and others about what
they would like to see an ethics committee do. Please post your comments
and suggestions on the blog (at http://lsaethics.wordpress.com/about-2/) or email me (claire.bowern (at) yale (dot) edu) or committee chair Lise Dobrin (ld4n (at) virginia (dot) edu).

[Guest post by Claire Bowern, LSA Ethics committee member and blog
co-webmaster]

Follow up: Not to split infinitives

As I promised last week, I have a slightly more elaborate analysis of two functions of negated infinitives. Recall that I experienced a very brief confusion during a speech by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney said something like the following:

1. Part of our responsibility was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done.

(This is just a portion of Mr. Cheney's sentence, edited to highlight the grammatical element I'm interested in here. Those interested in the content of the speech can see a transcript at the Washington Post's web page.)

I experienced a sort of garden-path phenomenon, in that I expected responsibility was not to introduce some task outside the set of things that are our responsibility - something like 2.

2. Forgetting the harm was not our responsibility.

But of course, as I quickly realized, the sentence actually intended something like 3.

3. Not forgetting the harm was our responsibility.

Call sentence 2 the no responsibility reading; call 3 the responsibility for negative reading.

I suggested last week that these two meanings could be suggested by placing the negative element - the word not - either before or after the infinitive marker to. It was my expectation that placing not before the infinitive marker would tend to suggest no responsibility, while placing not between the infinitive marker and the verb would tend to suggest responsibility for negative. Got that? Maybe I'd better illustrate it.

4. My responsibility is not to foo (but to faa). [no responsibility]

5. My responsibility is to not foo (and you shouldn't, either). [responsibility for negative]

As I hope was clear in the previous posting, these are simply my own intuitions about my own usage, not a theory about negation in English. Today, however, I have a bit more data to add, based on a brief exploration of the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

I searched the corpus for instances of job is not to and job is to not. The former search returned 61 results; the latter only three. (As I suggested last time, the lack of examples in the latter case may be related to the common preference to avoid split infinitives.) Since there were so few instances of job is to not, I searched again for responsibility is to not, but found only a single example. The following is based on comparison of all four job/responsibility is to not tokens, and 59 tokens of job is not to. (Two of the original 61 tokens were found to be repetitions of other tokens from the same media source - possibly from different editions.) The data are summarized in the following table.

	no responsibility	responsibility for negative	other*
job is not to	71.2% (42 of 59)	6.8% (4 of 59)	22.0% (13 of 59)
job is to not	0.0% (0 of 4)	75.0% (3 of 4)	25.0% (1 of 4)
*The category other includes tokens that could not be placed unambiguously into either category.

These numbers largely accord with my intuition. The string job is not to most often precedes a task which is not part of the job (no responsibility); much less frequently, the job is defined as doing the activity named by the negated verb phrase (responsibility for negative). In contrast, the string job (or responsibility) is to not most often indicates a responsibility for negative - but the small number of tokens makes this conclusion weaker.

Appendix - Examples
not to::no responsibility
true. And I think, you know, at this point, Bush's job is not to win back disaffected Democrats, it's to win back people who

a reservist, " you realize that they're cheating you, " that the job is not to defend the country but " to defend settlements. " Even before

he would recommend be changed to improve the racial climate in this country. Our job is not to make a report. Our job is simply to advise this president

not to::responsibility for negative
They look like bushes, " said Redford resident Enrique Madrid. " " Their job is not to be seen. They take pride in that. They brag about

the innocent. That's right. But also, the Attorney General's job is not to get caught up in the hysteria of the moment and the opinion

not to::unclear
off if they had a different ruler, " he said. " But my job is not to pick their rulers for them. I always tell everybody I am

the Persian Gulf before the operation started, and one point I made was your job is not to interrupt an interview. I'm disturbed when I see that.

to not::no responsibility
N/A

to not::responsibility for negative
he might vote on it, should it ever come to that. And his job is to not give them any inkling whatsoever. Because in the event that it

see an English-speaking campus some day, largely instigated by the Malaysians themselves. My job is to not get in the way. # By Terry Fredrickson ITM-MUCIA Cooperative Program

time and again, along with all the other jurors, that that was our responsibility is to not make a decision before all of the facts were in and that

to not::other
lyrics. This woman taught me when you're standing up to sing, your job is to not only be vocally correct, but to get it across to the

Reactions to Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute (Part II)

In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, former Vice President Cheney made the following suggestion.

The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work, proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.

I don't want to devalue the difficult work of intelligence officers or to question their dedication to their jobs or the country they serve, but Mr. Cheney's assertion sort of reminds me of an old elephant joke.

A: Why do you have a banana in your ear?
B: It keeps elephants away.
A: There are no elephants in this part of the world.
B: You see! It works!

