I’ve been working with an image-generating algorithm by Vadim Epstein called CLIP+FFT, which uses OpenAI’s CLIP algorithm to judge whether images match a given caption, and an FFT algorithm to come up with new images to present to CLIP. Give it any random phrase, and CLIP+FFT will try its best to come up with a matching image. And now there’s a version that will generate images to go with several phrases in a row and then fuse them into a video.
Here’s the sea shanty The Wellerman, sung by Nathan Evans, Jonny Stewart, and others, and illustrated by CLIP+FFT.
Now, there are several interesting things going on here, once you get past the sheer AI fever dream horror of it. One thing you’ll notice is that I changed some of the lines from the standard lyrics. CLIP+FFT deals with each line independently, so even if we have been talking about a ship and a whale throughout the song, the AI doesn’t know that in “when down on her a right whale bore”, the “her” refers to a ship. I made similar tweaks in one or two places.
There was nothing I could do about the line “One day, when the tonguing is done”. Trying to be more precise about the whaling sense of “tonguing” would, if anything, have made the image more horrifying.
Having none of the “Wellerman is a ship” context, the AI interprets The Wellerman itself as some kind of eldritch oil well drilling supervillain.
I kind of like what happened to “The winds blew hard, her bow dipped down,” with golden locks of hair and bows everywhere. I mean, I like it in a “oh no this has gone terribly yet fascinatingly wrong” sort of way.
The image for “We’ll take our leave and go” is also interesting, since it illustrates “leave” in so many ways. Sometimes there are cars and suitcases, or people shaking hands. Interestingly, I see hints of European Union flags and British flags in many of them, signs that during training CLIP was learning to associate “leave” with Brexit.
The “bully boys” are hilarious, classic glowering expressions and mean-kid haircuts. The AI is not used to the early-1900s meaning of “bully = awesome”
You’ll notice that many of the frames have text, which I find charming, as if the AI is frowning to itself and muttering “tea. tea. Billy. tea.” or “blow. blow.” The less interpretable the phrase is in image form, the more likely the AI is to use text instead.
I also had CLIP+FFT illustrate The Twelve Days of Christmas and this is one of my favorite frames from it: Ten Lords A-Leaping
To see the other illustrated Days of Christmas (including the weirdly human-faced swans), become a supporter of AI Weirdness! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.
Every visual iteration of “the tonguing” is deeply unsettling. I love it.
My best friend is a disabled veteran, with traumatic brain injuries, seizures, and memory issues. That often means it’s hard for him to maintain an interest because it gets frustrating to always feel like you can’t keep up with anything.
He’s developed a recent interest in Koine Greek, specifically the New Testament Greek but it’s branching off into him trying his best to teach himself syntax and vocabulary in general. I can help with the “What does genitive mean?” but I have zero knowledge of Greek itself.
So I’m reaching out to offer a paid position for a knowledgeable tutor in Koine Greek, who can host regular virtual sessions and will have the patience to repeat lessons as necessary. I know most language learning needs to go A -> AB -> ABC -> ABCD, but the ideal tutor would be willing to go A -> AB -> A -> AB -> ABC as needed by the student.
He has been working SO HARD, listening to children’s songs to remember the alphabet, taking copious notes so he doesn’t lose anything he’s gained, and I would be willing to pay someone just to help him achieve this goal.
It’s more of a scholarly pursuit to understand various Biblical languages rather than some religious quest, but he’s also down for conversations about religion in the abstract as well.
If you can help, or have a lead, please DM me here or email breakaribecca @ gmail dot com.
We don’t talk about Bruno, no, no, no! We don’t talk about Bruno… but
The more I play this song in my head, the more impressed I am with the rhyme schemes.
It was my weddingday It was our weddingday We were getting ready, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky No clouds allowed in the sky
Bruno walks inwith a mischievous grin- Thunder!! You telling this story,oramI? I’m sorry, mi vida, go on
Bruno says, “Itlookslikerain” Why did he tell us? In doing so, he floodsmybrain Abuela, get the umbrellas Married in a hurricane What a joyous day… but anyway
We don’t talk about Bruno, no, no, no! We don’t talk about Bruno!
Pepa and Felix, aside from interrupting one another (Pepa’s side-eye!), get some nice internal and partial rhymes in: ‘wedding-getting-ready’, ‘clouds-allowed’. I love the that ‘umbrellas’ is rhymed with ‘he tell us’, and partly echoed in ‘Abuela’, and the sort of echo between ‘married’ and ‘hurricane’, while ‘looks like rain’ and ‘floods my brain’ plays on sound, rhyme and the watery imagery.
Hey!Grew to live in fearofBrunostutteringorstumbling I could always hearhim sort of mutteringandmumbling I associate him with the sound of falling sand, ch-ch-ch It’s a heavy lift, with a giftsohumbling AlwaysleftAbuela and the familyfumbling Grappling with prophecies they couldn’t understand Do you understand?
This bit of Dolores’ is wonderfully complex. ‘Fear-stuttering-stumbling’ and ‘hear-muttering-mumbling’ has rhyme and alliteration across and within lines. I also think ‘fear/hear’ is also dimly echoed by the ‘-ering’ in ‘stuttering/muttering’ because then a similar pattern is repeated with ‘lift-gift-humbling’ and ‘left-family-fumbling’. There’s some great assonance with ‘associate-sound-sand’, and then some partial alliteration with ‘grappling-prophecies’.
A seven-foot frame Rats along his back When he calls your name Itall fades to black Yeah, he sees your dreams And feastson your screams (hey!)
