Transcript Недискретность в языке и фокальная структура Non-discreteness in language and focal structure А.А.Кибрик (ИЯз РАН и МГУ) [email protected] НПММВЯ, 12 октября1

Недискретность в языке
и фокальная структура
Non-discreteness in language
and focal structure
А.А.Кибрик
(ИЯз РАН и МГУ)
[email protected]
НПММВЯ,
12 октября
2013
1
The problem
 We tend to think about language as a
system of discrete, segmental units
(phonemes, morphemes, words,
sentences...)
 But this view does not survive an
encounter with reality
2
Simple example:
morpheme fusion
 Russian adjective детский
‘children’s, childish’
det-sk-ij
child-Attr-M.Nom
Root-Suffix-Ending

suffix
[ d’eck’ -ij ]
root
Many human languages have something like
that in morphological structure
3
Similar phenomena abound at
all lingustic levels
 Phonemes
 Syllables
 Words
 Clauses
 Sentences
4
Phonemes
 Coarticulation:
cat keep cool
 Engwall (2000): articulographic study of how

pronunciation of Swedish fricatives is affected by
surrounding vowels
Sequences such as asa, ɪsɪ, ɔsɔ, ʊsʊ, aɕa, ɔʂɔ, ʊfʊ,
etc.
 For example: context of
labial vowels strongly
increases lip protrusion
5
Phonemes (continued)
 Also, the tongue is
more anterior in
the context of the
front vowel /ɪ/
compared to back
vowels (Engwall
2000: 10)
 That is, boundaries between “segments” are not

really segmental
Trying to posit boundaries in the signal
inevitably means a kind of digitalization
6
Syllables




Language speakers often naturally “feel” the syllabic structure
But segmentation into syllables is usually less than clear-cut
For example, speakers of Pulaar confidently segment words into
syllables, e.g. gor |ko ‘man’
But cf. the behavior of geminated consonants
On the one hand, when asked to segment a word into syllables,
speakers of Pulaar usually posit a boundary between the two copies
of a geminated consonant: hok |kam ‘give me’
On the other hand, a Pulaar secret language is reported

Geminates such as kk are thus inconsistent:


 the encrypting sequence lfV is inserted after the first syllable of a word
(Gaden 1914, Labouret 1952: 108):
 hokkam ndiyam ‘give.me water’
 holfokkam ndilfiyam
 in some way they belong to two different syllables
 in some other way they form the onset of a syllable (Koval 2000: 114,
185)
7
Words

Possessive constructions N + N

On the one hand, of is a preposition and thus clearly belongs to the possessor
rather than to the possessed
 analytic of-genitive: the retinue of the queen
 the retinue [of the queen], lots [of stuff]

On the other hand, there are indications of reanalysis

This kind of graphic practices suggest that language users attach the clitic of to
the possessed rather than to the possessor
In terms of Nichols 1986, in these kinds of examples English hesitates on
behaving as dependent-marking or head-marking
Of displays doubleface behavior in two ways


 Jurafsky et al. 1998: of is so often reduced that one must posit the allomorph [ɔ]
 Native users of English feel that and render that in spelling, also altering the affiliation
of the clitic
 lots of > lotsa, couple of > coupla
 “Kinda outta luck” (song by Lana del Rey)
 as any clitic, it is a semi-word, that is something between a word and an affix
 it oscillates between two possible hosts
8
Clauses
 Widely held view of “syntax from the discourse
perspective” (see Chafe 1994):
 Local discourse structure consists of quanta, or
chunks, or elementary discourse units (EDUs) (Kibrik
and Podlesskaya eds. 2009)
 EDUs can be defined by a set of prosodic criteria
 Thus identified EDUs typically coincide with clauses
 The level of such coincidence mostly varies within the
range between 1/2 and 3/4
9
Clauses (continued)
Language
Percentage of
clausal EDUs
English (Chafe 1994)
60%
Mandarin (Iwasaki and Tao 1993)
39.8%
Sasak (Wouk 2008)
51.7%
Japanese (Matsumoto 2000)
68%
Russian (Kibrik and Podlesskaya
eds. 2009)
67.7%
Upper Kuskokwim (Kibrik 2012)
70.8%
10
Clauses (continued)







However, there is a significant residue
Non-clausal EDUs
 Subclausal EDUs
• Increments
(translation from a Russian spoken corpus “Night Dream
Stories” – Kibrik and Podlesskaya eds. 2009)
 And suddenly I saw a box.
 With a ribbon on top.
Increments appear after a clear prosodic boundary
At the same time, they semantically and grammatically
fit into the preceding base clause
Such increments simultaneously belong and do not
belong to the preceding clause
They are outliers in clause structure
11
Paradigmatics


