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Contents

1 Adpositional phrase 11.1 Three types of adpositional phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1.1 Prepositional phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.1.2 Postpositional phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.1.3 Circumpositional phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

1.2 Representing adpositional phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.3 Distribution and function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.3.1 Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41.3.2 Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

1.4 Particles - a source of confusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61.6 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61.7 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2 Archi-writing 72.1 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3 Bongo-Bongo (linguistics) 83.1 Etymological studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83.2 Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83.3 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

4 Chronotope 94.1 Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94.2 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104.3 Recent applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104.4 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

5 Co-occurrence 115.1 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115.2 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

6 Conveyed concept 12

i

ii CONTENTS

6.1 Adjective use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126.2 Conveying meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126.3 Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136.4 Example use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136.5 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146.6 References and footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

7 Cross-serial dependencies 157.1 Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157.2 Why languages containing cross-serial dependencies are non-context-free . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167.3 Treatment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167.4 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

8 Gesamtbedeutung 17

9 Gradualism 189.1 Geology and biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189.2 Phyletic gradualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189.3 Punctuated gradualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189.4 Politics and society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199.5 Linguistics and language change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199.6 Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199.7 Other types of gradualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199.8 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209.9 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

10 Graphocentrism 2110.1 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2110.2 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

11 Growth point 2211.1 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

12 Hypocorrection 2312.1 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2312.2 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

13 Iconicity 2413.1 Quantity principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2413.2 Iconicity and the evolution of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2413.3 Iconic calls and gestures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2513.4 Iconicity and sign languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2513.5 Iconicity and poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2513.6 Iconicity and folk etymology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

CONTENTS iii

13.7 Use of iconicity to help teach foreign languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2613.8 Vowel magnitude relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2613.9 Iconicity and the Digital World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2613.10See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2713.11References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2713.12Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

14 Isogloss 2914.1 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

14.1.1 Centum-Satem isogloss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2914.1.2 North-Midland isogloss (American English) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2914.1.3 Northwest Semitic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

14.2 Isographs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3114.3 Etymology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3214.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3214.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3214.6 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3214.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

15 Language island 3315.1 Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3315.2 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3315.3 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

16 Letter frequency 3416.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3516.2 Relative frequencies of letters in the English language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3516.3 Relative frequencies of the first letters of a word in the English language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3516.4 Relative frequencies of letters in other languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3616.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3716.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3816.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

17 Letter frequency effect 4017.1 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4017.2 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

18 Metalanguage 4118.1 Types of metalanguage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

18.1.1 Embedded metalanguage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4118.1.2 Ordered metalanguage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4118.1.3 Nested metalanguage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

18.2 Metalanguages in natural language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

iv CONTENTS

18.3 Types of expressions in a metalanguage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4218.3.1 Deductive systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4218.3.2 Metavariables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4218.3.3 Metatheories and metatheorems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4218.3.4 Interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

18.4 Role in metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4318.5 Metaprogramming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4318.6 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4318.7 Dictionaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4418.8 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4418.9 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

19 Null Subject Parameter 4519.1 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

20 Pancake sentence 4720.1 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

21 Phonocentrism 4821.1 Advocates of phonocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4821.2 Derrida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

21.2.1 Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4921.3 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4921.4 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5021.5 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

22 Skunked term 5122.1 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

23 Underspecification 5223.1 Example of Underspecification in Phonology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5223.2 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5223.3 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

23.3.1 Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5423.3.2 Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5523.3.3 Content license . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Chapter 1

Adpositional phrase

The term "adpositional phrase" is defined in linguistics as a syntactic category that includes prepositional phrases,postpositional phrases, and circumpositional phrases.[1] Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, post-position, or circumposition) as head, and usually a complement such as a noun phrase. Language syntax treats adpo-sitional phrases as units that act as arguments or adjuncts. Prepositional and postpositional phrases differ by the orderof the words used. Languages that are primarily head-initial such as English predominantly use prepositional phrases,whereas head-final languages predominantly employ postpositional phrases. Many languages have both types, as wellas circumpositional phrases.

1.1 Three types of adpositional phrases

There are three types of adpositional phrases: prepositional phrases, postpositional phrases, and circumpositionalphrases. These three types are illustrated in the subsections that follow:

1.1.1 Prepositional phrases

The underlined phrases in the following sentences are examples of prepositional phrases in English. The prepositionsare in bold:

a. She walked around his desk.

b. Ryan could see her in the room.

c. David walked on top of the building.

d. They walked up the stairs.

e. Philip ate in the kitchen.

Prepositional phrases have a preposition as the central element of the phrase, i.e. as the head of the phrase. Theremaining part of the phrase, usually a noun (phrase) or pronoun, is sometimes called the prepositional complement.

1.1.2 Postpositional phrases

Postpositional elements are frequent in head-final languages such as Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Korean,Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil. The word or other morpheme that corresponds to an English prepositionoccurs after its complement, hence the name postposition. The following examples are from Japanese, where the casemarkers perform a role similar to that of adpositions:

1

2 CHAPTER 1. ADPOSITIONAL PHRASE

a. ..mise nistore to = 'to the store'

b. ..ie karahouse from = 'from the house'

c. ..hashi dechopsticks with = 'with chopsticks’

And from Finnish, where the case endings perform a role similar to that of adpositions:

a. ..kauppaanstore.to = 'to the store'

b. ..talostahouse.from = 'from the house'

c. ..puikoillachopsticks.with = 'with chopsticks’

While English is generally seen as lacking postpositions entirely, there are a couple of words that one can in factview as postpositions, e.g. the crisis two years ago, sleep the whole night through. Since a phrase like two years agodistributes just like a prepositional phrase, one can argue that ago should be classified as a postposition, as opposedto as an adjective or adverb.

1.1.3 Circumpositional phrases

Circumpositional phrases involve both a preposition and a postposition, whereby the complement appears betweenthe two. Circumpositions are common in Pashto and Kurdish. English has at least one circumpositional construction,e.g.

a. From now on, he won't help.

German has more of them, e.g.

b. Von mir aus kannst du das machen.From me out can you that do = 'As far as I'm concerned, you can do it.'

c. Um der Freundschaft willen sollst du es machen.around the friendship sake should you it do = 'For the sake of friendship, you shoulddo it.'

1.2 Representing adpositional phrases

Like with all other types of phrases, theories of syntax render the syntactic structure of adpositional phrases usingtrees. The trees that follow represent adpositional phrases according to twomodern conventions for rendering sentencestructure, first in terms of the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars and then in terms of the dependencyrelation of dependency grammars. The following labels are used on the nodes in the trees: Adv = adverb, N = nominal(noun or pronoun), P = preposition/postposition, and PP = pre/postpositional phrase:[2]

1.2. REPRESENTING ADPOSITIONAL PHRASES 3

These phrases are identified as prepositional phrases by the placement of PP at the top of the constituency trees andof P at the top of the dependency trees. English also has a number of two-part prepositional phrases, i.e. phrases thatcan be viewed as containing two prepositions, e.g.

Assuming that ago in English is indeed a postposition as suggested above, a typical ago-phrase would receive thefollowing structural analyses:

The analysis of circumpositional phrases is not so clear, since it is not obvious which of the two adpositions shouldbe viewed as the head of the phrase. However, the following analyses are more in line with the fact that English isprimarily a head-initial language:

4 CHAPTER 1. ADPOSITIONAL PHRASE

1.3 Distribution and function

The next two subsections consider the distribution and function of prepositional phrases in English. The term distri-bution denotes the environments in which a syntactic unit can appear.

1.3.1 Distribution

The distribution of prepositional phrases in English can be characterized in terms of heads and dependents. Preposi-tional phrases typically appear as postdependents of nouns, adjectives, and finite and non-finite verbs, although theycan also appear as predependents of finite verbs, for instance when they initiate clauses. For ease of presentation,just dependency trees are now employed to illustrate these points. The following trees show prepositional phrases aspostdependents of nouns and adjectives:

And the following trees show prepositional phrases as postdependents of non-finite verbs and as predependents offinite verbs:

1.4. PARTICLES - A SOURCE OF CONFUSION 5

Attempts to position a prepositional phrase in front of its head noun, adjective, or non-finite verb are bad, e.g.

a. his departure on Tuesdayb. *his on Tuesday departure

a. proud of his gradeb. *of his grade proud

a. He is leaving on Tuesday.b. *He is on Tuesday leaving.

The b-examples demonstrate that prepositional phrases in English prefer to appear as postdependents of their heads.The fact, however, that they can at times appear as a predependent of their head (as in the finite clauses above) iscurious.

1.3.2 Function

More often than not, a given adpositional phrase is an adjunct in the clause or noun phrase that it appears. Thesephrases can also, however, function as arguments, in which case they are known as oblique:

a. She ran under him. - Adjunct at the clause level

b. The man from China was enjoying his noodles. - Adjunct in a noun phrase.

c. He gave money to the cause. - Oblique argument at the clause level

d. She argued with him. - Oblique Argument at the clause level

e. A student of physics attended. - Argument in a noun phrase

1.4 Particles - a source of confusion

A prepositional phrase should not be confused with a sequence formed by the particle and the direct object of aphrasal verb. Phrasal verbs often consist of a verb and a particle, whereby the particle is mistakenly interpreted to bea preposition, e.g.

6 CHAPTER 1. ADPOSITIONAL PHRASE

a. He turned on the light. - on is a particle, not a prepositionb. He turned it on. - Shifting identifies on as a particle

a. She made up a story. - up is a particle, not a prepositionb. She made it up. - Shifting identifies up as a particle

a. They put off the party. - off is a particle, not a prepositionb. They put it off. - Shifting identifies off as a particle.

Particles are identified by shifting, i.e. the particle can switch places with the object when the object is a pronoun.Prepositions cannot do this, i.e. they cannot switch positions with their complement, e.g. He is relying on Susan vs.*He is relying her on.

1.5 See also• Adjunct

• Adposition

• Argument

• Dependency grammar

• Head

• Phrase

• Phrase structure grammar

• Preposition

• Shifting

1.6 Notes[1] Adpositional phrases are discussed by, for instance, Stockwell (1977:60ff.), Lockwood (2002:54f.), and Tallerman (2005:48f.).

[2] Phrase structure trees like the ones here can be found in, for instance, Brinton (2000), and dependency grammar trees likethe ones here can be found in Osborne et al. (2011).

1.7 References• Brinton, L. 2000. The structure of modern English: A linguistic introduction.

• Lockwood, D. 2002. Syntactic analysis and description: A constructional approach. London: Continuum.

• Osborne, T., M. Putnam, and T. Groß 2011. Bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax:Is Minimalism becoming a dependency grammar? The Linguistic Review 28, 315–364.

• Stockwell, R. 1977. Foundations of syntactic theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

• Tallerman, M. 2005. Understanding syntax. 2nd edition. London: Hodder Arnold.

• Tesnière, L. 1959. Éleménts de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.

Chapter 2

Archi-writing

"Archi-writing" (French: archi-écriture) is a term used by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his attempt tore-orient the relationship between speech and writing.Derrida argued that as far back as Plato, speech had been always given priority over writing. In the West, phoneticwriting was considered as a secondary imitation of speech, a poor copy of the immediate living act of speech. Derridaargued that in later centuries philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure both gave writinga secondary or parasitic role. In Derrida’s essay Plato’s Pharmacy, he sought to question this prioritising by firstlycomplicating the two terms speech and writing.According to Derrida, this complication is visible in the Greek word φάρμακον pharmakon, which meant both“cure” and “poison.” Derrida noted that Plato argued that writing was “poisonous” to memory, since writing is a mererepetition, as compared to the living memory required for speech. Derrida points out however, that since both speechand writing rely upon repetition they cannot be completely distinguished.In the neologism archi-writing, “archi-" meaning “origin, principle or telos,” attempts to go beyond the simple divisionof writing/speech. Archi-writing refers to a kind of writing that precedes both speech and writing. Derrida arguedthat archi-writing is, in a sense, language, in that it is already there before we use it, it already has a pregiven, yetmalleable, structure/genesis, which is a semi-fixed set-up of different words and syntax. This fixedness is the writingto which Derrida refers, just such a 'writing' can even be seen in cultures that do not employ writing, it could be seenin notches on a rope or barrel, fixed customs, or placements around the living areas.Philosopher John R. Searle argued that most of Derrida’s concepts were characterized by a “breathtaking implau-sibility,” being based on an “eccentric reading of the history of Western philosophy”, which overlooks or misstatesmany important details of philosophy and language (e.g., Derrida distorts Saussure’s structural linguistics).[1]

2.1 References[1] Searle, John R. (1983) “TheWord TurnedUpside Down,” The NewYork Review of Books, Volume 30, Number 16, October

27, 1983.

7

Chapter 3

Bongo-Bongo (linguistics)

Bongo-Bongo in linguistics is used as a name for an imaginary language. It is most commonly invoked in etymologicalstudies to conceptualize random similarities between unrelated languages.[1] It has also been used as a name for aconstructed language invented by John Lyons as a teaching tool in linguistics.[2]

3.1 Etymological studies

Random similarities occur between related and unrelated languages and these are commonly disregarded in the aca-demic study of etymology. The widespread habit of unscientific researches to look for such coincidental similaritiesand proclaim them as proof of genetic relationship has given rise to the term Bongo-Bongo approach or Bongo-Bongoeffect.[1] For example, when comparing random surface forms in Basque and Hungarian (which are known to beunrelated languages), “pairings” such as hegi (Basque for “ridge”) and hegy (Hungarian for “hill”) are easily foundbut ultimately meaningless in terms of etymology without additional historical linguistic research and data.[1]

3.2 Anthropology

The concept can also be found occasionally in anthropology where the Bongo-Bongo are sarcastically used as animaginary tribe or ethnicity (or by extension, Bongo Bongo Land).[3]

3.3 References[1] Trask, R.L. The History of Basque Routledge: 1997 ISBN 0-415-13116-2

[2] Murray, N.Writing Essays in English Language and Linguistics: Principles, Tips and Strategies for UndergraduatesCambridgeUniversity Press (2012) ISBN 978-0521128469

[3] Kippenberg, HG (ed) Concepts of Person in Religion and Thought (Religion and Reason, No 37) de Gruyter (1990) ISBN978-3110121599

8

Chapter 4

Chronotope

Not to be confused with Chronotype or Chronotrope.