I’ve highlighted the stressed vowels in Camilo’s part. English spelling obscures some of the phonological patterns, but using a rough phonetic transcription, it’s perhaps easier to see the same vowels pop up over and over, with the high front vowel /i/ in ‘sees-dreams-feasts-screams’ building some tension at the end.
ɛ-ʊ-eɪ
a-ɔ-a
ɔ-ɔ-eɪ
ɔ-eɪ-a
i-ɔ-i
i-ɔ-i
We don’t talk about Bruno, no, no, no! (We don’t talk about Bruno, no, no, no!) We don’t talk about Bruno (we don’t talk about Bruno!)
He told me my fish would die The next day: dead! (No, no!) He told me I’d grow a gut! And just like he said… (no, no!) He said that all my hair would disappear, now look at my head (no, no! Hey!) Your fate is sealed when your prophecy is read!
Not much to say about the bit above - maybe that’s why Lin-Manuel Miranda gave it to the townsfolk!
He told me that the life of my dreams would be promised, and someday be mine He told me that my power would grow, like the grapes that thrive on the vine Óye, Mariano’s on his way
He told methat the man of my dreams would be just out of reach Betrothed to another It’s like I hear him now Hey sis, I wantnot a sound out of you (it’s like I can hear him now) I can hear him now
These two bits contrast with one another in the music itself, and mirror each other in the language. It’s neat that for Isabela’s line with ‘me-dreams-promised-someday’, the syllable with /m/ and/or /i/ is sung on a higher note that the surrounding syllables, while in the corresponding line for Dolores’ part ‘me-man-dreams-reach’, the /m/ and/or /i/ is generally on a lower note than the surrounding syllables. Then there is also some alliteration ‘grow-grapes’ and even ‘thrive-vine’, ‘betrothed-another’ and ‘want-not-sound’.
Rhyme scheme nerdfest over … for now. That’s what you get for talking about Bruno!
I recently wondered if there was a way to visualise some aspects of the phonological character of Quenya and Sindarin, and the differences between them. The following charts are based on the Namárië poem for Quenya and The King’s Letter for Sindarin. I did a broad phonological transcription for both, then ran frequency counts and relative frequencies on the phonemes. And here are some of the results!
1. Tolkien liked his alveolar stops! And whilst Quenya shows a preference for voiceless stops over voiced stops, the reverse is true of Sindarin.
Part of the reason why the Sindarin voiced stops are so prevalent is due to the extensive consonant mutation system of Sindarin. In the case of stop consonants, the soft mutation turns voiceless stops into voiced stops in certain phonological and/or grammatical environments.
2. Both Quenya and Sindarin prefer front vowels over back vowels, i.e. /i/ and /e/ are preferred over /u/ and /o/ (the Sindarin text happened not to have /u/ at all). The low vowel /ɑ/ is the most frequent vowel in both languages.
Tolkien wrote that in Quenya, the vowel sign for /ɑ/ was often left out in writing, e.g. calma ‘lamp’ could be written as clm (using the equivalent Elvish characters, of course!).
3. Quenya seems to be more vowel-heavy than Sindarin, but Sindarin’s consonants seem to have a larger proportion of liquids, nasals and fricatives … and Sindarin /n/ and /r/ are super-popular!
Almost half of the phonemes shown for Quenya are vowels, compared with two-fifths in Sindarin. As Tolkien wrote, Quenya words more often ended in a vowel, whilst those in Sindarin more often ended in a consonant.
In Sindarin, about two in seven phonemes (of those shown in the chart) is either /r/ or /n/! In Quenya, /n/ appears about twice as often as /m/, but in Sindarin, /n/ appears about seven times more often than /m/!
A friend of mine has asked me to spread the word: some former students of his are conducting an evaluation task on British English. If you’re an English speaker from the UK and are interested in participating, you can follow this link:
I haven’t written anything for this blog for ages, but this is something I wrote for another one…
English has a lot of relatives. I don’t mean languages to which it is related, but rather relative clauses. I’m only going to focus here on some so-called restrictive relative clauses. An example is given in (1) (the relative clause is in bold).
(1) The wolf that ate grandma was in bed.
In (1), the relative clause helps us to identify which wolf we are referring to, i.e. out of all the wolves in context, we are referring to the one that ate grandma. In other words, the relative clause in (1) restricts the referent of the noun modified by the relative clause, in this case wolf.
There are quite a few types of relative clause which can be used to restrict the referent of a noun. Some of them look quite similar to one another but they behave in slightly different ways as we will see.
First of all, there are relative clauses introduced by relative pronouns (whoorwhich) and those introduced by that. Let’s call them wh-relatives and that-relatives respectively.
(2) a. The wolf that ate grandma was in bed.
b. The wolf which ate grandma was in bed.
The noun modified by a wh-relative or a that-relative can correspond to a number of different positions inside the relative clause. In (2), for example, the noun wolf corresponds to the subject of ate. However, it could correspond to the object, like in (3), or the object of a preposition, like in (4), as well.
(3) a. The wolf that we saw was in bed.
b. The wolf which we saw was in bed.
(4) a. The wolf that Red Riding Hood talked to was in bed.
b. The wolf which Red Riding Hood talked to was in bed.
c. The wolf to which Red Riding Hood talked was in bed.
Some people would say (4b) is not correct because it has a stranded preposition, and that (4c) is the correct version. However, we are interested in what English speakers actually do, not what some people think they should do. Interestingly, if we use a that-relative, like in (4a), we have no choice but to strand the preposition! (5) is not even acceptable to English grammar pedants! (* means unacceptable/ungrammatical).