So far we have only discussed difficulties associated with
the syntagmatic indentification of units
The same problem applies to paradigmatic boundaries

Marginal phonemes
 That is, boundaries between classes, types, or categories in an
inventory
 “One might consider the voiceless velar fricative /x/ occurring in
words such as Bach (the German composer) or loch (a Scottish lake)
as a marginal phoneme for some speakers of English” (Brinton and
Brinton 2010: 53)
 Russian [w] in loan words
• Russian has phonemes /v/ and /u/
• English William > Russian
Вильям or Уильям
Vil’jam
Uil’jam
[v]
[u], increasingly [w]
• English wow > Russian: usually spelled вау vau, pronounced [wau]
12
Semantics



Semantics provides particularly abundant evidence of nondiscrete boundaries
Plethora of examples have been discussed in cognitive
semantics
Textbook example from Labov’s 1973 “Boundaries of words
and their meanings”
cup
bowl
13
Diachronic change


Diachrony provides innumerable examples of nondiscrete boundaries between linguistic elements or
stages
Hock and Joseph 1996: 237-238
 Old English wēod ‘plant’ and wæ̅d(e) ‘garment’
 Both developed into modern English weed
 The meaning ‘garment’ only survives in a couple of expressions,
such as widow’s weed ‘a widow’s mourning clothes’
 Modern speakers tend to connect this usage with the winning
weed
 The erstwhile meaning of wæ̅d(e) is echoed in the modern
language as a faint trace
14
Language wholeness







Languages are identifiable, but
every language has internal
variation
Consider a very small language,
Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan
Ethnic group of about 200
individuals in central interior Alaska
About 20 remaining speakers
The members of the group have a
clear feeling of identity, as well as
separateness from other
neighboring Athabaskan languages
Still, striking dialectal variation
In particular, the rendering of ProtoAthabaskan coronal consonant
series
© Michael Krauss, 2011
15
Language wholeness
(continued)
Interdental
Dental
Retroflex
As in:
Dialect:
Conservative:
‘my tongue’ ‘snow’
‘raven’
sitsula’
tsetł'
dotron'
Tanana
Standard merger:
sitsula’
tsetł'
dotron'
Tsetsaut
Downriver merger:
sitsula’
tsetł'
dotson'
Koyukon
Merger of all three
sitsula’
tsetł'
dotson'
Ahtna
no merger
loss of interdentals
loss of retroflex
16
Language wholeness
(continued)



Note that the rendering of coronal series is traditionally
used as the basis for classifying the family into branches
This situation can be explained by geographical and
demographic factors
 The Upper Kuskokwim traditional territory probably occupied
over 50 K square kilometers
 Traditionally, contact between famlies/bands was seasonal or
sporadic
Still, what identifies the language’s wholeness and
boundaries in terms of internal characteristics?
17
Proto-languages




Linguists often speak about proto-languages (ProtoGermanic, Proto-IE, etc.), as if they were fixed, 100%
homogeneous communities without any internal variation
Dahl (2001) discussed the status of Old Nordic
He questions the notion of Common Nordic and the
assumption that the Scandinavians “changed their language
all at the same time and in the same fashion, as if
conforming to a EU regulation on the length of cucumbers”
(p. 227).
Contrary to the traditional tree-like picture of a protolanguage splitting into daughter languages, Dahl suggests
that the spread of prestige dialects may have led to a
decrease in diversity and to unification
18
Language contact







Trudgill 2011: 56-58
Contact with Low German affected Scandinavian
languages significantly
This influence can generally be described as
simplification
That was possible because in the 1400s cities such as
Bergen and Stockholm had about 1/3 or more of
German population
When non-native population reaches close to 50%,
natives accommodate
Boundaries between languages are thus penetrable
Almost all languages are creoles to a degree
19
Other cognitive domains
 Studies by the Russian psychologist Yuri
Alexandrov
 Alexandrov and Sergienko 2003: psychophysiological
experiments demonstrate the non-disjunctive
character of mind and behavior
• “Continuity is the overarching principle in the organization of
living things at various levels” (p. 105)
 Alexandrov and Alexandrova 2010: complementary,
non-disjunctive character of cultures
• Niels Bohr, discussing the relationships between cultures,
emphasized that, “unlike physics <...> there is no mutual
exclusion of properties belonging to different cultures”.
20
Intermediate conclusion