Recall that Mr. Cheney's speech yesterday was part of an on-going series of public speeches defending the actions of the former administration, which he served, and suggesting that the current administration's approach to terrorism is insufficient. Consider the following from yesterday's speech:

Behind the overwrought reaction to enhanced interrogations is a broader misconception about the threats that still face our country. You can sense the problem in the emergence of euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and our terrorist enemy.

Apparently using the term war where terrorists are concerned is starting to feel a bit dated. So henceforth we're advised by the administration to think of the fight against terrorists as, quote, overseas contingency operations.

It is striking that Cheney calls "overseas contingency operations" a euphemism, right after referring to "enhanced interrogations" himself, but the slippery definition of euphemism may have to wait for another post. For today, I want to point out that this entire line of discourse is based on the assumption that something terrible would have happened were it not for the actions of the Bush administration, including "enhanced interrogations" and other controversial activities. The "entire line of discourse" I refer to includes not just Mr. Cheney's recent remarks, but also expressions by other politicians, journalists, and ordinary people that the Bush administration "kept us safe."

There are two problems with this presupposition. First, if the claim is that there were fewer than two attacks on US soil in which thousands of people were killed during the time that President Bush held office, virtually every US president can make the same claim. (Critics of the Bush administration suggest that the notion that there were no attacks after 11 September 2001 is not true. Examples here and here.) Second, and more to the point, there is no evidence that actions undertaken between 2001-2008, such as "enhanced interrogations", "extraordinary rendition", or operating the prison at Guantanamo Bay specifically prevented any attack. At least two people employed by the US government during those years, former State Department lawyer Philip Zelikow (PDF here) and former counterterrorism agent Ali Soufan, have suggested that these techniques were either unnecessary or counter-productive.

An additional problem is in the nature of presupposition itself. The idea that the United States would inevitably be attacked is seldom asserted overtly. Rather, assertions that a terrible harm was averted are built on an implicit assumption that the threat of harm exists. I admit that former Vice President Cheney probably knows more than I do about the existence of potential threats to the United States, though it is highly unlikely that he knows more about such threats than members of the current administration do. In any case, though, what I lament is harm to public discourse caused by presupposed, ill defined notions of reified threats.

Reactions to Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute (Part I)

I had two reactions while listening to former Vice President Richard Cheney's speech about national security yesterday, 21 May 2009. In this posting I will describe a purely linguistic and fairly trivial reaction. I'll also have another, I hope more substantive post on the framing of information in that speech and recent terrorism-related discourse.

Not to split infinitives
First, the trivial reaction to linguistic form. The former vice president said,

Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse.

This struck me as slightly odd, and after a second's reflection I figured out why.

1. Our responsibility was not to do X.
2. Our responsibility was to not do X.

I most readily understand structure 1 to mean that there is a set of responsibilities that includes several tasks, but that X is not one of them. On the other hand, I would use 2 to mean that the responsibility is to do the negative of X (don't forget etc.).

While listening to the former vice president, I very briefly understood something like 3.

3. Forgetting the terrible harm that had been done to America and letting 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse was not our responsibility.

What the former vice president clearly intended, though, was the sentiment expressed in 4.

4. Not forgetting the terrible harm that had been done to America and not letting 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse was our responsibility.

Of course, I was able to understand this very quickly, but the mismatch between Mr. Cheney's preferred style and my own did not go unnoticed.

I suspect that Mr. Cheney (or his speech writers) prefers not to split infinitives. That would rule out a sentence like 2, above. He is not alone: the Corpus of Contemporary American English contains many more instances of strings like responsibility not to V than responsibility to not V, as shown by the following table.

	to not	not to	example
responsibility	8	63	responsibility not to let the people down
job	4	118	the job is not to defend the country
duty	3	54	The duty not to discriminate

[NOTE: Due to a typo, an earlier version of this chart suggested that there are 543 examples of duty x not to in the corpus. There are actually 54.]

Of course, some of these not to strings intend the "no responsibility" reading, while some intend the "responsibility to negative" reading. (In other words, the author of the job example has no responsibility to defend the country, while the author of the duty example must not discriminate.) I'll look more closely at the results and try to post some sort of analysis in a few days. For now, suffice to say that while my own usage of the split infinitive doesn't appear to be unique, Mr. Cheney's avoidance seems to be more common.

American Anthropological Association - new blog

The American Anthropological Association has a new blog, which is a very good thing. I think it must be difficult, however, to select topics and coverage broadly enough to satisfy a target audience as diverse as the AAA. Even if that target audience were limited to AAA members it would be huge, and I suspect the AAA bloggers are also targeting a broader audience, at least secondarily - that's what I do, anyway.

I'm therefore somewhat disappointed, but not too surprised, with the recent entry, "Tanaka in AEQ: U.S. Anthropologists Should Address 'The End of Culture'."