(5) *The wolf to that Red Riding Hood talked was in bed.
English also has restrictive relative clauses introduced by neither a relative pronoun nor that. Let’s call these zero-relatives because there is nothing (zero) visible/audible to introduce them. The noun modified by a zero-relative can correspond to an object or the object of a preposition in a relative clause. Some examples are given in (6).
(6) a. The wolf we saw was in bed.
b. The wolf Red Riding Hood talked to was in bed.
So far, zero-relatives look just like wh-relatives and that-relatives except that the relative pronoun or that is missing. However, there is another difference. We saw in (2) that the noun modified by a wh-relative or a that-relative can correspond to the subject of the relative clause. However, this is not possible when the noun is modified by a zero-relative.
(7) *The wolf ate grandma was in bed.
In (7), the intended meaning is the one where wolf corresponds to the subject of ate. However, (7) is unacceptable/ungrammatical. To express this meaning, we would need to use a wh-relative or a that-relative instead.
We have seen that a noun modified by a zero-relative cannot correspond to the subject of a relative clause. There are other restrictive relative clauses where the modified noun can only correspond to the subject. These are the so-called reduced relatives.
(8) a. The wolf eating grandma has such big ears, eyes and teeth.
b. The person eaten by the wolf was grandma.
They are called reduced because they seem to be reduced versions of wh-relatives or that-relatives.
(9) a. The wolf which/that is eating grandma has such big ears, eyes and teeth.
b. The person who/that was eaten by the wolf was grandma.
However, various pieces of evidence suggest that the examples in (8) are not the results of bits of (9) being deleted. For example, there are acceptable reduced relatives with no acceptable ‘full’ counterpart. Therefore, reduced relatives are not literally reductions of full relatives.
(10) a. The creature resembling grandma is a wolf.
b. *The creature which/that is resembling grandma is a wolf.
Reduced relatives in English are formed using the participle forms of the verb: either the present participle, e.g. eating in (8a), or the passive participle, e.g. eaten in (8b). Even though the passive participle looks like the past participle in English, the evidence tells us that reduced relatives can be formed using the passive participle, but not the past participle.
(11) a. The wolf has eaten grandma.
b. *The wolf eaten grandma is in bed.
In (11a), eaten is a past participle (not a passive participle). If reduced relatives were formed using the past participle and if the noun modified by a reduced relative can only correspond to the subject of the relative clause, we would expect (11b) to be acceptable. However, it isn’t. This, among other things, tells us that it is the passive participle that is used to form this type of reduced relative.
There is a lot more to say, and we haven’t even mentioned all the types of relative clause that English has to offer! But that must wait for later. If I say anymore at present, I fear you might start to envy grandma.
(No grandmas were harmed in the writing of this blogpost… well, one was eaten, but the rest are fine)
In English, the subordinating conjunction that is often optional.
(1) You think that John kissed Mary.
(2) You think John kissed Mary.
(1) and (2) are both acceptable sentences in English: that is present in (1) but absent in (2).
When we ask a question about an element inside the subordinate clause, that usually remains optional, as in (3) and (4). Note how who(m) appears in sentence-initial position. However, we still intuitively feel that, in this particular example, it is the direct object of kissed. Since direct objects in English follow the relevant verb (Maryfollowskissed in (1) and (2)), we can capture this intuition by putting a trace of who(m), represented as twho(m), in the position just after kissed.
(3) Who(m) do you think that John kissed twho(m)?
(4) Who(m) do you think John kissed twho(m)?
However, there are instances when that is not optional. When we ask a question about the subject of the subordinate clause (corresponding to John in all the examples so far), that must be absent (* means that the sentence is unacceptable).
(5) *Who do you think that twho kissed Mary?
(6) Who do you think twho kissed Mary?
The unacceptable configuration involves that followed immediately by a trace, hence this effect is called the that-trace effect (Perlmutter, 1968).
Why is the that-trace effect interesting?
Thethat-trace effect is interesting in a number of respects, but I’ll just mention two of them. The first is the question of how we, as English speakers, come to ‘know’ that there is a contrast between (5) and (6) given that that is generally optional as we saw in (1) and (2), and (3) and (4). Unless you’ve studied syntax, you’ve probably never been explicitly taught that there exists a that-trace effect in English at all. So how do we learn such an effect? Phillips (2013) looks at how frequent examples like (3-6) are in a corpus of speech directed at children. This is what he found (Phillips, 2013: 144):
(7) a. Who do you think that John met __? 2 / 11,308
b. Who do you think John met __? 159 / 11,308
c. *Who do you think that __ left? 0 / 11,308
d. Who do you think __ left? 13 / 11,308
The corpus contains 11,308 examples of wh-questions (i.e. questions involving the wh-phraseswho, what, etc.). Out of the 11,308 examples, there were no examples of the form in (7c), i.e. cases where the subject of the subordinate clause is questioned. This is the configuration that English speakers judge unacceptable. What is particularly interesting is (7a). Out of the 11,308 examples, there were only two tokens where that is present and the direct object of the subordinate clause has been questioned. Yet speakers judge such sentences as acceptable. If examples like (7a) are so rare, why don’t speakers hypothesise that (7c) just happens to be very rare as well? Alternatively, given how rare it is to find thatinwh-questions, why don’t speakers hypothesise that that is generally impossible in wh-questions? Either way, it is quite difficult to see how the contrast between (5) and (6) (or (7c) and (7d)) can be acquired purely from child-directed speech. We thus hypothesise that there is something about the way the syntax (of English) works that allows us to ‘know’ about the that-trace effect. This is a classic argument based on the poverty of the stimulus.