In literary theory and philosophy of language, the chronotope is how configurations of time and space are representedin language and discourse. The term was taken up by Russian literary scholar M.M. Bakhtin who used it as a centralelement in his theory of meaning in language and literature.[1] The term itself comes from the Russian xронотоп,which in turn is derived from the Greek χρόνος ('time') and τόπος ('space'); it thus can be literally translated as“time-space.” Bakhtin developed the term in his 1937 essay "Формы времени и хронотопа в романе", publishedin English as “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” Here Bakhtin showed how different Greekliterary genres operated with different configurations of time and space, which gave each genre its particular narrativecharacter. For example, the chronotopic frame of the epic differed from that of the hero adventure or the comedy.[2]

4.1 Description

In the philosophy of language and philology, Bakhtin scholars Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist state that thechronotope is “a unit of analysis for studying language according to the ratio and characteristics of the temporal andspatial categories represented in that language”. Specific chronotopes are said to correspond to particular genres, orrelatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies. To this extent, achronotope is both a cognitive concept and a narrative feature of language.In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin defines the chronotope thus:

We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporaland spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employedin mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The special meaning ithas in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism almostas a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparabilityof space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). We understand the chronotope as a formallyconstitutive category of literature; we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture.' Inthe literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out,concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, spacebecomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axesand fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.

The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is preciselythe chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in thechronotope is time. The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degreethe image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.

9

10 CHAPTER 4. CHRONOTOPE

4.2 Analysis

The distinctiveness of chronotopic analysis, in comparison to most other uses of time and space in language analysis,stems from the fact that neither time nor space is privileged by Bakhtin, they are utterly interdependent and theyshould be studied in this manner.Linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso invoked “chronotopes” in discussing Western [Apache] stories linked withplaces. At least in the 1980s when Basso was writing about the stories, geographic features reminded the WesternApache of “the moral teachings of their history” by recalling to mind events that occurred there in important moralnarratives. By merely mentioning “it happened at [the place called] 'men stand above here and there,'" storyteller NickThompson could remind locals of the dangers of joining “with outsiders against members of their own community.”Geographic features in the Western Apache landscape are chronotopes, Basso says, in precisely the way Bakhtindefines the term when he says they are “points in the geography of a community where time and space intersectand fuse. Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged andresponsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people. ...Chronotopes thus stand asmonuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves”(1981:84, as cited by Basso 1984:44-45).

4.3 Recent applications

More recently chronotopicity has been adopted into the analysis of classroom events and conversations; for exam-ple, by Raymond Brown and Peter Renshaw in order to view “student participation in the classroom as a dynamicprocess constituted through the interaction of past experience, ongoing involvement, and yet-to-be-accomplishedgoals” (Brown&Renshaw 2006: 247-259). In their study, Kumpulainen, Mikkola, and Jaatinen (2013) examinedthe chronotopes, that is, the space–time configurations of elementary school students’ technology-mediated creativelearning practices over a year long school musical project in a Finnish elementary school community. The findingsof their study illuminate “blended practices appeared to break away from traditional learning practices, allowing stu-dents to navigate in different time zones, spaces, and places with diverse tools situated in their formal and informallives” (Kumpulainen, Mikkola & Jaatinen, 2013, 53).

4.4 Notes[1] Dentith, S. “Chronotope”. The Literary Encyclopedia.

[2] Bakhtin, M. (1981). “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel”. In The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: Univ.Texas Press. pp. 84–258.

4.5 References

M.M. Bakhtin,The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. , translated by Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist,University of Texas Press, 1981.K. Basso, “Stalking with Stories: Names, Places, and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache,” In E. Bruner,ed. Text, Play and Story. Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 1984.Brown, R. & Renshaw, P. (2006) “Positioning Students as Actors and Authors: A Chronotopic Analysis of Collab-orative Learning Activities” in Mind, Culture and Activity, Vol. 13(3) p. 247-259. 1984.Kumpulainen, K., Mikkola, A., & Jaatinen, A-M. (2014). The chronotopes of technology-mediated creative learningpractices in an elementary school community. 'Learning, Media and Technology, 39(1), 53-74.Morson, Gary S. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.Renshaw, Peter; Renshaw, Peter (2006). “Positioning Students as Actors and Authors: A Chronotopic Analysis ofCollaborative Learning Activities”. Mind, Culture and Activity 13 (3): 247–259. doi:10.1207/s15327884mca1303_6.Also of interest is Joseph Frank’s essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”, Sewanee Review, 1945, Vol. 2-3Keane, Webb (Feb 1995). “The Spoken House: Text, Act, and Object in Eastern Indonesia”. American Ethnologist22 (1): 102–124. doi:10.1525/ae.1995.22.1.02a00050. JSTOR 646048.

Chapter 5

Co-occurrence

Co-occurrence or cooccurrence is a linguistics term that can either mean concurrence / coincidence or, in a morespecific sense, the above-chance frequent occurrence of two terms from a text corpus alongside each other in acertain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic proximity or anidiomatic expression. In contrast to collocation, co-occurrence assumes interdependency of the two terms. A co-occurrence restriction is identified when linguistic elements never occur together. Analysis of these restrictions canlead to discoveries about the structure and development of a language.[1]

5.1 See also• Correlation

• Distributional hypothesis

• Statistical semantics

• Co-occurrence matrix

• Co-occurrence networks

5.2 References[1] Kroeger, Paul (2005). Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 20. ISBN

978-0-521-01653-7.

11

Chapter 6

Conveyed concept

Conveyed concept is a set phrase that denotes a concept as understood or perceived. If someone explains an ideaor if an idea is conveyed by some type of media then that idea or concept is a conveyed concept but in the mind ofthe person/people to whom it was conveyed it is a concept processed within the framework of their understanding ofthat concept. That concept, being either poorly or precisely conveyed, is now a concept as understood or processedby whomever it was conveyed to and can be referred to as a conveyed concept.[1] [2] [3]

In computer programming a conveyed concept refers to information sent from programmer to AI, computer-to-computer, human to computer, programmer to programmer, etc. In programming an AI program, the conveyedconcepts of the AI program are used as building blocks to program new concepts, and it is important that the conveyedconcepts are fine tuned in order to create the correct response. In programming, programs need to compare conveyedconcepts in order to communicate a correct process or response. In this media the concepts being compared are notwhat was programmed (the code) but the response of the program so that the code can be changed to achieve thecorrect response.[4][5]

Because of the abstract nature of concept when paired with the word “conveyed”, the word “conveyed” transitions toa slightly different meaning than its historical Linguistic meaning in Linguistic semantics. “Conveyed” has undergonesomewhat of a Semantic change in that it is used as an adjective to express the understanding by someone of somethingthat was communicated to them.[6] This is especially true in the context of conveying meaning. In this context theactual material or words used to convey something to ‘Individual A’ is not the subject of the question - Instead, in thiscontext, convey means what is 'Individual A’s' understanding of what was conveyed.[7]

6.1 Adjective use

The conveyed concept is individual in that each person will use their cognitive process to interpret the idea or conceptin their own individual way. So a conveyed concept is more than just the imparting of a concept or a concept thatis conveyed. Once a concept is communicated it becomes a conveyed concept and unique to each individual. Theword conveyed in the phrase conveyed concept is used as an adjective describing perception or individual meaningof a concept that has been expressed.[8] In the thought process of the person who is interpreting the concept that isbeing conveyed they develop or construct(Cognitive linguistics) a conveyed concept of what was conveyed to them.[9]When conveyed is used as a verb then the concept can be poorly or accurately conveyed and does not hold the samemeaning.

6.2 Conveying meaning

When asked “What does this painting convey to you?", a person will answer with the conveyed concept of whatthey think the painting means. The same is true with any abstract information that we receive through our sensory(Sensory analysis) processes. A billboard with marketing information is the same. The information may be perceivedin a number of ways. A person seeing this information may or may not buy the product or service depending on theirconveyed concept of that information.[10]

In communication the conveyed meaning of words has been the subject of studies and is an intricate part of human

12

6.3. CONCEPTS 13

interaction.(CSCC) [11]

6.3 Concepts

New concepts are linked to existing concepts.[12]

A caveman discovers fire by throwing a rock into a field which hits another rock and causes a sparkthat in turn ignites the dry grass and a fire is born. The cave man sees the fire but has no concept ofwhat a fire is. He walks closer to it and feels the heat, he has a concept of heat and immediately linksfire to heat. He walks closer and reaches his hand toward the flame and is burned. He has a concept ofbeing burned by the heat of the sun and links being burned to his evolving concept of fire. He watchesas the dry grass is consumed by the fire and understands that the fire is consuming the dry grass andconnects this with his concept of consumption which is already linked to his concept of eating. As hebegins linking existing concepts, concepts that are already cross-linked, he begins building a completeconcept of fire. He takes off his heavy garment and places it over the flame and the flame dies out. Heconsiders this and using existing concepts he concludes the flame needs air to live. He considers all ofthis and concludes that the fire was alive and that he brought it to life. The fire ate and breathed and asit did it grew so it must have been alive. Could he talk to it? If he had not placed his garment over thefire would it have walked? Although his concept of fire is nearly accurate some of his existing conceptscause him to arrive at some wrong conclusions or at least conclusions which are not entirely accurate.To him his conveyed concept of fire is valid.

Now lets assume he meets caveman2, who also has no concept of fire. Caveman1 begins to conveyto him his concept of fire. Caveman2 however has a different concept of life and when he tries to linkthe concept of fire to life he is unable to. As the concept of fire is conveyed to him he constructs a similarconcept of fire except he understands that the fire is not truly alive within the scope of his concept oflife. So his conveyed concept of fire is similar but also has a stark difference.

This is also true when speaking of religion. All monotheists have a conveyed concept of God and religion, but eachmonothiest’s conveyed concept of God differs.[13]

Not all concepts are conveyed to us. It is possible to give birth to a new concept by creating links internally.[14] Butwith conveyed concept we are talking about a concept being conveyed from an external media or communication andthen constructing our conveyed concept based on that information and existing concepts we have developed.[15]

6.4 Example use

Consider this:

This piece of material when introduced in a specific way introduces the child to the concept of height.Once the child understands the conveyed concept they may explore that material in a multitude of waysas long as the materials are still being handled respectfully.

This piece of material when introduced in a specific way introduces the child to the concept of height.Depending on the child’s conveyed concept of height, they may explore that material in a multitude ofways as long as the materials are still being handled respectfully.

If we study the first sentence we can draw a line from material to concept of height to child and then to “the conveyedconcept”. Because we are depending on the child’s understanding of the “concept of height” in order to continuethen “the conveyed concept” is the child’s understanding of that concept. The word conveyed here is used as anadjective to describe what was conveyed to the student, the concept of height, but if the child still does not understandthe concept of height then it could be said the concept was poorly conveyed and that the child’s conveyed conceptof height was incorrect. So the conveyed concept could be what was actually presented to the child so they couldunderstand the concept of height or conveyed concept can refer to how the child perceived what was presented. Thisis illustrated in Concept mapping, a technique which can be used by teachers to gauge the success rate of materials

14 CHAPTER 6. CONVEYED CONCEPT

used in a student’s understanding of a concept. This mapping can be specific to one student or to a group but it mapsthe conveyed concept of the student so a teacher can fine tune their methods in trying to convey the concept.[16][17][18]The Relevance theory can further explain how each of us can perceive what is conveyed to us in different ways.[19]

6.5 External links• Example use

• Conveyed Concept in Teaching Reading and Writing

• Conveyed Concept in programming

• Conceptual Speech

• Music and Concepts

6.6 References and footnotes[1] Shapiro, Arthur Dr. Everybody Belongs: Changing Negative Attitudes Toward Classmates. ISBN 0-8153-3960-7.

[2] Information and Cognitive Process-Peter K. Storkerson M.F.A. Ph.D.

[3] On Conceptual Struggles over “Testing”-Krzysztof M. Brzezi´nski-Warsaw University of Technology

[4] (page 106) Griffith University

[5] Concept Based Optimization(Texas A&M University)

[6] Davis, Wayne A.. Meaning, Expression, and Thought. ISBN 0-521-55513-2.

[7] Millikan, Ruth Garrett. Language: A Biological Model. ISBN 0-19-928477-6.

[8] Kucer, Stephen B. Kucer. Dimensions of Literacy: A Conceptual Base for Teaching Reading and. ISBN 0-8058-4941-6.

[9] Oxford, Manuel García-Carpintero, Josep Macià. Two-Dimensional Semantics. ISBN 0-19-927195-X.

[10] Parmerlee, David. Analyzing Markets, Products, and Marketing Plans. ISBN 0-658-00133-7.

[11] Lycan, William C. Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. ISBN 0-415-17116-4.

[12] NEURONS, CONCEPTS, AND CONNECTIONS IN THINKING - Arnold vander Nat

[13] Concepts of God

[14] Birth of a Concept

[15] McGriff.pdf Steven J McGriff - Assimilation Theory

[16] Attributed concept maps: fuzzy integration and fuzzy matching - -

[17] Concept Mapping -

[18] The Role of Manipulative Materials in the Learning of Mathematical Concepts -

[19] Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber -

Chapter 7

Cross-serial dependencies

A schematic showing cross-serial dependencies. Notice that the w’s and v’s, which represent words, each form respective series.Notice also that the lines representing the dependency relations mutually overlap.

In linguistics, cross-serial dependencies (also called crossing dependencies by some authors[1]) occur when thelines representing the dependency relations between two series of words cross over each other.[2] They are of partic-ular interest to linguists who wish to determine the syntactic structure of natural language; languages containing anarbitrary number of them are non-context-free. By this fact, Dutch[3] and Swiss-German[4] have been proved to benon-context-free.

7.1 Example

A Swiss-German sentence containing cross-serial dependencies (shown as lines between the verbs and their objects).The English translation with its dependencies, which do not cross, is shown for comparison.

A more complicated example.

As Swiss-German allows verbs and their arguments to be ordered cross-serially, we have the following example, takenfrom Shieber:[4]

15

16 CHAPTER 7. CROSS-SERIAL DEPENDENCIES

That is, “we helped Hans paint the house.”Notice that the sequential noun phrases em Hans (Hans) and s huus (the house), and the sequential verbs hälfed(helped) and aastriiche (paint) both form two separate series of constituents. Notice also that the dative verb hälfedand the accusative verb aastriiche take the dative em Hans and accusative s huus as their arguments, respectively.