Language (as well as cognition in general) simultaneously
 longs for discrete, segmented structure
 tries to avoid it
The omnipresence of non-discreteness effects has not yet
led to proper recognition in the mainstream linguistic
thinking
Linguists are often bashful about non-discreteness
But non-discreteness is not just a nuisance
Non-discrete effects permeate every single aspect of
language
This problem is in the core of theoretical debates about
language
21
Possible reactions
 “Digital” linguistics:
 ignore non-discrete
phenomena or dismiss them
as minor
 Ferdinand de Saussure:
language only consists
of identities and differences
 More inclusive (“analog”) linguistics:
the discreteness
delusion
appeal
of scientific rigor
but reductionism
a bit too
simplistic
often a mere statement of continuous boundaries
and countless intermediate/borderline cases
22
Cognitive science



Wittgenstein: family resemblance
Rosch: prototype theory
Lakoff: radial categories

D
C
A
B

Picture from Janda
and Nesset 2012
A is the prototypical
phoneme/word/clause/meaning...
B, C, and D are less prototypical
representatives
 We still need a theory for:
 boundaries between related categories
 boundaries in the syntagmatic structure
23
My main suggestion
 In the case of language we see the structure



that combines the properties of discrete and
non-discrete: focal structure
Focal phenomena are simultaneously distinct
and related
Focal structure is a special kind of structure
found in linguistic phenomena, alternative to the
discrete structure
It is the hallmark of linguistic and, possibly,
cognitive phenomena, in constrast to simpler
kinds of matter
24
Various kinds of structures
1
discrete structure
2
1
continuous
▐ structure
2
focal structure
▐
focal point 1
outlier
hybrid
focal point 2
or anchor
point25
A possible analogy:
neuronal structure with synapses
26
Examples
Syntagm.
Paradigm.
Diachr.
Lg.contact
det
[c]
v
w
wēod
(widow’s) weed
Old Norse
Norwegian
sk
u
wæ̅d(e)
Low German
etc., etc.
focal point 1
▐
focal point 2
27
Caveat






The claim about non-discrete boundaries should not be
overstated
Phonemes, words, clauses, and languages do exist
They are just not as discrete and segmental as we
apparently want them to be
We should not replace the discrete structure with the
idea of a mere continuum, basically non-structure
Cf. Goddard 2010: 233 defending the discrete character
of meaning by dismissing the idea of a continuum or
merging
Something like focal structure is in order as the major
model of linguistic and cognitive “matter”
28
Peripheral status of non-discrete
phenomena in linguistics
 Are linguists unaware about the nondiscreteness effects?
 No, they are aware of them
 “distinct but related”
 But they tend to ignore them
 Why?
 I am not sure
 But I suspect the answer is related to the
well known Kant’s problem
29
Kant’s puzzle






The Critique of Pure Reason: The role of observer, or cognizer,
crucially affects the knowledge of the world
“The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the
phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human
soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature
here employs.”
It is possible that the human analytical mind is digital, and it
wants its object of observation to be digital as well
In addition, standards of scientific thought have developed on
the basis of physical, rather than cognitive, reality
Physical reality is much more prone to the discrete approach
Compared to the physical world, in the case of language and
other cognitive processes Kant’s problem is much more acute
 because mind here functions both as an observer and an
object of observation, so making the distinction between30
the two is difficult
A paradoxical state of affairs


Language is full of non-discrete phenomena
But our “digital” mind is biased towards discreteness


“The tyranny of the discontinuous mind” (R. Dawkins)
It is like eyeglasses
keeping only a part
of the reality
and filtering out the rest

Addressing the “analog” reality in its entirety is often
perceived as pseudo-science, or quasi-science at best
Language is unknowable, a Ding an sich?

 Perhaps, partly because of the scientific tradition based on
segmentation and categorization (Aristotelian, “rational”, “lefthemispheric”, etc.)
31
What to do?

We need to develop a more embracing
linguistics and cognitive science that address
non-discrete phenomena:




not as exceptions or periphery of language and
cognition
but rather as their core
Can we outwit our mind?
Two suggestions towards this goal
1. Object of investigation: concentrate on obviously
non-discrete communication channels, not so
burdened with the tradition of discrete analysis
2. Methodology: new type of models
32
SUGGESTION 1: Look at communication
channels other than verbal

Explore gesticulation accompanying speech

Explore prosody

These communication channels are obviously less
discrete than the verbal code
So it may be a good idea to develop new theoretical
approaches on the basis of gesticulation and prosody,
then apply them to traditional, “segmental” language

 Michael Tomasello (2009): in order to “understand how humans
communicate with one another using a language <…> we must
first understand how humans communicate with one another
using natural gestures”
 I discuss a case study in “Reference in discourse” (2011)
 Sandro Kodzasov (2009): “there is a multitude of prosodic
techniques <...> defining the basic gestalts of our perception of
the world”
33
Sentences