The second point of interest comes from the fact that English has a that-trace effect as well as an anti-that-trace effect. The anti-that-trace effect can be seen in relative clauses. In English, we can form relative clauses using that. In general, that is optional in relative clauses just as it is in (1-4) above (we use traces again and the relative clause is in boldface).
(8) The woman that John kissed twoman is called Mary.
(9) The woman John kissed twomanis called Mary.
In (8) and (9) we have relativised a direct object; woman is interpreted as the direct object of kissed inside the relative clause.
Now, if we relativise a subject, that is no longer optional. In such cases, that is obligatory.
(10) The man thattmankissed Mary is called John.
(11) *The man tman kissed Mary is called John.
Once again there is something special about the relationship between that and the subject of the subordinate clause. However, the effect in (10) and (11) is the exact opposite of the that-trace effect seen in (5) and (6)! As seen in (5), that immediately follow by a trace is unacceptable; that must be absent, as in (6). In (10) and (11), the situation is reversed. As seen in (10), that immediately followed by a trace is acceptable; the absence of that results in unacceptability, as in (11). We thus call the effect in (10) and (11), the anti-that-trace effect.
The problem for us, then, is that there is something about the syntax of English that allows us to ‘know’ that the that-trace effect exists, but which also allows the existence of its opposite, the anti-that-trace effect. The challenge, which I am working on at the moment, is to find out what that something is!
References
Perlmutter, D. M. (1968). Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Phillips, C. (2013). On the nature of island constraints II: Language learning and innateness. In J. Sprouse & N. Hornstein (Eds.), Experimental Syntax and Island Effects (pp. 132–157). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
These were too good not to share! They’re entries in a little glossary of nature terms from Cambridgeshire and neighbouring counties (cited from A Poet’s Field Guide by Dr. Robert Macfarlane in CAM Issue 74, 2015, pp 32-37).
roke(n.) - smoke-like mist that rises in the evenings off marshes and water meadows; also very faint rain.
rodham(n.) - a raised bank or ridge of silt in the Fens, formerly the bed and sides of a river or tidal creek; roddamy land is rolling or undulating land.
tabernacle(n.) - farming term for an old barn or store-shed.
fizmer(n.) - rustling noise produced in grass by petty agitations of the wind.
rawky(adj.) - of weather or atmosphere: cold, damp, chilly, dull, foggy.
donk,donkey (adj.) - wet, moist or damp; generally applied to land of soil.
horizontigo(n.) - the malaise induced by sustained exposure to flat terrain; the sudden feeling of fright brought about by contemplation of an intensely lateral terrain (a coinage from a correspondent).
smeuse,smuise (n.) - a hole in the base of a hedge caused by the repeated passage of a small animal; a hare’s track through a hedge.
clock-ice (n.) - ice that has been cracked and crazed by fissures, usually produced by the pressure of walkers or skaters.
bullfinch (n.) - a hedge that is allowed to grow high without laying.
honeyfur (n.) - the soft seeds of grasses and rushes (a coinage by a 4-5 year old).
mabish,mavis (n.) - regional names for the song thrush (Turdus philomelos)
As the author points out, although such terms are rapidly disappearing, there is nothing to stop new terms being coined! Has anyone got other terms for these or similar things?
Some friends and I were talking about words in certain languages which have no direct translation into another language. One that came up was the German Treppenwitz (lit. ‘staircase joke’, cf. French l'esprit de l'escalier).We probably all know the feeling of thinking of the perfect retort when it’s too late, that perfect retort being the Treppenwitz.
Anyway, I felt my English deserved a word for this as well, and for that reason I invented aftertort. It’s made up of after+ tort(cf. re-tort) and also serves as a play on afterthought (it works better if you speak a non-rhotic English variety).
A few weeks ago there was a two-part programme on BBC entitled Talk to the Animals presented by Lucy Cooke. As you might imagine, it was about ‘cracking the animal code’ – finding out what animals are communicating with each other and how they are doing so. It was a great programme and got me thinking again about the differences between humans and other animals in terms of the way we communicate.
Our most stand-out method of communication is, of course, language. And our language is used to communicate just about anything and everything we can think of. Whilst animal communication typically concerns food, danger and mating, human communication goes way beyond these things. The more interesting question for me, however, is not so much what we are communicating, but how we are communicating it. How do we package the information we wish to convey and how do we structure it? How is language designed such that it allows us to do these things in the first place?
This question is huge and, surprise, surprise, unanswered. Therefore, I’m simply going to muse on one of the most significant design features of language that has been identified – duality of patterning.
Every human language has a system by which meaningless sounds are combined to make meaningful units (these can be thought of as words), and every human language has a separate system which combines these meaningful units into phrases and sentences (the same applies to Sign Languages). This means that a language can have a reasonably small number of meaningless elements from which it can generate a very large number of distinct words. Furthermore, this very large number of distinct words can be combined to form an even larger number of distinct sentences (in fact, an infinite number of sentences). The capacity of human language to take discrete elements from one level and combine them to make discrete units at another level is what Charles F. Hockett called duality of patterning (Hockett 1960).
It is an immensely efficient way of doing things. Imagine what language would be like if this were not the case. To be meaningful at all, the elements of language would have to be meaningful in and of themselves. Since there would be no way of combining them, we could only express as many things as we have words for. The shapes of these words would be chaotic as well since there would be no way of combining smaller meaningless elements into words.