7.2 Why languages containing cross-serial dependencies are non-context-free

In Swiss-German sentences, the number of verbs of a grammatical case (dative or accusative) must match the numberof objects of that case. Additionally, a sentence containing an arbitrary number of such objects is admissible (inprinciple). Hence, the following formal language is grammatical:L = Jan Des aitdas mer (d'chind) m(em Hans) ns huus h andwele (laa) m(h alfe)naastriiche.It can be seen that L is of the form xambnycmdnz . By taking another image to remove the x , y and z , thenon-context-free[5] language L′ = ambncmdn may be observed. All spoken languages which contain cross-serialdependencies also contain a language of a form similar to L′ .[2]

7.3 Treatment

Research inmildly context-sensitive language has attempted to identify a narrower andmore computationally tractablesubclass of context-sensitive languages that can capture context sensitivity as found in natural languages. For examplecross-serial dependencies can be expressed in linear context-free rewriting systems (LCFRS); one can write a LCFRSgrammar for {anbncndn | n ≥ 1} for example.[6][7][8]

7.4 References[1] Stabler, Edward (2004), “Varieties of crossing dependencies: structure dependence and mild context sensitivity” (PDF),

Cognitive Science 28: 699–720, doi:10.1016/j.cogsci.2004.05.002.

[2] Jurafsky, Daniel; Martin, James H. (2000). Speech and Language Processing (1st ed.). Prentice Hall. pp. 473–495. ISBN978-0-13-095069-7..

[3] Bresnan, Joan; M. Kaplan, Ronald (1982), “Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch”, Linguistic Inquiry 13 (4): 613–635.

[4] Shieber, Stuart (1985), “Evidence against the context-freeness of natural language” (PDF), Linguistics and Philosophy 8(3): 333–343, doi:10.1007/BF00630917.

[5] John E. Hopcroft, Rajeev Motwani, Jeffrey D. Ullman (2000). Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Compu-tation (2nd Edition). Pearson Education. ISBN 0-201-44124-1..

[6] http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~{}kallmeyer/GrammarFormalisms/4nl-cfg.pdf

[7] http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~{}kallmeyer/GrammarFormalisms/4lcfrs-intro.pdf

[8] Laura Kallmeyer (2010). Parsing Beyond Context-Free Grammars. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 1–5. ISBN978-3-642-14846-0.

Chapter 8

Gesamtbedeutung

Gesamtbedeutung (German for “general meaning”, German pronunciation: [ɡəˈzamtbəˌdɔʏtʊŋ]), in linguistics, is thegeneral meaning of the various uses of a morphological element. The Gesamtbedeutung of a language’s past tense,for instance, might be conceived as “distance from the present”. This meaning might later be generalized to refer toevents both temporally distant (e.g. the box was empty) as well as separated in terms of reality or likelihood (e.g. thebox might be empty, if the box were empty..., the box could be empty, etc.)In Japanese, for example, the tense system has been reduced to a system of “past”, “non-past”, and “probable”, wherethe latter two tenses share the Gesamtbedeutung of abstraction from the real. The past tense refers to events whichare complete and definite, whereas the non-past refers to virtually everything else, including present and future events.The probable tense functions in much the same way as the non-past, but with a stronger sense of separation from thepresent reality.For another example, consider the English word endings "-ing” and "-er”. Both share a Gesamtbedeutung of agency(as opposed to that of patienthood, represented by such morphemes as "-ed” and "-ee”). One who is driving is, bydefinition, a driver. Though differing in grammatical function, these two morphemes share a common Gesamtbe-deutung.

17

Chapter 9

Gradualism

Gradualism, from Latin gradus (“step”), is a hypothesis, a theory or a tenet assuming that change comes about grad-ually or that variation is gradual in nature.[1] Similar concepts are: uniformitarianism, incrementalism and reformism.

9.1 Geology and biology

In the natural sciences, gradualism is the theory which holds that profound change is the cumulative product of slowbut continuous processes, often contrasted with catastrophism. The theory was proposed in 1795 by James Hutton, aScottish physician and gentleman farmer, and was later incorporated into Charles Lyell's theory of uniformitarianism.Tenets from both theories were applied to biology and formed the basis of early evolutionary theory.Charles Darwin was influenced by Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which explained both uniformitarian methodologyand theory. Using uniformitarianism, which states that one cannot make an appeal to any force or phenomenon whichcannot presently be observed (see catastrophism), Darwin theorized that the evolutionary process must occur gradu-ally, not in saltations, since saltations are not presently observed, and extreme deviations from the usual phenotypicvariation would be more likely to be selected against.Gradualism is often confused with the concept of phyletic gradualism. It is a term coined by Stephen Jay Gould andNiles Eldredge to contrast with their model of punctuated equilibrium, which is gradualist itself, but argues that mostevolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability (called stasis), which is punctuated by rare instances ofbranching evolution.[2]

9.2 Phyletic gradualism

Main article: Phyletic gradualism

Phyletic gradualism is a model of evolution which theorizes that most speciation is slow, uniform and gradual.[3]When evolution occurs in this mode, it is usually by the steady transformation of a whole species into a new one(through a process called anagenesis). In this view no clear line of demarcation exists between an ancestral speciesand a descendant species, unless splitting occurs.

9.3 Punctuated gradualism

Main article: Punctuated gradualism

Punctuated gradualism is a microevolutionary hypothesis that refers to a species that has “relative stasis over a con-siderable part of its total duration [and] underwent periodic, relatively rapid, morphologic change that did not leadto lineage branching”. It is one of the three common models of evolution. While the traditional model of palaeon-tology, the phylogenetic model, states that features evolved slowly without any direct association with speciation,

18

9.4. POLITICS AND SOCIETY 19

the relatively newer and more controversial idea of punctuated equilibrium claims that major evolutionary changesdon't happen over a gradual period but in localized, rare, rapid events of branching speciation. Punctuated gradu-alism is considered to be a variation of these models, lying somewhere in between the phyletic gradualism modeland the punctuated equilibrium model. It states that speciation is not needed for a lineage to rapidly evolve from oneequilibrium to another but may show rapid transitions between long-stable states.

9.4 Politics and society

In politics, gradualism is the hypothesis that social change can be achieved in small, discrete increments rather thanin abrupt strokes such as revolutions or uprisings. Gradualism is one of the defining features of political liberalismand reformism.[4] In Machiavellian politics, congressmen are pushed to espouse gradualism.In socialist politics and within the socialist movement, the concept of gradualism is frequently distinguished fromreformism, with the former insisting that short-term goals need to be formulated and implemented in such a way thatthey inevitably lead into long-term goals. It is most commonly associated with the libertarian socialist concept of dualpower and is seen as a middle way between reformism and revolutionism.Martin Luther King, Jr. was opposed to the idea of gradualism as a method of eliminating segregation. The govern-ment wanted to try to integrate African-Americans and European-Americans slowly into the same society, but manybelieved it was a way for the government to put off actually doing anything about racial segregation:

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.–Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, delivered August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorialin Washington DC

9.5 Linguistics and language change

In linguistics, language change is seen as gradual, the product of chain reactions and subject to cyclic drift.[5] Theview that creole languages are the product of catastrophism is heavily disputed.

9.6 Morality

Main article: Law of graduality

Gradualism has also been used in a religious sense, especially in Catholicism (specifically, in ethics and moral the-ology), to describe the fact that certain individuals and families that make up a parish or community may be livingat various points along a line extending from being in a state of serious sin, to being at least minimally in the “stateof grace” and able to receive the Eucharist, and to a level of greater holiness. The lives and relationships of peoplewith morally unacceptable lifestyles may have some elements of good, even of great good, such as sacrificial love andconsistent respect. It recognizes that virtues are not all-or-nothing propositions, and that elements of good may befound even in the context of morally unacceptable situations.

9.7 Other types of gradualism

Contradictorial gradualism is the paraconsistent treatment of fuzziness developed by Lorenzo Peña which regardstrue contradictions as situations wherein a state of affairs enjoys only partial existence.Gradualism in social change implemented through reformist means is a moral principle to which the Fabian Societyis committed. In a more general way, reformism is the assumption that gradual changes through and within existinginstitutions can ultimately change a society's fundamental economic system and political structures; and that an ac-cumulation of reforms can lead to the emergence of an entirely different economic system and form of society thanpresent-day capitalism. This hypothesis of social change grew out of opposition to revolutionary socialism, whichcontends that revolution is necessary for fundamental structural changes to occur.

20 CHAPTER 9. GRADUALISM

In the terminology of NWO-related speculations, gradualism refers to the gradual implementation of a totalitarianworld government.

9.8 See also• Evolution

• Uniformitarianism

• Incrementalism

• Reformism

• Catastrophism

• Saltation

9.9 Notes[1] Brian McGowran. (2008). Biostratigraphy: Microfossils and Geological Time. Cambridge University Press. p. 384. ISBN

978-0521048170

[2] Eldredge, Niles, and S. J. Gould (1972). “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism.” In T.J.M. Schopf,ed., Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Company, pp. 82-115.

[3] Eldredge, N. and S. J. Gould (1972). “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism” In T.J.M. Schopf, ed.,Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman Cooper. p. 84.

[4] Paul Blackledge (2013). “Left reformism, the state and the problem of socialist politics today”. International SocialistJournal. Retrieved 14 November 2013.

[5] Henri Wittmann (1983). “Les réactions en chaîne en morphologie diachronique.” Actes du Colloque de la Société interna-tionale de linguistique fonctionnelle 10.285-92.

Chapter 10

Graphocentrism

Graphocentrism or scriptism is a typically unconscious interpretative bias in whichwriting is privileged over speech.[1][2]Biases in favor of the written or printed word are closely associated with the ranking of sight above sound, the eyeabove the ear, which has been called 'ocularcentrism'.[3] It opposes phonocentrism, which is the bias in favor ofspeech. It is often referred to as “scriptism”.

10.1 See also

Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications

10.2 References[1] Kittel, Harald; House, Juliane; Schultze, Brigitte (2007), Traduction: encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la

traduction, Walter de Gruyter, p. 1111, ISBN 978-3-11-017145-7

[2] Bijay Kumar Das (2005), Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, pp. 41–, ISBN 978-81-269-0457-0

[3] http://www.cs.oswego.edu/~{}blue/xhx/books/semiotics/glossaryG/section21/main.html

21

Chapter 11

Growth point

A Growth Point is a technical term in cognitive linguistics and gesture research. It refers to the earliest beginningsof a spoken utterance in the mind of a speaker, combining the beginnings of a mimetic gesture with the preliminaryverbal expression of the person’s thought.[1][2]

The growth point is the speaker’s minimal idea unit that can develop into a full utterance togetherwith a gesture... the content of the growth point tends to be the novel departure of thought from thepresupposed background. It is the element of thought that stands out in the context and may be the pointof greatest relevance... The concept of the growth point unites image, word and pragmatic content intoa single unit.

—McNeill, D.1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press, p. 220.

11.1 References[1] D. McNeill, S. Duncan, J. Cole et al. 2008. Growth Points from the Very Beginning. Interaction Studies 9: 117-132.

[2] McNeill, D.1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought.. Chicago and London: The University ofChicago Press

22

Chapter 12

Hypocorrection

Hypocorrection is a linguistic phenomenon which involves the purposeful addition of slang in an attempt to appearless intelligible or soften the description. It contrasts with hesitation and modulation because rather than the speakernot having the right words to say or choosing to avoid them, the speaker uses hypocorrection as a strategy.

12.1 See also• Slang

• Hypercorrection

• Circumlocution

• Analogy

12.2 References• Claire Maury-Rouan. “Do listener’s facial expressions influence speaker’s discourse?". Retrieved 2011-09-27.

23

Chapter 13

Iconicity

In functional-cognitive linguistics, as well as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity or analogy betweenthe form of a sign (linguistic or otherwise) and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness.Iconic principles:

• Quantity principle: conceptual complexity corresponds to formal complexity

• Proximity principle: conceptual distance tends to match with linguistic distance

• Sequential order principle: the sequential order of events described is mirrored in the speech chain

13.1 Quantity principle

The use of quantity of phonetic material to iconically mark increased quality or quantity can be noted in the length-ening of words to indicate a greater degree, such as “looong”. It is also common to use reduplication to iconicallymark increase, as Sapir is often quoted, “The process is generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicatesuch concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance”(1921:79). This has been confirmed by the comparative studies of Key (1965) and Moravcsik (1978).[1] This can beseen, for example, in Amharic: täsäbbärä 'it was broken' and täsäbbabärä 'it was shattered'.Iconic coding principles may be natural tendencies in language and are also part of our cognitive and biological make-up. The question whether iconicity is indeed a true part of language has always been debated in linguistics. Recently,for instance, Haspelmath has argued against iconicity, claiming that most iconic phenomena can be explained byfrequency biases: since simpler meanings tend to be more frequent in the language use they tend to lose phonologicalmaterial.Onomatopoeia may be seen as a kind of iconicity, though even onomatopoeic sounds have a large degree of arbitrari-ness.