The entry is quite short - about a hundred and fifty words - and mostly just reproduces the abstract of Greg Tanaka's recent "Reflection from the field" in Anthropology & Education Quarterly. What makes this unfortunate is that the abstract is a poor summary of what Tanaka actually says in his reflection essay. (In fact, I might be wrong even to call it an "abstract"; it may be better to call it an "introductory paragraph".)

According to the AAA blog post, "George Tanaka’s [sic] article in the current issue of Anthropology & Education Quarterly presents provocative findings from an action research project on a U.S. university campus...
The project reveals that a large percentage of white students cannot trace their identities to a particular nation in Europe and are, as a result, unable to name the shared meanings of an ethnic culture."

In fact, though, Tanaka's piece does not present any such research; the research is merely referred to at the beginning of the piece. The author does describe one white student who, deprived of the "deeply naturalized privilege [of] whiteness" and unwilling to identify with another ethnic identity, experiences pain and disorientation. But Tanaka does not call for re-inscribing some form of identity on de-ethnicized whites. His reflections serve as a critique of multiculturalist approaches based on exposing hierarchy, and as a call for an intersubjectivist approach that minimizes any hierarchy of ethnic or other groups.

Given the unfortunate abstract and blog post, it is unsurprising, though again unfortunate, that a commenter at the AAA blog labeled the post, and by extension the essay, a "simplistic view of culture that only includes 'ethnic culture'." I am reminded of polyglot conspiracy's round-up of comments from around the web attacking Mary Bucholtz. One small ray of hope (or maybe it's just pride): where many seemed content to critique Bucholtz without reading her work, at least the commenter at AAA confesses, "Of course, I haven’t read the article."

That's one thing for which I must thank the AAA bloggers: they led me to read (and at least mention here) Tanaka's essay. Of course that raises another sore subject, but the frustrating problems of AnthroSource can't really be laid at the door of American Anthropological Association blog.

Eggcorns and Fuzzy Spots

The term eggcorn was coined in 2003 by linguist-bloggers Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman, and has spawned something of a cottage industry of eggcorn-hunters on the Web. An eggcorn is defined as "an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect [which] introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context." The eponymous eggcorn, for example, is used by some speakers in place of acorn. Though not standard, the substitution is easy to understand: acorns are seeds (corns) that are sort of shaped like eggs. On web sites such as The Eggcorn Database and Eggcorn Forum, Wikipedia, and various blogs, scores of amateur lexicographers (including yours truly) track and discuss the production and use of these lexical innovations.

Recently Eggcorn Forum contributor Kem Luther, noting uses of both brute and blunt in place of brunt, wrote

I'm beginning to think that people have large fuzzy spots in their brains where the semantic contents of the words "brute," "blunt," "brunt," and "butt" are stored. Speakers do not have a good handle on the meaning of these terms.

I think he is quite right. Furthermore, Kem's observation about "large fuzzy spots" has lead me to create a half-baked theory about the role of word frequency in eggcorn formation.

If, as some linguists suggest (e.g. Bybee 1995, Clark 1987, Tomasello 2005 inter alia), language acquisition and language change are sensitive to frequency, then it is unsurprising that lower frequency words should be less clearly differentiated even in the minds of adult speakers. In other words, structures that are heard more frequently will be learned faster and "better" in the sense that the hearer can use them in the standard way that other speakers do; words that are heard less frequently will be learned less well. (Such claims can be somewhat controversial for morphology and syntax, but I think much less so for words.)

Add to low frequency a competition with phonologically similar words, and certain forms seem doomed to reside in "large fuzzy spots" of the mental lexicon. Low-frequency near-homonyms are not heard often enough to be remembered clearly, and they shade into one another in the hearer's memory.

None of the words brute, blunt, brunt or butt appear on Kilgarriff's lemmatized BNC word frequency list, which means that none of them occur more than 800 times in the hundred-million word British National Corpus.^* It is therefore unsurprising that this complex is confounded for many speakers.

In comparison, the complex of and, ant, and amp are not confounded despite their phonological similarity, since they are the 4th, 5539th, and 5960th most frequent words in the BNC, respectively. Conversely, I would not expect moan to be part of such a complex even though it is only the 6309th most frequent word, since it has few near homophones. (Of course, having written that, I fully expect someone to find an eggcorn of moan within a few days. Comments are open.)

Bybee, Joan. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10, 425-455.

Clark, Eve. 1987. The principle of contrast: a constraint on language acquisition. In B. MacWhinney (ed) Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, 1-33. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Constructing a Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

^* Even if the word butt is relatively common in speech, it probably occurs most frequently in the anatomical sense. A Google search for "butt of" (as in "butt of the joke" etc.) returns more than a million and a half raw hits, but "my butt" returns nearly four and a half million. On the other hand, the conjunction but is the 23rd most frequent word on the Kilgarriff list; I suspect that it is frequent enough to avoid conflation with its homophones. Speaking of homophones, by the way, Meriam Webster's 10th Collegiate Dictionary lists six separate head words for butt and five for but.