A number of authors have suggested that a system for combining meaningless elements into meaningful words does exist in other animals, e.g. humpback whales and chaffinches (see Hurford 2007), but a system for combining meaningful words into phrases and sentences appears to be much rarer and possibly unique to humans. Why should humans have two combinatorial systems at their disposal? Or could it be that the two systems are fundamentally the same but appear different purely because of the nature of the elements they manipulate? This suggests that studying the similarities and differences between phonology and syntax will shed light on the underpinnings of our combinatorial abilities (see Nevins (2010) who argues that the operation Agree is found in both syntax and phonology). Comparing these with the abilities of other animals may then shed light on the evolution of language itself.
References
Hockett, C. F. (1960). The Origin of Speech. Scientific American,203(3), 89–96.
Hurford, J. R. (2007). The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nevins, A. (2010). Locality in Vowel Harmony. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
I wrote this for the CamLangSci blog last month… I have been working on reconstruction in relative clauses quite a bit recently, so this represents one way of desaturating my brain. That is not to imply that it is a tedious topic – far from it. Reconstruction effects in relative clauses give us a fascinating clue about how these constructions are built and how our interpretive faculties ‘read’ such structures. I have tried to avoid technicalities and jargon as much as possible, and to keep this blog entry a reasonable length whilst also getting to the core of some very deep questions in current syntactic theory. So, let’s get started.
We’ll start by considering the following data (if two elements have the same subscript, it means that the two elements refer to the same individual; if the subscripts are different, the elements refer to different individuals. The * means that the sentence is ungrammatical).
(1) a. Samx likes the picture of himselfx.
b. *Samx likes the picture of himx.
c. Samx thinks that Rosie likes the picture of himx.
In (1a), himself must refer to Sam. In (1b), him must not refer to Sam but must refer to some other singular male individual (some speakers find (1b) acceptable (Reinhart & Reuland 1993), but I and most other people I have asked do not). (1c) is ambiguous: him can either refer to Sam (as shown by the subscripts) or to some other singular male individual. The pattern in (1) is traditionally captured by the Binding Conditions (Conditions A and B to be more precise) (Chomsky, 1981). The Binding Conditions are quite technical so I won’t go into them here. What is important is the pattern in (1).
What happens if we relativise picture of X, i.e. modify picture of X with a relative clause?
(2) a. The picture of himselfx that Samx likes is quite flattering.
b. ?/*The picture of himx that Samx likes is quite flattering.
c. The picture of himx that Samx thinks that Rosie likes is quite flattering.
As we can see, the pattern in (2) is exactly the same as in (1). This suggests that we are interpreting the head of the relative clause, i.e. picture of himself, in the object position of like, since then (2) can be interpreted in the same way as (1). This in turn suggests that the head of the relative clause originated inside the relative clause and was moved to the position in which it is pronounced. However, when it comes to interpreting (rather than pronouncing) the structure, we ‘reconstruct’ the movement and interpret the head of the relative clause in its original position (see Bianchi, 1999; Kayne, 1994; Schachter, 1973; Vergnaud, 1974). For example, (2a) is interpreted as (3), where the bold copy is the one being interpreted. Note that this bold copy is not pronounced.
(3) The picture of himselfx that Samxlikes(the)picture of himselfxis quite flattering.
The bold the is in brackets because technically the determiner the does not reconstruct with the head of the relative clause picture of himself (Bianchi, 2000; Cinque, 2013; Kayne, 1994; Williamson, 1987 on the so-called indefiniteness effect on the copy internal to the relative clause). Reconstruction thus captures the similarities between (1) and (2) in a straightforward way.
In (2), the head of the relative clause served as the subject of the main clause. What happens when it serves as the direct object of the main clause?
(4) a. *Mrs. Cottony hates the picture of himselfx that Samxlikes.
b. ?/*Mrs. Cottony hates the picture of himx that Samxlikes.
c. Mrs. Cottony hates the picture of himx that Samx thinks that Rosie likes.
If the head of the relative is picture of him, the pattern is the same as in (1) and (2), which suggests that reconstruction has taken place. However, (4a) is ungrammatical for all the speakers that I have asked (this result is highly significant given what is usually said in the literature). This result is unexpected, especially if reconstruction is available in (4b) and (4c). If reconstruction were available, picture of himself should be able to reconstruct to the direct object position of likes inside the relative clause where it could co-refer with Sam, just like in (3). However, the only interpretation available in (4a) is the ungrammatical one where himself is trying to co-refer with Mrs. Cotton suggesting that reconstruction is impossible.
The difference between (4a) and (2a) lies in whether there is an element in the main clause that himself could get its reference from. In (2a), there is no such element, so picture of himself is forced to reconstruct so that himself gets a reference. In (4a), there is an element, albeit an unsuitable one. This suggests that the Binding Condition which allows himself to get its reference from another element applies blindly/automatically: himself gets bound to Mrs. Cotton automatically, which prevents reconstruction occurring. Later on, when it is time to interpret the binding relation, we discover that we were wrong to have bound himselftoMrs. Cotton, but by this time it is too late to perform reconstruction. This suggests that interpretation of syntactic structure only happens after all syntactic operations have finished. If it didn’t, we might expect that we could repair the mistake in (4a) by reconstruction. However, this is not what we find.
The same effect is also found in other constructions. Based on Browning (1987: 162-165), Brody (1995: 92) shows that (5) is acceptable suggesting that picture of himself has reconstructed to the direct object position of buy (the example is slightly adapted).
(5) This picture of himselfx is easy to make Johnxbuy.