13.2 Iconicity and the evolution of language

Derek Bickerton has posited that iconic signs, both verbal and gestural, were crucial in the evolution of human lan-guage. Animal communication systems, Bickerton has argued, are largely composed of indexical (and, occasionally,iconic) signs, whereas in human language, “most words are symbolic, and...without symbolic words we couldn't havelanguage.” The distinction Bickerton draws between these categories is one of displacement, with the indexical signsof animal communication systems having no capacity for displacement, and the symbolic signs of human languagerequiring it. Iconic signs, however, “may or may not have it depending on how they're used...iconicity, therefore, isthe most probable road that our ancestors took into language.”Using a niche-construction view of human evolution, Bickerton has hypothesized that human ancestors used iconicsigns as recruitment signals in the scavenging of dead megafauna. This process “would have created new words

24

13.3. ICONIC CALLS AND GESTURES 25

and deployed old words in new contexts, further weakening the uncoupling of words from situations, from currentoccurrence—even from fitness,” and thus allowing for the creation of symbolic language.[2]

In The Symbolic Species, Terrance Deacon argues that the emanation of symbolic capacities unique to language was acritical factor in the evolution of the human brain, and that these symbolic capacities are vital to differentiating animalfrom human forms of communication, processes of learning, and brain anatomy. “The doorway into this virtual worldwas opened to us alone by the evolution of language, because language is not merely a mode of communication, it isalso the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought — symbolic representation.”[3]

13.3 Iconic calls and gestures

Iconic calls and gestures mimic the forms of the things they stand for (such as outlining shapes or moving your handsback and forth multiple times to show repetition.) Iconic calls and gestures are not formally considered language,or language-like communication in that they do not contrast or possess arbitrary characteristics. Noises that imi-tate sounds of the surrounding environment (ideophones) are also iconic. Though humans possess a repertoire oficonic calls and gestures, mammals produce very few signals that are iconic in any way. Despite this, a few captivechimpanzees have shown the beginning stages of iconicity. Burling et al. states: “Chimpanzees in the wild do notpoint, and rarely do so in captivity, however there is a documented case of one named Kanzi, described by Savage-Rumbaugh et al., who could indicate direction of travel by 'extending his hand.' Another chimpanzee, Viki (Hayesand Nissen 1971:107) made motions of kneading or ironing when she wanted to knead dough or iron napkins.” Beedances are another example of iconicity in animal communication systems.[4]

13.4 Iconicity and sign languages

Iconicity is often argued to play a large role in the production and perception of gesture. Proposed ways in whichiconicity is achieved is through Hands that Act, Embody, Model, and Draw. In sign languages iconicity was oftenargued to be largely confined to sign formation (comparable to onomatopeia). Some proponents believe that iconicitydoes not play an actual role in perception and production of signs once they have undergone phonological reduction andbecome part of the conventionalized vocabulary.[5] More recently, as sign language researchers gain confidence (andthe fear of losing linguistic status subsides), the possible role of iconicity is being evaluated again. Current researchon sign language phonology acknowledges that certain aspects are semantically motivated. Further, the ability tomodify sign meaning through phonological changes to signs is gaining attention. The ability to work creatively withsign language in this way has been associated with accomplished, or native signers.Iconicity is expressed in the grammatical structure of sign languages called classifiers. These are used to give descrip-tive information about a subject or verb. In American Sign language (ASL) a grammatical marker denoting “intensity”is characterized by a movement pattern with two parts: an initial pause, followed by a quick completion. When thispattern is added to the adjective GOOD the resulting meaning is VERY-GOOD.[6] The ASL marker for “intensity”is iconic in that the intended meaning (building of pressure, a sudden release) is matched by the articulatory form (apause, a quick completion).Like in vocal languages, developmental trends in ASL shy away from iconicity in favor of arbitrariness. These changes“contribute toward symmetry, fluidity, locational displacement and assimilation.”.[7] For example the sign WE usedto contain the sign for each individual being described by the WE. So the singer would sign ME + YOU1 + YOU2 +YOU n + ME. Now the sign has turned into a smooth symbolic sign where the signer makes two touches on the chest,one on each side, with a sweep of the wrist in between.

13.5 Iconicity and poetry

Iconicity often occurs within poetry. A well-known form of poetic iconicity is the use of onomatopoeia, which maybe called auditory iconicity. Sometimes, though, the form of the poem resembles or enacts the poem’s content, and inthis case, a visual iconicity is present. One poet well known for his visual poems, and therefore visual iconicity, is E.E. Cummings. A subset of visual iconicity involves a spatial iconicity. For instance, in Cummings’ grasshopper poem(“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”) the word arriving begins on the far right of the poem with the “a,” the “r” is near the middleof the poem, and the rest of the word is on the left of the poem. The reader must travel a great distance across the

26 CHAPTER 13. ICONICITY

poem, therefore, in order to “arrive.” The spatial dimension, then, can relate to a temporal dimension. In the poems“The Fish” and “The Moose” by Elizabeth Bishop, temporal iconicity is at work. The amount of time it takes to read“The Fish” coincides with the length of time a fish could live outside of water; likewise, the duration of the long busride in “The Moose” coincides with the poem’s long first sentence as well as the twenty-some stanzas it takes beforethe passengers on the bus (and the reader) actually encounters the moose.

13.6 Iconicity and folk etymology

Iconicity occurs in rejective phono-semantic matching. “Consider Lithuanian Ashkenazic Hebrew דם רע ra dom (cf.Yiddish ra dam), lit. ‘of bad blood’ (from Hebrew דם רע ra` dam ‘of bad blood’). This is a toponymic rejectivephono-semantic matching of Polish Radom, the name of a town in Poland (approximately 100 km south of Warsaw),or of its Yiddish adaptation ródem (see Uriel Weinreich 1955: 609, Paul Wexler 1991: 42). Thus, if a pogrom hadoccurred in Radom, it would surely have been rationalized by ra dam ‘of bad blood’. Obviously, providing such anetymythological explanation for the pogrom was regarded by some Jews as a mere play on words. However, othersmight have conceived of ra dam as having deep intrinsic truth, which might have been religiously and homileticallybased. One should not forget that at that time it was a common belief that all languages were God-created and thatHebrew was the divine Ursprache.”[8]

13.7 Use of iconicity to help teach foreign languages

It has been suggested that iconicity can be used in the teaching of languages. There are two ways this has beensuggested. The first being “Horizontal-Iconicity” and the second being vowel magnitude relationships. Horizontal-Iconicity is the phenomenon of opposition of meaning and spelling. For example, in Egyptian mer, which means righthand and rem, which means left hand. Because people are more likely to remember things they have more Mnemonictags for, it is suggested that it may be helpful to point these things out in the teaching of language.[9]

13.8 Vowel magnitude relationships

Vowel magnitude relationships suggest that, the larger the object, the more likely it is to have open vowel sounds inits name — e.g. /ɒ/, /eɪ/, /æ/ — whereas, the smaller the object, the more likely it is to have a closed vowel sound —e.g. /iː/, /ʊ/, /juː/. Open vowel sounds are also more likely to be associated with round shapes and dark or gloomymoods, where closed vowel sounds are more likely to be associated with pointed shapes and happy moods.[9]

A test run by Sapir asked subjects to differentiate between two different sized tables using invented word pairs suchas “mal” and “mil.” He discovered a word containing [a] was at four times more likely to be judged as larger ifpaired with a word containing [i]. In her paper, Nuckolls states: “Newman discovered that... as the tongue recedesin articulating vowels from the front to the back of the mouth, and as acoustic frequencies become lower, the vowelsare judged to be larger and darker.” Bentley and Varron (1933) ran tests asking subjects to differentiate betweenvowel sounds without providing them, beforehand, contrasting attributes (such as bright and dark.) They found onlymoderate success rates that decreased when vowel sounds were closer in tone. However, they still found that [a]sounds were judged larger or lower than [i] sounds.[10]

In morphology, examples from degree adjectives, such as long, longer, longest, show that the most extreme degree oflength is iconically represented by the word with the greatest number of phonemes. Jakobson cites examples of wordorder mimicking the natural order of ideas. In fact, iconicity is now widely acknowledged to be a significant factor atmany levels of linguistic structure.[10]

13.9 Iconicity and the Digital World

Over a seven year span, Marc Davis, Brian Williams, and Golan Levin have managed to develop their own iconicvisual language. The creation of their program called Media Streams was derived from a need and a desire to have auniversal language when creating videos. Media accessibility is becoming easier to obtain by the day, and with thisgrowth new development in the field is bound to happen.

13.10. SEE ALSO 27

Media production was once limited to an elite group of individuals who spent a large portion of their time takingcourses and specializing in the art. Now with the technological advancements and internet use of today, much of theskill can be learned out of your own home. As Marc Davis would say, just as the printing press was given to the usersvia Desktop Publishing, media production can now, also, be given to these same users. Streaming media is vastlygrowing and the manipulation and reconstruction of this hot trend is more than needed and necessary to keep thediversity coming.From 1991–1997 Marc Davis and his colleagues worked out of the Machine Understanding Group of the MITLaboratory and the Interval Research Corporation to create their media streams program.Media Streams – “Is a system for annotating, retrieving, repurposing, and automatically assembling digital video.”(Davis; Media Streams) The system uses a stream based, semantic representation of video content with an iconicvisual language interface of hierarchically structured and searchable primitives.The goal of this system is to address the problems of annotation convergence and human-computer communication.Developing the iconic visual language was necessary to assist the computational reading and writing of representa-tional consensual interpretations of video content in a standardized way. Illiterate, diverse languages and the like willall be able to work with this system due to its universal language.

13.10 See also

13.11 References[1] Moravcsik (1978)

[2] Bickerton, Derek (2009). Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. New York, NY:Hill & Wang. pp. 52, 53, 218–222. ISBN 9780809022816.

[3] Deacon, Terrance (1997). “1”. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393038386.

[4] Burling, Robbins; David F. Armstrong; Ben G. Blount; Catherine A. Callaghan; Mary Wallace; Joel Wallman; A. Whiten;Sheman Wilcox; Thomas Wynn (February 1993). “Primate Calls, Human Language, and Nonverbal Communication [andcomments and reply]". Current Anthropology 34 (1): 30, 31. doi:10.1086/204132. Check date values in: |accessdate=(help);

[5] Frishburg (1975).

[6] Wilcox (2004)

[7] Frishberg, Nancy (September 1975). “Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language”. Lin-guistic Society of America 51 (3): 696–719. doi:10.2307/412894. Check date values in: |accessdate= (help);

[8] See p. 246 of Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2006), "'Etymythological Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering' in Judaism,Islam and Christianity. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical Perspective”, Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion,edited by Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 237–258.

[9] Croft (1978)

[10] Nuckolls, Janis B. (1999). “The Case for Sound Symbolism”. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 230, 231, 246.doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.225. Check date values in: |accessdate= (help);

13.12 Bibliography

• Croft, L. B. (1978). “The Mnemonic Use of Linguistic Iconicity in Teaching Language and Literature”. TheSlavic and East European Journal 22 (4): 509–518. doi:10.2307/307673.

• Davis, Marc. 1995. "Media Streams: An Iconic Visual Language for Video Representation.” In: Readings inHuman-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, eds. Ronald M. Baecker, Jonathan Grudin, William A.S. Buxton, and Saul Greenberg. 854–866. 2nd ed., San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.

28 CHAPTER 13. ICONICITY

• Frishberg, N (1975). “Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in America”. Language 51 (3): 696–719.doi:10.2307/412894.

• Haiman, John (1980). “The Iconicity of Grammar: Isomorphism and Motivation”. Language 56: 515–540.doi:10.2307/414448.

• Haiman, John (1983). “Iconic and Economic Motivation”. Language 59: 781–819. doi:10.2307/413373.

• Moravcsik, Edith, A. 1978. Reduplicative constructions. In Universals of human language, vol. 3: Wordstructure, Joseph H. Greenberg, ed., 297–334. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

• Shapiro, Bruce G. 1999. Reinventing Drama: Acting, Iconicity, Performance. Greenwood Press.

• Wilcox, S (2004). “Conceptual spaces and embodied actions: Cognitive iconicity and signed languages”.Cognitive Linguistics 15 (2): 119–147. doi:10.1515/cogl.2004.005.

Chapter 14

Isogloss

An isogloss—also called a heterogloss (see Etymology below)—is the geographic boundary of a certain linguisticfeature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. Major dialectsare typically demarcated by groups of isoglosses; for example the Benrath line distinguishes High German from theother West Germanic languages; and the La Spezia–Rimini Line divides the Northern Italian dialects from CentralItalian dialects. However, an individual isogloss may or may not have any coincidence with a language border. Forexample, the front-rounding of /y/ cuts across France and Germany, while the /y/ is absent from Italian and Spanishwords that are cognate with the /y/-containing French words.One of the most well-known isoglosses is the centum-satem isogloss.Similar to an isogloss, an isograph is a distinguishing feature of a writing system. Both concepts are also used inhistorical linguistics.

14.1 Examples

14.1.1 Centum-Satem isogloss

Main article: Centum-Satem isogloss

The Centum-Satem isogloss of the Indo-European language family relates to the different evolution of the dorsalconsonants of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). In the standard reconstruction, three series of dorsals are recognised:In some branches (for example Greek, Italic and Germanic), the palatals fell together with the velars: PIE *keup-“tremble (inwardly)" became Latin cupiō “desire” and *ḱmtom “hundred” became Latin centum (pronounced [ken-tum]); but *kʷo- "interrogative pronoun" became quō “how? where?". These branches are known asCentum branches,named after the Latin word for hundred.In other branches (for example Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian), the labiovelars fell together with the velars: PIE *keup-became Vedic Sanskrit kopáyati “shaken” and *kʷo- became Avestan kō “who?"; but *ḱmtom became Avestan satəm.These branches are known as Satem branches, named after the Avestan word for hundred.[1][2]

14.1.2 North-Midland isogloss (American English)

Amajor isogloss in American English has been identified as the North-Midland isogloss, which demarcates numerouslinguistic features, including the Northern Cities vowel shift: regions north of the line (including Western New York;Cleveland, Ohio; lower Michigan; northern Illinois; and eastern Wisconsin) have the shift, while regions south of theline (including Pennsylvania, central and southern Ohio, and most of Indiana) do not.

29

30 CHAPTER 14. ISOGLOSS

Isoglosses on the Faroe Islands

14.1.3 Northwest Semitic

A feature of the ancient Northwest Semitic languages is the following: w- > y- (w becomes y at the beginning of aword). Thus, in Proto-Semitic and subsequent non-Northwest Semitic languages and dialects, the root letters for aword for “child” were w-l-d. However, in the ancient Northwest Semitic languages, the word was y-l-d, that is, withw- > y-.

14.2. ISOGRAPHS 31

High German subdivides into Upper German (green) and Central German (blue), and is distinguished from Low Franconian andLow German (yellow). The main isoglosses, the Benrath and Speyer lines, are marked in black.

Similarly, Proto-Semitic ā (long a) becomes ō (long o) in the Canaanite dialects of Northwest Semitic.[3] Note thatwithin the Aramaic languages and dialects of Northwest Semitic, the historic ā is preserved. Thus, an ancient North-west Semitic language in which historic ā becomes ō can be classed as part of the Canaanite branch of NorthwestSemitic.Such features can be used as data of fundamental importance for the purposes of linguistic classification.

14.2 Isographs

Just as there are distinguishing features of related languages, there are also distinguishing features of related scripts(for a discussion of writing systems, see The World’s Writing Systems[4]).For example, a distinguishing feature of the ancient Old Hebrew script (i.e., Iron Age Old Hebrew script) is the factthat the letters bet, dalet, 'ayin, and resh do not have an open head, while Aramaic of the same period has open-headed forms. Similarly, the bet of Old Hebrew has a distinctive stance (namely, leans to the right), while the bet ofthe Aramaic and Phoenician script series has a different stance (namely, both of these lean to the left).