However, reconstruction is blocked if there is a potential element that himself could get its reference from, even if it turns out later to be unsuitable (Brody, 1995: 92).
(6) *Maryy expected those pictures of himselfx to be easy to make Johnxbuy.
We have only touched the surface on reconstruction in relative clauses here (there are more reconstruction effects and more subtleties that I have been working on but which would take too long to lay out here). What we have concluded is that reconstruction is generally available in relative clauses (at least in English). This tells us that relative clauses are constructed with a copy of the head of the relative clause inside the relative clause itself. The problem is how to choose which copies to interpret. It seems that there are structural conditions which force certain copies to be interpreted, i.e. the choice is not completely free. Explaining what these conditions are can thus provide a fascinating clue about how the human mind works (and how it doesn’t).
If you’re keen to find out more, Sportiche (2006) gives a good overview of reconstruction effects and Fox (2000) develops a nice account of how interpretation interacts with syntactic structure.
References
Bianchi, V. (1999). Consequences of Antisymmetry: Headed Relative Clauses. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bianchi, V. (2000). The raising analysis of relative clauses: a reply to Borsley. Linguistic Inquiry,31(1), 123–140.
Brody, M. (1995). Lexico-Logical Form: A Radically Minimalist Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Browning, M. (1987). Null Operator Constructions. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Cinque, G. (2013). Typological Studies: Word Order and Relative Clauses. New York/London: Routledge.
Fox, D. (2000). Economy and Semantic Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kayne, R. S. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schachter, P. (1973). Focus and relativization. Language,49(1), 19–46.
Sportiche, D. (2006). Reconstruction, Binding, and Scope. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax. Volume IV (pp. 35–93). Oxford: Blackwell.
Vergnaud, J.-R. (1974). French relative clauses. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Williamson, J. S. (1987). An Indefiniteness Restriction for Relative Clauses in Lakhota. In E. J. Reuland & A. G. B. ter Meulen (Eds.), The Representation of (In)definiteness (pp. 168–190). Cambridge, MA.
I wrote this for another blog - essentially trying to introduce and work through some of the motivations for certain analyses of relative clauses without too much jargon…
Introduction
My research focuses on the syntax of relative clauses. A typical relative clause is a type of subordinate sentence which modifies a noun. For example,
(1) a. the book that I’m reading
b. that blog post you’ve written
c. the man who saw me
d. a type of subordinate sentence which modifies a noun
The clause in bold is traditionally called the relative clause. They are theoretically interesting for a number of reasons. Some syntactic ones are: they are optional, i.e. nouns do not require a relative clause; the noun being modified seems to play a role in both the main clause and the relative clause; relative clauses resemble other constructions to a greater or lesser extent, e.g. interrogatives, possessives, etc.
The head of the relative
One of the major debates in the syntax of relative clauses lies in where we say the noun being modified originates in the syntactic structure (I will call this noun the relative head from now on). Consider the following example:
(2) You wrote the book that I’m reading.
Intuitively the relative head ‘book’ is the direct object of the main clause verb ‘write’. We also understand that ‘book’ is the direct object of the relative clause verb ‘read’. How can it be two things at once?
One option is to say that ‘book’ is base-generated, i.e. enters the syntactic structure, as the direct object of ‘write’ and is co-indexed with a relative pronoun in the relative clause (if two items are co-indexed, it basically means they refer to the same thing). This relative pronoun may be ‘who’, ‘which’ or silent (or ‘that’ depending on your analysis). Adopting the silent option and symbolising this silent pronoun as REL.PRO (for ‘relative pronoun’), the sentence in (2) would have the structure in (3) (the relative clause is placed in square brackets and the co-indexing is symbolised by the subscript ‘i’).
(3) You wrote the booki[REL.PROi that I’m reading]
But how does this capture the idea that ‘book’ is also the direct object of ‘read’? For this we say that the REL.PRO has moved from the direct object position of ‘read’ to the left edge of the relative clause. This gives the structure in (4).
(4) You wrote the booki[REL.PROi that I’m reading REL.PROi]
This captures our intuitions about how ‘book’ relates to the main clause and the relative clause. This is the sort of analysis found in Chomsky (1977) and Sauerland (2003), for example.
Another option would be to abandon co-indexing and say that ‘book’ is base-generated as the direct object of ‘read’. Instead of having a silent REL.PRO move to the left edge of the relative clause, the head of the relative itself moves (I use a subscript ‘1’ to symbolise that the two occurrences of ‘book’ are two copies of a single item rather than two independent items).
(5) You wrote the [book1 that I’m reading book1]
We would then say that the copy of ‘book’ in the direct object position of ‘read’ is not pronounced but is nonetheless present in the structure since we are able to interpret ‘book’ as being the direct object of ‘read’. The copy at the left edge of the relative clause is pronounced, giving the sentence in (2). This is the sort of analysis found in Kayne (1994).
The head, the ‘the’ and the relative clause
The type of relative clause we have been looking at is called a restrictive relative because it restricts the possible denotation of the noun. For example, (6) means that you wrote something and that something is a book AND that something is being read by me. In other words, the direct object of ‘write’ has to satisfy both the condition of being a book and being something that I’m reading. It allows you to distinguish this book from one that I’m not reading.
(6) You wrote the book that I’m reading.
To capture this, we say that the head of the relative and the relative clause are in the scope of the determiner ‘the’.
(7) [the [book that I’m reading]]
This can be capture in the syntactic structure by saying that [book that I’m reading] forms a constituent which excludes the determiner ‘the’. Now we have an interesting problem: ‘the’ appears with nouns, not clauses, which might suggest the following structure.