32 CHAPTER 14. ISOGLOSS

Recently, Christopher Rollston has suggested using the term isograph to designate a feature of the script that distin-guishes it from a related script series (e.g., a feature that distinguishes the script of Old Hebrew from Old Aramaicand Phoenician, etc.).[5]

14.3 Etymology

The term isogloss (Ancient Greek ἴσος ísos “equal, similar” and γλῶσσα glōssa “tongue, dialect, language”) is inspiredby contour lines or isopleths such as isobar. However, the isogloss separates rather than connects points of equallanguage. Consequently, it has been proposed that the term heterogloss (ἕτερος héteros “other”) be used instead.[6]

14.4 See also• Dialect• Dialectology• Dialect continuum• Cultural boundary• Joret line• Uerdingen line

14.5 References[1] Fortson IV, Benjamin W. (2004). Indo-European Language and Culture. Blackwell Publishing. pp. 52–54. ISBN 1-4051-

0316-7.

[2] Rix, Helmut (2001). Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag. p. 359. ISBN 3-89500-219-4.

[3] Garr, W. Randall (2 June 2008). Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine: 1000-586 BCE. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 1-57506-091-4.

[4] Daniels, Peter; Bright, William, eds. (8 February 1996). TheWorld’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-507993-0.

[5] Rollston, Christopher A. (2006). “Scribal Education in Ancient Israel: The Old Hebrew Epigraphic Evidence”. Bulletin ofthe American Schools of Oriental Research 344: 47–74.

[6] Sihler, Andrew L. (2000). Language History. Current issues in linguistic theory 191. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: JohnBenjamins Publishing. p. 170. ISBN 90-272-3698-4.

14.6 Bibliography• Chambers, J.K.; Trudgill, Peter (28 December 1998). Dialectology. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (2nded.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-59646-7.

• Woodard, Roger D. (31 May 2004). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. NewYork: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56256-2.

14.7 External links• An example of an isogloss in Southern England.• Beyond the Isogloss: The Isograph in Dialect Topography: A discussion of the shortcomings and oversimplifi-cations of using isoglosses.

• On Some Acoustic Correlates of Isoglossy: A humorous analysis of Russian isoglossy.

Chapter 15

Language island

A language island is an exclave of a language that is surrounded by one or more different languages.[1]

Examples of language islands:

• Saterland

• Brussels

• Isleños

• Palenquero

• Alghero

• Swabian Turkey

• Upper Harz

• Betawi

15.1 Gallery

• The predominantly French-speaking enclave of Brussels

• Language islands in Romania

• Sorbian language area in Germany

15.2 See also• Enclave and exclave

15.3 References[1] Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens, Paul Kerswill. Dialect change: convergence and divergence in European languages. str. 221.

“The term 'Sprachinsel' was used for the first time in 1847 to designate a Slavonic community surrounded by a German-speaking population close to Konigsberg, East Prussia cf. Mattheier 1996. 812”

33

Chapter 16

Letter frequency

The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular,dating back to the Iraqi mathematician Al-Kindi (c. 801–873 CE), who formally developed the method (the ciphersbreakable by this technique go back at least to the Caesar cipher invented by Julius Caesar, so this method could havebeen explored in classical times).

California Job Case

Letter frequency analysis gained additional importance with the development of movable type in Asia in 1040 CEand in Europe in 1450 CE, where one must estimate the amount of type required for each letterform, as evidencedby the variations in letter compartment size in typographer’s type cases.Linguists use letter frequency analysis as a rudimentary technique for language identification, where it’s particularlyeffective as an indication of whether an unknown writing system is alphabetic, syllablic, or ideographic. For example,the Japanese Hiragana syllabary contains 46 distinct characters, which is more than most phonetic alphabets, e.g. theHawaiian language which has a mere 13 letters, or English which has 26.No exact letter frequency distribution underlies a given language, since all writers write slightly differently. However,most languages have a characteristic distribution which is strongly apparent in longer texts. Even language changeas extreme as from old English to modern English (regarded as mutually unintelligible) show strong trends in relatedletter frequencies: over a small sample of Biblical passages, from most frequent to least frequent, enaid sorhmtgþlwu (æ)cfy ðbpxz of old English compares to eotha sinrd luymw fgcbp kvjqxz of modern English, with themost extreme differences concerning letterforms not shared.[1]

Linotype machines (which seem to have been primarily or exclusively marketed for English-language typesetting)assumed the letter order, frommost to least common, to be etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkjq xz based on the experienceand custom of manual compositors.Likewise, Modern International Morse code (generally believed to have been developed by Alfred Vail based onEnglish-language letter frequencies of the 1830s) encodes the most frequent letters with the shortest symbols; ar-ranging the Morse alphabet into groups of letters that require equal amounts of time to transmit, and then sortingthese groups in increasing order, yields e it san hurdm wgvlfbk opjxcz yq. Similar ideas are used in modern

34

16.1. INTRODUCTION 35

data-compression techniques such as Huffman coding.Letter frequency was also used by other telegraph systems, such as the Murray Code.

16.1 Introduction

Letter frequencies, like word frequencies, tend to vary, both by writer and by subject. One cannot write an essayabout x-rays without using frequent Xs, and the essay will have an idiosyncratic letter frequency if the essay is aboutthe frequent use of x-rays to treat zebras in Qatar. Different authors have habits which can be reflected in their useof letters. Hemingway's writing style, for example, is visibly different from Faulkner's. Letter, bigram, trigram, wordfrequencies, word length, and sentence length can be calculated for specific authors, and used to prove or disproveauthorship of texts, even for authors whose styles are not so divergent.Accurate average letter frequencies can only be gleaned by analyzing a large amount of representative text. With theavailability of modern computing and collections of large text corpora, such calculations are easily made. Examplescan be drawn from a variety of sources (press reporting, religious texts, scientific texts and general fiction) and thereare differences especially for general fiction with the position of 'h' and 'i', with H becoming more common.Herbert S. Zim, in his classic introductory cryptography text “Codes and Secret Writing”, gives the English letterfrequency sequence as “ETAON RISHD LFCMU GYPWB VKJXQ Z”, the most common letter pairs as “TH HEAN RE ER IN ON AT ND ST ES EN OF TE ED OR TI HI AS TO”, and the most common doubled letters as “LLEE SS OO TT FF RR NN PP CC”.[2]

The “top twelve” letters comprise about 80% of the total usage. The “top eight” letters comprise about 65% of thetotal usage. Letter frequency as a function of rank can be fitted well by several rank functions, with the two-parameterCocho/Beta rank function being the best.[3] Another rank function with no adjustable free parameter also fits the letterfrequency distribution reasonably well[4] (the same function has been used to fit the amino acid frequency in proteinsequences.[5]) A spy using the VIC cipher or some other cipher based on a straddling checkerboard typically uses amnemonic such as “a sin to err” (dropping the second “r”)[6][7] or “at one sir”[8] to remember the top eight characters.The use of letter frequencies and frequency analysis plays a fundamental role in cryptograms and several word puzzlegames, including Hangman, Scrabble and the television game showWheel of Fortune. One of the earliest descriptionin classical literature of applying the knowledge of English letter frequency to solving a cryptogram is found in E.A.Poe's famous story The Gold-Bug, where the method is successfully applied to decipher a message instructing on thewhereabouts of a treasure hidden by Captain Kidd.[9]

Letter frequencies had a strong effect on the design of some keyboard layouts. The most-frequent letters are on thebottom row of the Blickensderfer typewriter, and the home row of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.

16.2 Relative frequencies of letters in the English language

Analysis of entries in the Concise Oxford dictionary is published by the compilers.[10] The table below is taken fromPavel Mička's website, which cites Robert Lewand’s Cryptological Mathematics.[11]

This table differs slightly from others, such as Cornell University Math Explorer’s Project, which produced a tableafter measuring 40,000 words.[12]

In English, the space is slightly more frequent than the top letter (e) [13] and the non-alphabetic characters (digits,punctuation, etc.) collectively occupy the fourth position (having already included the space) between t and a.[14]

16.3 Relative frequencies of the first letters of a word in the English lan-guage

The frequency of the first letters of words or names is helpful in pre-assigning space in physical files and indexes.[15]Given 26 filing cabinet drawers, rather than a 1:1 assignment of one drawer to one letter of the alphabet, it is oftenuseful to use a more equal-frequency-letter code by assigning several low-frequency letters to the same drawer (oftenone drawer is labeled VWXYZ), and to split up the most-frequent initial letters—S, A, and C -- into several drawers

36 CHAPTER 16. LETTER FREQUENCY

0

0.02

0.04

0.06

0.08

0.1

0.12

0.14

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Relative frequencies of letters in text.

(often 4 drawers Aa-An, Ao-Az, Ca-Cj, Ck-Cz, Sa-Si, Sj-Sz). The same system is used in some multi-volume workssuch as some encyclopedias.The first letter of an English word, from most to least common, s a c m p r t b f g d l h i e n o w u v j k q y z x.[15]

Both the overall letter distribution and the word-initial letter distribution approximately match the Zipf distributionand even more closely match the Yule distribution.[16]

Often the frequency distribution of the first digit in each datum is significantly different from the overall frequency ofall the digits in a set of numeric data—see Benford’s law for details.Analysis of a subset of Project Gutenberg text shows the following frequencies of letters at the starts of words:[17]

16.4 Relative frequencies of letters in other languages

*See Dotted and dotless IThe figure below illustrates the frequency distributions of the 26 most common Latin letters across some languages.Based on these tables, the 'etaoin shrdlu'-equivalent results for each language is as follows:

• French: 'esait nruol'; (Indo-European: Romance; traditionally, 'esartinulop' is used, in part for its ease ofpronunciation[31])

• Spanish: 'eaosr nidlt'; (Indo-European: Romance)

• Portuguese: 'aeosr idmnt' (Indo-European: Romance)

• Italian: 'eaion lrtsc'; (Indo-European: Romance)

16.5. SEE ALSO 37

0

0.02

0.04

0.06

0.08

0.1

0.12

0.14

e t a o i n s h r d l c u m w f g y p b v k j x q z

Relative frequencies ordered by frequency.

• Esperanto: 'aieon lsrtk' (artificial language – influenced by Indo-European languages, Romance, Germanicmostly)

• German: 'ensri atdhu'; (Indo-European: Germanic)

• Swedish: 'eanrt sildo'; (Indo-European: Germanic)

• Turkish: 'aeinr lkdım'; (Altaic: Turkic)

• Dutch: 'enati rodsl'; (Indo-European: Germanic)[27]

• Polish: 'aieon wrszc'; (Indo-European: Slavic)

• Danish: 'ernta idslo'; (Indo-European: Germanic)

• Icelandic: 'arnie stulð'; (Indo-European: Germanic)

• Finnish: 'ainte slouk'; (Uralic: Finnic)

• Czech: 'aeoni tvsrl'; (Indo-European: Slavic)

All these languages use a basically similar 25+ character alphabet.

16.5 See also• Corpus linguistics

• ETAOIN SHRDLU

38 CHAPTER 16. LETTER FREQUENCY

• RSTLNE (Wheel of Fortune)

• Frequency analysis (cryptanalysis)

• Linotype machine

• Most common words in English

• Scrabble

• Arabic Letter Frequency

16.6 References[1] Moreno, Marsha Lynn (Spring 2005). “Frequency Analysis in Light of Language Innovation” (PDF). Math UCSD. Re-

trieved 19 February 2015.

[2] Zim, Herbert Spencer. (1961). Codes & Secret Writing: Authorized Abridgement. Scholastic Book Services. OCLC317853773.

[3] Li, Wentian; Miramontes, Pedro (2011). “Fitting ranked English and Spanish letter frequency distribution in US andMexican presidential speeches”. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 18 (4): 359. doi:10.1080/09296174.2011.608606.

[4] Gusein-Zade, S.M. (1988). “Frequency distribution of letters in the Russian language”. Probl. Peredachi Inf. 24 (4):102–7.

[5] Gamow, George; Ycas, Martynas (1955). “Statistical correlation of protein and ribonucleic acid composition” (PDF). Proc.Natl. Acad. Sci. 41 (12): 1011–19. doi:10.1073/pnas.41.12.1011. PMC 528190. PMID 16589789.

[6] Friedrich L. Bauer. “Decrypted Secrets: Methods and Maxims of Cryptology”. 2006. p. 57.

[7] Greg Goebel. “The Rise Of Field Ciphers: straddling checkerboard ciphers” 2009.

[8] Dirk Rijmenants. “One-time Pad”

[9] Poe, Edgar Allan. “The works of Edgar Allan Poe in five volumes”. Project Gutenberg.

[10] “What is the frequency of the letters of the alphabet in English?". Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Retrieved29 December 2012.

[11] Mička, Pavel. “Letter frequency (English)". Algoritmy.net.

[12] http://www.math.cornell.edu/~{}mec/2003-2004/cryptography/subs/frequencies.html

[13] Statistical Distributions of English Text

[14] Lee, E. Stewart. “Essays about Computer Security” (PDF). University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. p. 181.

[15] Herbert Marvin Ohlman. “Subject-Word Letter Frequencies with Applications to Superimposed Coding". Proceedingsof the International Conference on Scientific Information (1959).

[16] Hemlata Pande and H. S. Dhami. “Mathematical Modelling of Occurrence of Letters and Word’s Initials in Texts of HindiLanguage”.

[17] Calculated from “Project Gutenberg Selections” available from the NLTK Corpora

[18] “CorpusDeThomasTempé". Retrieved 2007-06-15.

[19] Beutelspacher, Albrecht (2005). Kryptologie (7 ed.). Wiesbaden: Vieweg. p. 10. ISBN 3-8348-0014-7.

[20] Pratt, Fletcher (1942). Secret and Urgent: the Story of Codes and Ciphers. Garden City, N.Y.: Blue Ribbon Books. pp.254–5. OCLC 795065.

[21] “Frequência da ocorrência de letras no Português”. Retrieved 2009-06-16.

[22] “La Oftecoj de la Esperantaj Literoj”. Retrieved 2007-09-14.

[23] Singh, Simon; Galli, Stefano (1999). Codici e Segreti (in Italian). Milano: Rizzoli. ISBN 978-8-817-86213-4. OCLC535461359.

16.7. EXTERNAL LINKS 39

[24] Serengil, S.I., Akin, M. "Attacking Turkish Texts Encrypted by Homophonic Cipher" Proceedings of the 10th WSEASInternational Conference on Electronics, Hardware, Wireless and Optical Communications, pp.123-126, Cambridge, UK,February 20–22, 2011.

[25] “Practical Cryptography”. Retrieved 2013-10-30.

[26] Wstęp do kryptologii, counting [space] 17.2%, [dot point] 0.9%, [comma] 0.9% and [semicolon] 0.5%

[27] “Letterfrequenties”. Genootschap OnzeTaal. Retrieved 2009-05-17.

[28] “Practical Cryptography”. Retrieved 2013-10-24.

[29] “Practical Cryptography”. Retrieved 2013-10-24.

[30] “Practical Cryptography”. Retrieved 2013-10-24.

[31] Perec, Georges; Alphabets; Éditions Galilée, 1976

Notes

Some useful tables for single letter, digram, trigram, tetragram, and pentagram frequencies based on 20,000 wordsthat take into account word-length and letter-position combinations for words 3 to 7 letters in length. The referencesare as follows:

1. Mayzner, M.S.; Tresselt, M.E. (1965). “Tables of single-letter and digram frequency counts for variousword-length and letter-position combinations”. Psychonomic Monograph Supplements 1 (2): 13–32. OCLC639975358.

2. Mayzner, M.S.; Tresselt, M.E.;Wolin, B.< R.< (1965). “Tables of trigram frequency counts for various word-length and letter-position combinations”. Psychonomic Monograph Supplements 1 (3): 33–78.

3. Mayzner, M.S.; Tresselt, M.E.;Woliin, B.< R,.. (1965). “Tables of tetragram frequency counts for variousword-length and letter-position combinations”. Psychonomic Monograph Supplements 1 (4): 79–143.

4. Mayzner, M.S.; Tresselt, M.E.Wolin, B,.< R.> (1965). “Tables of pentagram frequency counts for variousword-length and letter-position combinations”. Psychonomic Monograph Supplements 1 (5): 144–190.

16.7 External links• A site with content of Cryptographical Mathematics by Robert Edward Lewand

• Some examples of letter frequency rankings in some common languages

• Java-Application for building letter frequencies out of a text file

• JavaScript Heatmap Visualization showing letter frequencies of texts on different keyboard layouts

• An updated version of Mayzner’s work using Google books Ngrams data set by Peter Norvig

Chapter 17

Letter frequency effect

Letter frequency effect - the effect of letter frequency according to which the frequency with which the letter isencountered influences the recognition time of a letter. Letters of high frequency show a significant advantage overletters of low frequency in letter naming,[1] same-different matching,[2] and visual search.[3] Letters of high frequencyare recognized faster than letters of low frequency.[4] Appelman andMayzner (1981) in their re-analysis of the studiesconcerning letter frequency effect have found that in 3 out of 6 studies using reaction times (RTs) as a dependentvariable the letter frequency correlated significantly with RTs.[5]

17.1 Discussion

Majority of studies on letter frequency effect failed to find a significant letter frequency effect.[6] These studies, how-ever, used the same-different matching task[6] in which the participants see two letters and are to respond if theseletters are same or different.[6] Therefore, the absence of letter frequency effect in these studies may be due to theparticipants using the visual form of a letter instead of a letter itself to match the letters.[6]

17.2 References[1] Cosky, M. J. (1976). The role of letter recognition in word recognition. Memory & Cognition, 4 , 207-214.

[2] Egeth, H., & Blecker, D. (1971). Differential effects of familiarity on judgments of sameness and difference. Perception& Psychophysics, 9 (4), 321-326.

[3] Latimer, C. R. (1972). Search time as a function of context letter frequency. Perception, 1 , 57-71.

[4] Miozo, Michele & Bastiani, Pierluigi de (2002). The Organization of Letter-Form Representations in Written Spelling:Evidence from Acquired Dysgraphia. Brain and Language 80, 366–392

[5] Appelman, I. B., & Mayzner , M. S. (1981). The letter-frequency effect and the generality of familiarity effects on per-ception.Perception & Psychophysics, 30, 436 – 446.

[6] Boris, New & Grainger, Johnatan (2011). On letter frequency effects. Acta Psychologica 138, 322 –328

40

Chapter 18

Metalanguage

Not to be confused with Metalinguistics.For the programming language, see ML (programming language).

Broadly, any metalanguage is language or symbols used when language itself is being discussed or examined.[1] Inlogic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to make statements about statements in another language (theobject language). Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in an object language by the useof italics, quotation marks, or writing on a separate line.

18.1 Types of metalanguage

There is a variety of recognized metalanguages, including embedded, ordered, and nested (or, hierarchical).

18.1.1 Embedded metalanguage

An embedded metalanguage is a language formally, naturally and firmly fixed in an object language. This idea isfound in Douglas Hofstadter's book,Gödel, Escher, Bach, in a discussion of the relationship between formal languagesand number theory: “... it is in the nature of any formalization of number theory that its metalanguage is embeddedwithin it.”.[2] It occurs in natural, or informal, languages, as well—such as in English, where words such as noun,verb, or even word describe features and concepts pertaining to the English language itself.

18.1.2 Ordered metalanguage

An orderedmetalanguage is analogous to ordered logic. An example of an ordered metalanguage is the constructionof one metalanguage to discuss an object language, followed by the creation of another metalanguage to discuss thefirst, etc.

18.1.3 Nested metalanguage

A nested (or, hierarchical)metalanguage is similar to an ordered metalanguage in that each level represents a greaterdegree of abstraction. However, a nested metalanguage differs from an ordered one in that each level includes the onebelow. The paradigmatic example of a nested metalanguage comes from the Linnean taxonomic system in biology.Each level in the system incorporates the one below it. The language used to discuss genus is also used to discussspecies; the one used to discuss orders is also used to discuss genera, etc., up to kingdoms.

41

42 CHAPTER 18. METALANGUAGE

18.2 Metalanguages in natural language

Natural language combines nested and ordered metalanguages. In a natural language there is an infinite regress ofmetalanguages, each with more specialized vocabulary and simpler syntax. Designating the language now as L0, thegrammar of the language is a discourse in the metalanguage L1, which is a sublanguage[3] nested within L0. Thegrammar of L1, which has the form of a factual description, is a discourse in the metametalanguage L2, which is alsoa sublanguage of L0. The grammar of L2, which has the form of a theory describing the syntactic structure of suchfactual descriptions, is stated in the metametametalanguage L3, which likewise is a sublanguage of L0. The grammarof L3 has the form of a metatheory describing the syntactic structure of theories stated in L2. L4 and succeedingmetalanguages have the same grammar as L3, differing only in reference. Since all of these metalanguages aresublanguages of L0, L1 is a nested metalanguage, but L2 and sequel are ordered metalanguages.[4] Since all thesemetalanguages are sublanguages of L0 they are all embedded languages with respect to the language as a whole.Metalanguages of formal systems all resolve ultimately to natural language, the 'common parlance' in which mathe-maticians and logicians converse to define their terms and operations and 'read out' their formulae.[5]

18.3 Types of expressions in a metalanguage

There are several entities commonly expressed in a metalanguage. In logic usually the object language that themetalanguage is discussing is a formal language, and very often the metalanguage as well.

18.3.1 Deductive systems

Main article: Deductive system

A deductive system (or, deductive apparatus) of a formal system) consists of the axioms (or axiom schemata) andrules of inference that can be used to derive the theorems of the system.[6]

18.3.2 Metavariables

Main article: Metavariable (logic)

A metavariable (or, metalinguistic variable) is a symbol or set of symbols in a metalanguage which stands for asymbol or set of symbols in some object language. For instance, in the sentence:

Let A and B be arbitrary formula of a formal language L .

The symbols A and B are not symbols of the object language L , they are metavariables in the metalanguage (in thiscase, English) that is discussing the object language L .

18.3.3 Metatheories and metatheorems

Main articles: Metatheory and Metatheorem

A metatheory is a theory whose subject matter is some other theory (a theory about a theory). Statements made inthe metatheory about the theory are called metatheorems. Ametatheorem is a true statement about a formal systemexpressed in a metalanguage. Unlike theorems proved within a given formal system, a metatheorem is proved withina metatheory, and may reference concepts that are present in the metatheory but not the object theory.[7]

18.3.4 Interpretations

Main article: Interpretation (logic)

18.4. ROLE IN METAPHOR 43

An interpretation is an assignment of meanings to the symbols and words of a language.

18.4 Role in metaphor

Michael J. Reddy (1979) discovered and has demonstrated that much of the language we use to talk about languageis conceptualized and structured by what he refers to as the conduit metaphor.[8] This paradigm operates through twodistinct, related frameworks.The major framework views language as a sealed pipeline between people:1. Language transfers people’s thoughts and feelings (mental content) to othersex: Try to get your thoughts across better.2. Speakers and writers insert their mental content into wordsex: You have to put each concept into words more carefully.3. Words are containersex: That sentence was filled with emotion.4. Listeners and writers extract mental content from wordsex: Let me know if you find any new sensations in the poem.The minor framework views language as an open pipe spilling mental content into the void:1. Speakers and writers eject mental content into an external spaceex: Get those ideas out where they can do some good.2. Mental content is reified (viewed as concrete) in this spaceex: That concept has been floating around for decades.3. Listeners and writers extract mental content from this spaceex: Let me know if you find any good concepts in the essay.

18.5 Metaprogramming

Computers follow programs, sets of instructions in a formal language. The development of a programming lan-guage involves the use of a metalanguage. The act of working with metalanguages in programming is known asmetaprogramming. Backus–Naur Form, developed in the 1960s by John Backus and Peter Naur, is one of the earli-est metalanguages used in computing. Examples of modern-day programming languages which commonly find usein metaprogramming include Lisp, m4, and Yacc.

18.6 See also• Category theory

• Conduit metaphor

• Jakobson’s functions of language

• Language-oriented programming

• Metaethics

• Meta-communication

• Metafiction

• Metagraphy

• Metalinguistic abstraction

44 CHAPTER 18. METALANGUAGE

• Metalocutionary act

• Metaphilosophy

• Metaprogramming

• Natural Semantic Metalanguage

• Paralanguage

• Self reference

• Use–mention distinction

18.7 Dictionaries• Audi, R. 1996. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Baldick, C. 1996. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Cuddon, J. A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books.

• Honderich, T. 1995. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Matthews, P. H. 1997. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-280008-4

• McArthur, T. 1996. The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

18.8 References[1] 2010. Cambridge Advanced Learner‘s Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dictionary online. Available

from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/metalanguage Internet. Retrieved 20 November 2010

[2] Hofstadter, Douglas. 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Vintage Books ISBN 0-14-017997-6

[3] Harris, Zellig S. (1991). A theory of language and information: A mathematical approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp.272–318. ISBN 0-19-824224-7.

[4] Ibid. p. 277.

[5] Borel, Félix Édouard Justin Émile (1928). Leçons sur la theorie des fonctions (in French) (3 ed.). Paris: Gauthier-Villars& Cie. p. 160.

[6] Hunter, Geoffrey. 1971. Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First-Order Logic. Berkeley:Universityof California Press ISBN 978-0-520-01822-8

[7] Ritzer, George. 1991. Metatheorizing in Sociology. New York: Simon Schuster ISBN 0-669-25008-2

[8] Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In AndrewOrtony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

18.9 External links• Metalanguage, Principia Cybernetica

• Willard McCarty (submitted 2006) Problematic Metaphors, Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 92.

Chapter 19

Null Subject Parameter

Pro-Drop Parameter/Null Subject ParameterThe parameter which determines whether a language is a pro-drop language or not. A positive setting of the parameterallows an empty pro-element to be identified by its governor. This is the case in pro-drop languages.[1]

A term used in government-binding theory for a specification of the types of variation that a principle of grammarmanifests among different languages. It is suggested that there are no rules of grammar in the traditional sense, butonly principles which can take a slightly different form in different languages. For example, a head parameter specifiesthe positions of heads within phrases (e.g. head-first in English, head-last in Japanese). The adjacency parameterof case theory specifies whether case assigners must be adjacent to their noun phrases (e.g. to the left in English,to the right in Chinese). The pro-drop (or ‘null subject’) parameter determines whether the subject of a clause canbe suppressed. Determining the parametric values for given languages is known as parameter-setting. The overallapproach has been called the principles and parameters theory (PPT) of universal grammar, and has since come tobe applied outside of syntactic contexts, notably in characterizing phonological relations. Later versions of metricalphonology, for example, recognize a series of parameters governing the way metrical feet should be represented, suchas quantity sensitivity and directionality.[2]

(in universal grammar) a parameter which determines whether the subject in declarative sentences may be deleted.Parameters vary in different languages within certain defined limits. Languages such as Italian and Arabic can havesubject-less declarative sentences, e.g. Italian parla ‘he/she speaks/talks’, and are referred to as pro-drop languages.However, languages such as English, French and German do not typically omit the subject in declarative sentences.They are referred to as non-pro-drop languages, e.g.:The term pro-drop is used because in the d-structure of the grammar, the empty subject position is filled by theelement pro, e.g. pro parla The pro-drop parameter and other parameters of Universal Grammar have attracted theinterest of researchers working in the fields of child language acquisition and language teaching. For example, thequestion has been raised: How do children ‘set’ a UG parameter to fit their particular language? Researchers in secondlanguage acquisition have investigated what happens if a parameter in the speaker’s native language is different fromthat of their target language, making it necessary to ‘reset’ the parameter. This would happen, for example, in theacquisition of Spanish (a pro-drop language) by speakers of non-pro-drop languages such as English and French.[3]

In GB, anyone of various putative universal statements permitting a specified degree of variation within languages.The idea is that anyone language selects just one of the small number of choices permitted by the theory of grammar.Examples include the Head Parameter, the Adjacency Parameter and the Pro-Drop Parameter.[4]

Notion in the theory of Universal Grammar (UG) and language acquisition. Parameters specify certain options thatare not specified in UG. The values of parameters are not genetically fixed. Thus, language acquisition becomes aprocess of parameter setting. Linguistic diversity is characterized in terms of the values of parameters, for examplethe null subject parameter. Certain languages such as Italian and Spanish may have sentences with no overt subject,while other languages such as English must have an overt subject, even in cases in which this is nonreferential (dummysubject). Parameter theory, thus, provides an explanation for systematic syntactic variation between languages andimposes restrictions on the number of choices which the language learner has to make.[5]

45

46 CHAPTER 19. NULL SUBJECT PARAMETER

19.1 References[1] Hadumod Bussmann/Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

[2] David Crystal/A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics

[3] Jack C. Richards and Richard Schmidt/Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

[4] R. L. Trask/A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics

[5] Silvia Luraghi and Claudia Parodi/Key Terms in Syntax and Syntactic Theory

Chapter 20

Pancake sentence

Pancake sentences are a phenomenon in Scandinavian linguistics where sentence agreement does not follow con-ventional linguistic patterns. The phrase appears to have been coined by Hans-Olav Enger in a 2004 academic paper,“Scandinavian pancake sentences as semantic agreement”. Enger states that pancake sentences are “where the pred-icative adjective apparently disagrees with its subject”. This phenomenon may be related or compared to Englishlanguage linguistics, where American English speakers might say “the team has arrived”, syntactically agreeing thesingular team, versus British English speakers saying “the team have arrived”, agreeing semantically to the collectivenoun team.An example from Swedish is the sentence “Pannkakor är nyttigt":

While Pannkakor 'pancakes’ is plural and of common gender, nyttigt 'healthy' is inflected to singular and neuter.