(8) [the [book [that I’m reading]]]
In this structure, ‘the’ requires a noun and so selects ‘book’. The relative clause modifies ‘book’ and so attaches to ‘book’. But there is evidence suggesting that the presence of ‘the’ is tied to the presence of the relative clause (a * means that the sentence is ungrammatical).
(9) a. London is beautiful.
b. *The London is beautiful.
c. The London that I remember is beautiful.
d. *London that I remember is beautiful.
A proper name, for example, ‘London’, cannot ordinarily appear with ‘the’ (hence the difference between (9a) and (9b)). However, when a proper name is modified by a relative clause, ‘the’ must appear (hence the difference between (9c) and (9d)). This suggests that ‘the’ requires the relative clause and not the noun! The following structure captures this idea (see Kayne, 1994).
(10) [the [[book] that I’m reading]]
Now, we have to come up with a way of relating ‘the’ to the head of the relative ‘book’, unless we want to abandon the idea that ‘the’ typically appears with nouns (an idea which might not be as crazy as it sounds). We could say that ‘the’ and ‘book’, by virtue of being close enough to each other in some non-technical sense, can enter into a relationship. Note that ‘book’ does not have a determiner of any kind. This is unusual in English.
(11) a. *I like book.
b. *Book is good.
We could therefore say that ‘book’ has an empty position for a determiner (I’ll call it D) that enters into a relationship with ‘the’ (see Bianchi, 2000).
(12) [the [[D book] that I’m reading]]
We can now make a prediction: if some other element occupies this D position, ‘the’ cannot form the required relationship and the sentence will be ungrammatical. A preposed genitive competes with ‘the’ in English, as seen in (13).
(13) a. the book
b. Bob’s book
c. *the Bob’s book
Now, if a preposed genitive occupies the D position that ‘the’ is aiming to form a relationship with, there will be trouble because ‘the’ and a preposed genitive cannot both be related to this same position, as seen in (13c). If ‘Bob’s’ is present, ‘the’ cannot be, but if ‘the’ is absent, the relative clause must be absent too. This accounts for why (14) is ungrammatical.
(14) *You wrote Bob’s book that I’m reading.
The only way to say what (14) intends to say is not to prepose the genitive, as in (15).
(15) You wrote the book of Bob’s that I’m reading.
Since ‘Bob’s’ no longer occupies D, ‘the’ is free to form a relationship with D and the sentence is grammatical.
Conclusion
That concludes this introduction to the syntax of relative clauses. We have seen that relative clauses are complex and have quite a counter-intuitive structure once we delve into the systematic patterns of grammaticality and ungrammaticality manifested in English. But that is the way of things – language is a part of the natural world and, just as theoretical physics is dumbfounding us with discoveries into the weird and wonderful nature of the physical universe, so too can theoretical linguistics make discoveries about the underlying structures of our linguistic universe (and all that without a Large Hadron Collider … for now).
References
Bianchi, V. (2000). The raising analysis of relative clauses: a reply to Borsley. Linguistic Inquiry,31(1), 123–140.
Chomsky, N. (1977). On Wh-Movement. In P. Culicover, T. Wasow, & A. Akmajian (Eds.), Formal Syntax (pp. 71–132). New York: Academic Press.
Kayne, R. S. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sauerland, U. (2003). Unpronounced heads in relative clauses. In K. Schwabe & S. Winkler (Eds.), The Interfaces: Deriving and interpreting omitted structures (pp. 205–226). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
When children learn their native language(s), they receive very little in the way of explicit instruction if any at all. The utterances a child is exposed to are not perfect - they contain false starts, repetitions, and various other mistakes and errors. Furthermore, children are not told what is grammatical and what is not. This latter point is especially important because it means that there is no negative evidence. Yet somehow a child is able to glean from such data the grammatical rules of their language(s). Consider the following:
(1) What did you say that Bill thought that John saw?
(2) *What did you say that Bill met the man who saw?
Despite perhaps never coming across utterances like (1) or (2), English speakers know that (1) is a grammatical sentence of English whilst (2) is not. But where did this knowledge come from? Another way of putting this question is to ask how we can know so much given how little we have to learn from. This is Plato’s Problem.
In modern linguistics, the solution to Plato’s Problem is to say that humans come equipped (i.e. it is in our genetics) with certain bits of knowledge, e.g. we instinctively/innately know how to analyse certain types of data in our environment. If we believe that any of these certain bits of knowledge that we make use of in language acquisition is specific to language, we arrive at the idea of Universal Grammar (UG).
Little announcement: So as I study Korean language all by myself, I chose this week to reread all the grammar I have learned and to repeat all the words that I didn’t learn properly. So it might get a little boring or something. I am sorry!
it’s really interesting how reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European have been used to figure out was Indo-European culture would have been like. For example:
the reconstructed language has no word for king, but it does have a word for clan chieftain so it’s been theorized that Indo-Europeans were organized in small groups or clans
there is a word for daughter-in-law but none for son-in-law which suggests that women would have joined their husbands’ families after marriage
there are many words for animals and few for fruits, veggies, and grains suggesting a meat-based diet
the existence of words for snow and winter suggest Indo-Europeans lived in a more northern climate
but it’s important to note that “the absence of a word in the reconstructed proto-language is far less compelling evidence than the presence of a word: a lack of evidence it not itself sure evidence”*.