20.1 References• Enger, Hans-Olav (December 2013). “Scandinavian pancake sentences revisited”. Nordic Journal of Linguis-tics (Cambridge University Press) 36 (03): pp 275–301.

• Josefsson, Gunlög (2012). “Pancake sentences and gender system changes in Mainland Scandinavian” (PDF).

• Josefsson, Gunlög (2014). “Pancake sentences and the semanticization of formal gender in Mainland Scandi-navian”. Language Sciences 43: 62–76.

• Josefsson, Gunlög (December 2012), ""Disagreeing” doubling det” (PDF), Working Papers in ScandinavianSyntax (Lund University) 90

• Polysemy and Pancakes

47

Chapter 21

Phonocentrism

Phonocentrism is the belief that sounds and speech are inherently superior to, or more primary than, written lan-guage. Those who espouse phonocentric views maintain that spoken language is the primary and most fundamentalmethod of communication whereas writing is merely a derived method of capturing speech. Many also believe thatspoken language is inherently richer and more intuitive than written language. These views also impact perceptionsof sign languages - especially in the United States. Oralism is the belief that deaf students should use sounds, speechreading, and primarily english instead of signs in their education. Alexander Graham Bell is a well known proponentfor oralism of the deaf - such phonocentristic views are rejected by the Deaf community. Phonocentrisim in thecontext of deafness is referred to as audism.Some writers have argued that philosophers such as Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ferdinand de Saussure havepromoted phonocentric views. Walter Ong, who has also expressed support for the idea of phonocentrism, has arguedthat the culture of the United States is particularly non-phonocentric.Some philosophers and linguists, notably including the philosopher Jacques Derrida, have used the term “phonocen-trism” to criticize what they see as a disdain for written language. Derrida has argued that phonocentrism developedbecause the immediacy of speech has been regarded as closer to the presence of subjects than writing. He believedthat the binary opposition between speech and writing is a form of logocentrism.[1]

21.1 Advocates of phonocentrism

The philosopher John Searle has argued that Plato expressed some skepticism about the value of writing relative tospeech.[2] The rhetorician and philosopherWalter Ong also believes that Plato was phonocentric. He argues that Platohad a clear preference for “orality over writing.”[3] However, he notes that Plato’s belief in phonocentrism was bothcontrived and defended textually, and is therefore paradoxical.[3]

Rousseau also held views that have since been characterized as phonocentric. He discussed the topic in Essay on theOrigin of Languages. He believed that speech was a more natural form of communication than writing, which heviewed as a somewhat parasitic and unhealthy derivation of speech.[4]

The linguist Leonard Bloomfield has also expressed the belief that spoken languages are the primary form of language,and that written languages should be viewed as derived from them. He argued that “writing is not language, but merelya way of recording language.”[5]

Saussure believed that speech should be treated as the primary topic of linguistics. He believed that writing was giventoo much attention in the field of linguistics. In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure argued that “language andwriting are two distinct systems of signs.” He believed that both systems influenced each other, but that writing couldobscure language. He argued that writing obscures how pronunciation forms because of its influence on pronunciation.Saussure drew a distinction between phonetic languages and languages such as Chinese in which a single characterrepresents a word. He believed that only phonetic languages cause problems for linguists.[6]

Ong has argued that American society is particularly opposed to phonocentrism. He believes that one cause of this isthe fact that written documents, such as the United States Constitution, form a key part of American national identity.He also notes that many Americans view the reality of words as defined by dictionaries rather than by vocal speech.He has stated, “We are so literate in ideology that we think writing comes naturally. We have to remind ourselves

48

21.2. DERRIDA 49

from time to time that writing is completely and irremediably artificial.”[7]

Ong believes that writing is necessary for transmitting knowledge in a technological culture. He maintains that speechshould be viewed as primary because it is drawn from the unconscious while writing requires conscious attention:“Speech is structured through the entire fabric of the human person. Writing depends on consciously contrivedrules.”[8] He also states that writing and speech are each privileged in specific ways, and that they depend upon eachother for identification and clarity.[9]

21.2 Derrida

Derrida believed that the fields of philosophy, literature, anthropology, and linguistics had become highly phonocentric.[10]He argued that phonocentrism was an important example of what he saw as Western philosophy's logocentrism.[1]He maintained that phonocentrism developed due to the human desire to determine a central means of authenticself-expression. He argued that speech is no better than writing, but is assigned that role by societies that seek to finda transcendental form of expression. This form of expression is said to allow one to better express transcendentaltruths and to allow one to understand key metaphysical ideas.[1] Derrida believed that phonocentric cultures associatespeech with a time before meaning was corrupted by writing. He saw phonocentrism as part of the influence ofRomanticism, specifically its belief in a time in which people lived in harmony and unity with nature. Derrida didnot believe that there was any ideal state of unity with nature. He also argued that speech suffers from many of thesame inherent flaws as writing.[10]

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has characterized Derrida’s opposition to phonocentrism as part of his campaign against“human egocentricity.”[11] Derrida points out that the expression of human views is often dominated by the voices ofhumans.[11] He also noted that writing frees expression from the human voice and is more exterior and stable thanspeech. He believed that this makes it a more effective carrier of meaning. Randal Holme has argued that Derridapreferred writing because he associated it with “the construction of meaning and the creation of category.”[11]

Derrida identified the often perceived difference between the value of speaking versus writing as one of the key binaryoppositions of logocentrism. He attempted to deconstruct this opposition by arguing that speech can be seen as derivedfrom writing as easily as writing is seen as derived from speech. He wrote that societies often make determinationsthat unfairly casts writing as an inferior method of communication and self-expression.[1]

Derrida insisted that the written word has its own value, and is likely not “the simple 'supplement to the spokenword.'"[12] In Of Grammatology he uses this method of analysis to critique the views that Rousseau expressed inEssay on the Origin of Languages.[12] Derrida argued that Rousseau’s views were contradictory and often underminedhis arguments.[4]

21.2.1 Criticism

Searle has criticized Derrida’s claims of historical opposition to Phonocentrism. Searle believes that many philoso-phers, including Aristotle, Gottfried Leibniz, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell, have “tended to emphasize writtenlanguage as the more perspicuous vehicle of logical relations.”[2] He argues that support for ordinary speech overwritten language only emerged in the 1950s with the advent of Ordinary language philosophy. He also contends thatDerrida makes sweeping misinformed claims about the history of writing.[2]

Geoffrey Hartman has also criticized Derrida’s accounts of phonocentrism. He has argued that Derrida failed toprovide an account of the historical forces that have influenced phonocentric and non-phonocentric cultures. Ong hasexpressed some agreement with Hartman’s critique. Though he describes Derrida’s view as “brilliant and to a degreeserviceable,” he believes that it “plays with the paradoxes of textuality alone and in historical isolation.” Though Ongbelieves that it is impossible to separate writing from its pretext, he contends that “this does not mean that text canbe reduced to orality.”[13]

21.3 See also

• Phallogocentrism

• Graphocentrism

50 CHAPTER 21. PHONOCENTRISM

21.4 Notes[1] Sarup 1993, pp. 35–38

[2] Searle 1983

[3] Ong 2004, p. 164

[4] Sarup 1993, p. 39

[5] Fasold 2003, p. 277

[6] Evans 1991, pp. 160–161

[7] Ong 1994, p. 137

[8] Ong 1994, p. 138

[9] Ong 2004, pp. 165–166

[10] Hogan 2000, p. 249

[11] Holme 2004, p. 149

[12] Derrida 1998, p. 7

[13] Ong 2004, p. 165

21.5 Bibliography• Derrida, Jacques (1998), Of Grammatology, Baltimore: JHU Press, p. 452, ISBN 978-0-8018-5830-7

• Evans, Joseph Claude (1991), Strategies of deconstruction: Derrida and the myth of the voice, Minneapolis: Uof Minnesota Press, p. 224, ISBN 978-0-8166-1925-2

• Fasold, Ralph W. (2003), The sociolinguistics of language, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 352, ISBN 978-0-631-13825-9

• Hogan, Patrick Colm (2000), Philosophical approaches to the study of literature, Gainesville: University Pressof Florida, p. 384, ISBN 978-0-8130-1764-8

• Holme, Randal (2004), Literacy: an introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 280, ISBN 978-0-7486-1689-3

• Ong, Walter J. (1994), “Literacy and Orality in Our Times”, in Young, Richard E.; Liu, Yameng, Landmarkessays on rhetorical invention in writing 8, Davis: Psychology Press, p. 272, ISBN 978-1-880393-14-7

• Ong, Walter J. (2004), Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, New York: Psychology Press, p.232, ISBN 978-0-415-28129-4

• Sarup, Madan (1993), An introductory guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism, Athens: University ofGeorgia Press, p. 240, ISBN 978-0-8203-1531-7

• Searle, John R. (1983), “The Word Turned Upside Down”, The New York Review of Books (New York) 30(16)

Chapter 22

Skunked term

A Skunked term is a term coined by lexicographer Bryan Garner in his 2008 edition of Garner’s Modern AmericanUsage to indicate for a word that has undergone “a marked change from one use to another” and is “likely to bethe subject of dispute”.[1] Garner recommends avoiding such terms if their use may distract from your message’smeaning.[2] Some terms such as "fulsome" may become skunked, then eventually revert to their original meaningover time.[3]

Older controversial terms include "decimate", which used to mean to 'kill one in ten' from the Roman practice ofdecimation which now means “to destroy” and "hopefully" which used to mean 'in a hopeful manner' but now means'it is hoped' since the beginning of the 1960’s.[2][4][5]

Other such examples include "niggardly", "jewfish", "Oriental". "data" and "media".[6]

Recent examples include the 2013 Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "literally" to include “figuratively”[7] andtowards 2014 the conflation of 'Deep Web' with 'Dark Web'.[8]

22.1 References[1] “skunked term”. Retrieved 6 September 2015.

[2] Brenner, Erin (13 March 2014). “The Politics of Writing: Should You Use Skunked Terms?". Retrieved 6 September2015.

[3] Brenner, Erin (22 February 2012). “The Story Behind “Fulsome"". Retrieved 6 September 2015.

[4] Liberman, Mark. “The H-word”. Retrieved 6 September 2015.

[5] Beaujon, Andrew (19 April 2012). “Hopefully, this is the last we’ll write about ‘hopefully’". Retrieved 6 September 2015.

[6] Perlman, Merrill (20 October 2014). “How common descriptors fall out of favor”. Retrieved 6 September 2015.

[7] Hawkes, Steve (13 August 2013). “Uproar as OED includes erroneous use of 'literally'". Retrieved 6 September 2015.

[8] Solomon, Jane (6 May 2015). “The Deep Web vs. The Dark Web”. Retrieved 26 May 2015.

51

Chapter 23

Underspecification

This article is about the linguistic concept. For the mathematical concept, see Indeterminate system.

In theoretical linguistics, underspecification is a phenomenon in which certain features are omitted in underlyingrepresentations. Restricted underspecification theory holds that features should only be underspecified if their valuesare predictable. For example, in most dialects of English, all front vowels (/i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ/) are unrounded. It is notnecessary for these phonemes to include the distinctive feature [−round], because all [−back] vowels are [−round]vowels, so the roundness feature is not distinctive for front vowels. Radical underspecification theory, on the otherhand, also allows for traditionally binary features to be specified for only one value, where it is assumed that everysegment not specified for that value has the other value. For example, instead of the features [+voice] and [−voice],only [+voice] is specified and voicelessness is taken as the default.The concept of underspecification is also used in morphological theory, particularly to refer to cases in which amorpheme does not bear an entire set of feature-values, and is thus compatible with a wide range of potential mor-phological environments. In this approach to morphology, for example, while the English pronouns he vs. she arespecified for gender, the plural pronoun they would be underspecified for gender.

23.1 Example of Underspecification in Phonology

In Tuvan, phonemic vowels are specified with the articulatory features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding.The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified.

Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony. If |U|occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme /i/; if following a back unroundedvowel, it will be as an /ɯ/; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an /u/. This can be seen in the followingwords:

23.2 Bibliography

• Archangeli, Diana (1988), “Aspects of underspecification theory”, Phonology 5: 183–207, doi:10.1017/S0952675700002268

• Itô, Junko; Mester, Armin; Padgett, Jaye (1995), “Licensing and underspecification in optimality theory”,Linguistic Inquiry 26: 571–613

• Mohanan, K. P. (1991), “On the bases of radical underspecification”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory9: 285–325, doi:10.1007/bf00134678

52

23.2. BIBLIOGRAPHY 53

• Reiss, Charles (2003), “Deriving the feature-filling / feature-changing contrast: An application to Hungarianvowel harmony.”, Linguistic Inquiry 34:2: 199–224, doi:10.1162/002438903321663389

• Steriade, Donca (1995), “Underspecification andmarkedness”, in JohnA. Goldsmith, The Handbook of Phono-logical Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 114–174, ISBN 0631180621

54 CHAPTER 23. UNDERSPECIFICATION

23.3 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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Beland, DragonflySixtyseven, Alarm, Espoo,Wavelength, Phantomsteve, RussBot, ENeville, PatrickNeylan, Thnidu, SmackBot,Wynand.winterbach,Tsca.bot, Bn, Packynix, Monni95, Rockpickle85, TwistOfCain, Alaibot, Thijs!bot, AntiVandalBot, NYSpinnerDan, Tremilux, ErikB,CapnPrep, MartinBot, Shiokumi, Fatpratmatt, J.delanoy, Javawizard, Jaguar83, Keitahill, Jalwikip, Buttercup sophi, Firehack23, Tur-die584, Stfg, Kalidasa 777, ClueBot, DanielDeibler, Katluv44, Alexbot, Vivio Testarossa, Versus22, MauricioDeAlencar, Dsimic, Ad-dbot, Ronhjones, Fraggle81, Bchs23, SassoBot, Amaury, A.amitkumar, MarkkuP, Paine Ellsworth, DrilBot, Tjo3ya, Sgt. R.K. Blue,Wik-itanvirBot, Solarra, John Cline, Donner60, Jhabdas, Khestwol, ClueBot NG,Widr, WNYY98, DionOwusu, Slovnic, FoolMeOnce2Times,Jr8825, Thebaconster, FourViolas and Anonymous: 81

• Archi-writing Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archi-writing?oldid=632141234 Contributors: TheRingess, Moskvax, Wars, GaiusCornelius, SmackBot, Colonies Chris, Byelf2007, Dammit, Cydebot, Tercross, Animum, Addbot, Middayexpress, Omnipaedista, Erik9bot,AvicAWB, Gorthian and Anonymous: 3

• Bongo-Bongo (linguistics) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongo-Bongo_(linguistics)?oldid=568082987 Contributors: Tpbrad-bury, Wars, Wavelength, Akerbeltz, Jerewmay, Grepppnig and Anonymous: 1

• Chronotope Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotope?oldid=678689882Contributors: Rholton,Moacir, Nicholas Cimini, Rjwilmsi,Wars, Sodin, RussBot, Bhny, Batula, Alarichall, Maunus, Gelingvistoj, JennyRad, MTBradley, Babycamels, Mitrius, Jimwilce, Espreon,Laonikoss, MarshBot, Danger, Ling.Nut, Maurice Carbonaro, Faradayplank, Hordaland, Dux is me, Estevoaei, Muhandes, 1ForThe-Money, MystBot, Addbot, DOI bot, Hilppo, Tassedethe, Yobot, Fraggle81, Rubinbot, NickK, Citation bot, LilHelpa, Dr Oldekop,Omnipaedista, Captain-n00dle, Citation bot 1, Sfhamel, WikitanvirBot, Perpetualrevolt, McDowdy, Joeanthro, Monkbot, Zma33 andAnonymous: 14

• Co-occurrence Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-occurrence?oldid=540958685Contributors: AxelBoldt, Kku, Cagri, Male1979,Crzrussian, Wars, RussBot, SmackBot, Pdturney, SieBot, One.guardian.angel, MystBot, Addbot, Johnfravolda, Фуыџгджз, ZéroBot andAnonymous: 2

• Conveyed concept Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conveyed_concept?oldid=647790985 Contributors: Nagelfar, Michael Devore,Wars, RUL3R, SmackBot, MartinPoulter, Colonies Chris, CmdrObot, AndrewHowse, Alaibot, Gökhan, Fabrictramp, R'n'B, Nono64,J.delanoy, Warut, Dorftrottel, Enviroboy, ClueBot, Thedosmann, CohesionBot, Frongle, Yobot, LilHelpa, Helpful Pixie Bot, Kyoakoa, Iam One of Many and Anonymous: 11

• Cross-serial dependencies Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-serial_dependencies?oldid=669625787 Contributors: Yobot,AnomieBOT, BG19bot, Aisteco, Christian Nassif-Haynes, JMP EAX and Anonymous: 5

• Gesamtbedeutung Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesamtbedeutung?oldid=517867185 Contributors: Binadot, Asbestos, Wars,Dialectric, Mike Dillon, SmackBot, Imz, Cydebot, Moonraker12 and Anonymous: 1

• Gradualism Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradualism?oldid=654258247 Contributors: Fredbauder, Imran, Heron, Ryguasu,Lexor, Nerd~enwiki, Hyacinth, Auric, Johnstone, Duncharris, Antandrus, Rich Farmbrough, Bender235, Kjkolb, Avenue, Axeman89,Angr, The JPS, Adiclaud, Jwanders, GregorB, Qwertyus, Fred Hsu, PinchasC, FlaBot, Wars, YurikBot, Kymacpherson, RussBot, Zwobot,Nitefood, Djramone, Rhthomsen, Brammers, EncycloPetey, AnOddName, Gilliam, HexaDecimal, Tsca.bot, Battlecry, BesselDekker,Thorsen, Byelf2007, Mchavez, Bcasterline, Robofish, Extremophile, G1076, Briancua, Gregbard, Andyjsmith, Mikenorton, Husond,Father Goose, Crunchy Numbers, MartinBot, Jim.henderson, Uncle Dick, Deor, VolkovBot, Tanstephluc, Caltas, Zbvhs, Lightmouse,Novalis69, ClueBot, Eklir, Some jerk on the Internet, Jarble, Legobot, Legobot II, AnomieBOT, Materialscientist, Srich32977, Forever-provence, RibotBOT, Gr5959, Tbh1313, FrescoBot, Wart Dark, Juhko, Beyond My Ken, Esoglou, WikitanvirBot, ZéroBot, Joshfinnie,RockMagnetist, ClueBot NG, Somedifferentstuff, Hallows AG, Mthoodhood, CsDix, RNealK, Dustin V. S. and Anonymous: 81

• Graphocentrism Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphocentrism?oldid=641390675Contributors: Bearcat, Gsingh, LadyofShalott,Funnyfarmofdoom, Cydebot, Yobot, BG19bot, Mark Arsten, AustinBristor, AustinWilliamBristor, BattyBot, DoctorKubla, Jolanil andJppcap

• Growth point Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_point?oldid=680800869Contributors: Hmains, Bwpach, Alaibot, Egpetersen,Gabriel Kielland, Idioma-bot, Donalmac31, Addbot, Yobot, Altg20April2nd, BG19bot, Tentinator, Biochembiotech and Anonymous: 1

• Hypocorrection Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocorrection?oldid=660827639 Contributors: The Anome, Furrykef, Canis-Rufus, Nonymous-raz, Wars, AndrewWTaylor, SmackBot, JesseRafe, Astirmays, Bluerabbit4210, Avicennasis, Cnilep, Tresiden, Myst-Bot, Addbot, Kyoakoa, BattyBot and Anonymous: 4

• Iconicity Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconicity?oldid=677766087 Contributors: Vaganyik, Heron, Andres, AnonMoos, Gtrmp,Everyking, Kwamikagami, Circeus, Velho, Woohookitty, Rjwilmsi, Wars, KEJ, Petusek, Maunus, Mike Dillon, MagneticFlux, Sterling0,Bazonka, BesselDekker, Jon Awbrey, Deflective, R'n'B, Kyle the bot, The Tetrast, Sapphic, AlleborgoBot, Yintan, Pete unseth, Ad-dbot, Lightbot, ,ماني AnomieBOT, Ross6789, Bartlomiej Chechlowski, Omnipaedista, Kyng, FrescoBot, Trappist the monk, Arekuzu,Milotoor, AvicAWB, Kyoakoa, Lobolingo, Banible, Apheliotropism, Adakat16, MartinEvergreen, SonjaArrasi6, Pedshe11, Givearatsash,Khazar2, , Lfdder, Monkbot and Anonymous: 13

• Isogloss Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogloss?oldid=682400408 Contributors: Patrick, DopefishJustin, Ihcoyc, Stan Shebs, Es-zett, Guaka, Itai, Donarreiskoffer, Ajd, Meursault2004, Pgan002, J. 'mach' wust, Gdr, Burschik, Jkl, Kwamikagami, Enirac Sum, Shree-vatsa, Paxsimius, Zinoviev, FlaBot, GnuDoyng, Wars, YurikBot, RobotE, RussBot, Test-tools~enwiki, Rnnyhoff, SmackBot, MattieTK,Unyoyega, Eskimbot, Jeffro77, Bluebot, Michkalas, AntonBryl, Radagast83, SofieElisBexter, SashatoBot, Joseph Solis in Australia, JohnRiemann Soong, Pajast, ,הסרפד Thijs!bot, Headbomb, AntiVandalBot, Kevin.cohen, JAnDbot, Tigga, Rei-bot, Kevin Steinhardt, SieBot,Periergeia, BenoniBot~enwiki, Mild Bill Hiccup, Three-quarter-ten, 1ForTheMoney, Delvin Kelvin, Williamangle, Addbot, LarryJeff,Ben Ben, Anypodetos, Hunnjazal, ArthurBot, Enok, Xqbot, DSisyphBot, Licqua, DrilBot, HRoestBot, Blacklauri, ZéroBot, ClueBotNG, Helpful Pixie Bot, Brikane, Earendil56, Bonomont and Anonymous: 24

• Language island Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_island?oldid=629042629 Contributors: Rich Farmbrough, Kwamik-agami, Angr, Huhsunqu, Olessi, Wars, SmackBot, Sinaloa, Thijs!bot, .anacondabot, Felisopus, Flash Gordon3, Numbo3, Egard89, Ky-oww, Niceguyedc, Alexbot, Dana boomer, Addbot, Cuaxdon, Gaj777, Bermicourt, Luckas-bot, ArthurBot, Xqbot, GrouchoBot, Erik9bot,Sj122390, ChuispastonBot, Mjbmrbot, 4Jays1034, Makecat-bot and Anonymous: 6

23.3. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES 55

• Letter frequency Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency?oldid=676686722Contributors: Frecklefoot, Eliasen, ArnoLa-grange, Ww, Taxman, Topbanana, AnonMoos, Donarreiskoffer, Chealer, AlainV, Tomchiukc, R3m0t, Lowellian, Auric, Smb1001, SethIlys, DavidCary, BenFrantzDale, Lee J Haywood, Timpo, Dissident, Gus Polly, Frencheigh, Matt Crypto, Urhixidur, Abdull, Thor-wald, CALR, Discospinster, LoganCale, Andrejj, EmilJ, Nandhp, BrokenSegue, Water Bottle, RandomEE2, Stephan Leeds, Jdege,Richwales, Winterdragon, Tabletop, Eyreland, Geenius at Wrok, Graham87, Rjwilmsi, Zbxgscqf, Wars, Zarano, DevastatorIIC, Vi-sor, DVdm, Peter Grey, YurikBot, Jimp, Jojo-schmitz~enwiki, RussBot, Hellbus, Thesloth, Uni4dfx, Rufua, ReCover, Arthur Rubin,LiquidFire, Tim Parenti, Livitup, GraemeL, Ordinary Person, Cmglee, That Guy, From That Show!, SmackBot, McGeddon, Speight,Kintetsubuffalo, Yamaguchi , Gilliam, LinguistAtLarge, RDBrown, Iwaterpolo, Trekphiler, Argyriou, Kukini, JackLumber, Dejudi-cibus, RomanSpa, Sharcho, Novangelis, DagErlingSmørgrav, FakeTango, Onepairofpants, MaxEnt, Mwhitlock, Gogo Dodo, Yonat,Gioto, Joe Schmedley, BranER, Arch dude, Moralist, JPDaigle, JMyrleFuller, Ariel., Tgeairn, Leon math, AstroHurricane001, Simp-sonDG, Pdcook, Prometheusg, Jshrubb, Philip Trueman, Melsaran, VanBuren, Finnrind, RubySS, Ori, Kleptog, MinorContributor,Rubo77, Mangledorf, ObfuscatePenguin, Foxj, Quinxorin, Niceguyedc, S0mbre, DumZiBoT, Addbot, Wli625, Tide rolls, Jarble, Yobot,VengeancePrime, Doctorhook, AnomieBOT, Salisbury-99, Jim1138, Citation bot, Xqbot, Thehelpfulbot, Tktru, Coroboy, Ywmpq205,Dramartistic, Mickm720, Pinethicket, A8UDI, Jschnur, Wolfehhgg, January, Jesse V., RjwilmsiBot, NerdyScienceDude, Mark mayzner,AlanSiegrist, Infideluxe, BestKH, Alexlatham96, ClueBot NG, Tideflat, Pejno Simono, Masssly, Widr, Helpful Pixie Bot, Kyoakoa,Glacialfox, Dexbot, Sminthopsis84, SteenthIWbot, C5st4wr6ch, FallingGravity, Michi5738, Phinumu, Sam Sailor, Mjdav1, Robdark00,Vieque, AwesoMan3000, Hannasnow, Pokemonmaster34, TusharMuralidharan, PiotrGrochowski000 and Anonymous: 138

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• Metalanguage Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage?oldid=671532511 Contributors: Andres, Charles Matthews, Dcoet-zee, Nickg, RedWolf, Benc, Wile E. Heresiarch, BenFrantzDale, Monedula, Neilc, Knutux, Ja malcolm, Almit39, SamHocevar, Lacrimo-sus, Discospinster, Kb, Visualerror, Aaronbrick, Ntmatter, John Vandenberg, Pyrrhos, Sam Korn, Guaca, Typobox, Hawky, Graham87,Qwertyus, KYPark, Venullian, Mathbot, Wars, Lmatt, Pricey3000, Chobot, YurikBot, Wavelength, Tomisti, Nzzl, Curpsbot-unicodify,Trickstar, SmackBot, FocalPoint, Nazgjunk, Lewstherin, Bn, JoseREMY, 16@r, Dicklyon, Graham Hurley, George100, InvisibleK,CBM, Gregbard, Peterdjones, Infinito, Mentifisto, VictorAnyakin, JAnDbot, Tedickey, Tonyfaull, LookingGlass, Joshua Davis, MauriceCarbonaro, VolkovBot, Shinju, VanishedUserABC, Carn29, Brainfsck, Ivan Štambuk, PanagosTheOther, ClueBot, Tyurp, Ordinaterr,DragonBot, Aitias, Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, The, Addbot, Jarble, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Empro2, GrouchoBot, FrescoBot,GoodSpeller, Brightkingdom, Lars Washington, Dude1818, FoxBot, Morton Shumway, EmausBot, ZéroBot, ClueBot NG, Snotbot,Steamerandy, Myconix, Sweeter49 and Anonymous: 68

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23.3.2 Images• File:Ambox_important.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Ambox_important.svg License: Public do-

main Contributors: Own work, based off of Image:Ambox scales.svg Original artist: Dsmurat (talk · contribs)• File:Ambox_wikify.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Ambox_wikify.svg License: Public domainContributors: Own work Original artist: penubag

• File:CaliforniaJobCaseLayout.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/CaliforniaJobCaseLayout.png Li-cense: Public domain Contributors: Transferred from en.wikipedia by SreeBot Original artist: HiTechHiTouch at en.wikipedia

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• File:Cross-serial_dependencies_2.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Cross-serial_dependencies_2.png License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: Christian Nassif-Haynes

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• File:English_letter_frequency_(alphabetic).svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/English_letter_frequency_%28alphabetic%29.svg License: Public domain Contributors: Own work; en:Letter frequency. Original artist: Nandhp

• File:English_letter_frequency_(frequency).svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/English_letter_frequency_%28frequency%29.svg License: Public domain Contributors: Own work; en:Letter frequency. Original artist: Nandhp

• File:Faroe_islands_isoglosses.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Faroe_islands_isoglosses.png Li-cense: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?

• File:German_dialectal_map.PNG Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/German_dialectal_map.PNG Li-cense: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?

56 CHAPTER 23. UNDERSPECIFICATION

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