*notes from Old English and Its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages by Orrin W. Robinson
If expression ‘cognitive studies’ means anything to you, this could be your opportunity to participate in a real associative experiment, the results of which will be later used for creation of a scientific research.
If not, this could be an opportunity to entertain yourself with a couple of weird questions :D
Anyway, any contribution would be of great - no, enormous - help. So any activity (participation, reblogs, etc.) is very much appreciated. Thank you!
So a few years back, I wrote my Master’s thesis while an Erasmus student in England and I thought I would share an abridged version with you. I wrote my thesis about the Northern Vowel Shift, under the title : The Old Scandinavian element and its impact in the actuation and development of the Northern Vowel Shift.
But first of all, what is the Great Vowel Shift ?
It’s an event described as a chain-shift where the lower vowels, in a push-change movement, forced the higher vowels to raise and the highest ones to diphthongise, as such:
[ɔː] → [oː] → [uː] → [aʊ]
[ɛː] → [eː] → [iː] → [aɪ]
This partly explains the discrepancy between sounds and orthography in English. For instance, <ee> in “meet” now pronounced /iː/ used to be pronounced /eː/and <oo> in “goose” now pronounced /uː/used to be /oː/. This large-scale shake-up took place between the mid-14th and the 18th century.
Why is the Northern Vowel Shift important?
Because, generally, when dealing with the Great Vowel Shift, it is often assumed that it affected the whole of England. However, the upward movement of vowels was not a unified motion as some British English varieties retain pronunciations that were left unmodified by the Shift and thus retain certain pronunciations similar to those of the period before the Shift intervened. The study of the phonological history of the English language, more often than not, tends to describe the evolution of the vowel set of English by the representation of its southern version.
It matters because this focus on the southern version is probably due to a form of social bias; the most prestigious variety in the United Kingdom in present days is RP (Received Pronunciation) / SBE (Southern British English).
The bulk of the literature published to this day on this matter does not really concern northern England. This fact is quite a shame for there are many differences between the Northern Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift that seem to indicate that the two phenomena are not likely to be connected and merely share a common vocalic shift.
How did the Great Vowel Shift/Southern Vowel Shift happen ?
In a nutshell, this Shift took place because of dialect contacts in the south of England. Smith (2007) mentions that early Tudor London offered economic opportunities to the people of the surrounding countryside, attracting large number of people with different dialectal traditions to the same place.
Smith (2007:130) argues that the socially salient pronunciation of [e̝ː ; o̝ː] inherited from French was used by a category of the population; System I speakers, and System II speakers from outside London, would perceive these raised [e̝ː ; o̝ː] as /i:/ and /uː/. A third group of speakers from System III, would come to London during the 18th century from East Anglia and bring more chaos to the situation. Smith believes that the diphthongisation of the long close vowels comes from System III speakers.
How did the Northern Vowel Shift happen and how is different ?
In my thesis I concluded that the NVS and the SVS were triggered by very different factors; while the SVS took place because of dialect contacts, it would seem that the NVS happened because of instability in Northern English vowels after the introduction of long /ɛː/ in the phonology following Open Vowel Lengthening, which took place between the Old and Middle English period. Open Vowel Lengthening happened as follows: CVCV structures became CVːCafter final vowels like -ewere dropped.
Examples:
Old English “nama” => Middle English “nām”(“name”)
Old English “faran” => Middle English “fār” (“go”)
However, as you can see, there is a blatant lack of symmetry in the upward movement of Northern English long vowels compared to that of the SVS. Basically, when looking at this graph, the NVS only concerns the front vowels, and not the back ones. I’ll add there is a level of detail missing in the graph depicting the rise of /ɔː/ to /oː/. However, contrary to what occurred in the SVS, the raising of Vowel 5, as Aitkens (2002) calls it, had no impact because once /ɔː/ rose to /oː/, there was nothing to move upward and force /uː/ to change quality in turn. This is why in Northern English and Scottish dialect, you can hear speakers pronounce the word “house” as /hu:s/ with a long monophthong instead of the usual diphthong /aʊ/.
The reason for that is relatively simple: the absence of /oː/ in the pre-NVS phonology. This vowel had seemingly fronted to /ø:/ in earlier stages, leaving the mid-high back vowel slot open. Thus when /ɔː/ rose, there was nothing to push towards /uː/.
Since the NVS didn’t happen for the same reasons as the SVS, and it looks like the culprit is the fronting of /oː/ to /ø:/ : whence does this fronting come? My hypothesis was that it was under the influence of Nordic languages that /ø:/ arose or was maintained longer in the northern dialects of English than in the southern, which had lost its front rounded vowels by the 11th century (an example of what I called south-eastern distaste for front rounded vowels).
In a nutshell, what I argued is that northern varieties of English may have started losing their front rounded vowels, like down south, but contact with Old Norse speakers ranging as far back as the late 8th century in Northern England may have played a role in re-introducing a decaying phoneme in northern dialects of English. Furthermore, Scandinavians tended to remain in their own little closed communities, exchanging little with the outside world for a few decades after the end of the Danelaw. Their contact with neighbouring population must have played a role in the upholding of /ø:/.
Basically,tl;dr,English underwent massive phonetic change because of the Great Vowel Shift. However, it would me more accurate to refer to it as the Southern Vowel since its effects did not affect northern regions of England, which had experienced its own shift; the Northern Vowel Shift. It arose because of phonetic evolution between Old and Middle English. A back vowel was absent from Old Northern English, rendering a SVS chain-shift-like motion impossible in northern dialects. This back vowel may have fronted because of Old Norse influence in the region, which lasted longer in the north of England than in the south.