In written language, sentences are separated from each
other by dedicated punctuation marks
Is the notion of sentence applicable to spoken language?
 cf. the “written language bias” (Linell 2005)
 written language, inherently digital, hypnotizes people and makes
them think that language is generally discrete
“Is sentence viable?” (Kibrik 2008)
In brief, spoken Russian displays two major prosodic
patterns:
 “comma intonation”: rising on the main accent of EDU
 “period intonation”: final falling on the main accent of EDU
But also “falling comma intonation” – non-final falling:
 similar to comma intonation in terms of discourse semantics
 formally similar to period intonation
/,
\.
\,
34
Proposed solution
 It appears that non-final falling is not as low as final
falling
 But the difference cannot be identified in absolute
terms
• Great variation (gender, individual)
• What is final falling in one person can be non-final in
another
 Employ the speaker’s “prosodic portrait”
 Final falling , targets at the bottom
of the given speaker’s F0 range
 Non-final falling targets at a level several dozen Hz
(several semitones) higher than the final falling in the
given speaker
35
F0 graph for an example
There was a lake,
either a river,
or a lake,
but I guess a lake,
because somehow it was small,
not a big one.
And across it there was a log,
like a bridge.
12
10
/
/
/
\
\
\
\
\
12
8
5
\ozero,
\malen’koe
takoe,
\nebol’
šoe.
\brevno kakoe \mosta.
-to,
36
Representation of EDU continuity
types (or “phase” types) in corpus
44%
50%
40%
30%
20%
Final
falling
33%
23%
Non-final
falling
10%
0%
(Non-final)
rising
37
Sentences (continued)





There are clearly contrasted, focal patterns:
 final falling (end)
 rising (non-end)
Speakers and listeners usually “know” when a sentence is
completed and when it is not
Spoken sentences are the prototype of written sentences
In addition, the hybrid type must be recognized: non-final
falling
 It can be identified on the basis of speaker’s prosodic portraits
 This helps to deal with tremendous phonetic variation
With this analysis, the notion of spoken sentence remains
viable
38
SUGGESTION 2:
Entertain another type of models
 Methodological point
 1960s: a fashion of “mathematical methods” in
linguistics
 That did not bring much fruit, primarily
because of the non-discreteness effects
 Time for another attempt of bringing in more
useful kinds of mathematics
39
Ongoing project: Modeling
referential choice in discourse

When we mention a person/object, we choose from a set of options

Corpus of Wall Street Journal texts

Annotation for multiple variables, candidate factors of ref. choice
 proper name: Kant
 description: the philosopher
 reduced form: he
 words – 45016, EDUs – 5497, anaphors – 3994





distances to antecedent
antecedent’s syntactic role
protagonisthood
animacy
..............

Machine learning algorithms


Two-way task: Full NP vs. pronoun
Three-way task: proper name vs. description vs. pronoun
 logical
 logistic regression
 compositions
40
Results of machine learning modeling
(RefRhet 3, Xудякова 2013)
Алгоритм
Совпадение
Несовпадение
Аккуратность
Логистическая регрессия
1615
237
87,2%
Деревья решений С4.5
1735
117
93,7%
Деревья решений С4.5,
1655
197
89,4%
1658
194
89,5%
улучшенные бэггингом
Деревья решений С4.5,
улучшенные бустингом
41
Non-categorical referential
choice
 100% accuracy cannot be reached
 The choice is not always deterministic (Kibrik 1999):
 often only one option is appropriate
 sometimes both Kant and he are appropriate
 Experiment (Mariya Khudyakova)
 Nine texts in which the algorithms deviated in their
prediction compared to the original referential choice:
pronoun instead of a proper name
 Each text was presented to 60 experiment participants, in
one of the two variations: original (proper name) and
altered (pronoun)
 1 question about the referent of a proper name/pronoun,
42
2 control questions
Non-categorical referential
choice (continued)


84% ̶ correctness of answers to proper names
80% ̶ correctness of answers to pronouns (in 7 texts)

In two instances participants showed a significant drop
in their accuracy

  In these instances the algorithm correctly predicted a
pronoun, even though deviating from the original referential
choice
 In these instances the algorithms erred in their prediction
Logistic regression provides the degree of certainty in
prediction
 That can be, with due caution, interpreted as probability
 The degree of certainty in the prediction of a pronoun varied
between 0.5 and 0.8 (in all instances but one):
• moderate probability of a pronoun, according to the algorithm’s
judgment
43
New type of models
 Non-categorical referential choice: a hybrid


between the clear, crisp, focal instances
Probabilistic modeling and machine learning
techniques can be used to simulate human
behavior in non-categorical situations
We need to employ (and develop!)
mathematical methods appropriate for the
“cognitive matter”
44
Conclusion







Just as we invoke scientific thinking, we tend to immediately turn
to discrete analysis
This may be the reason why discrete linguistics is so popular, in
spite of the omnipresence and obviousness of non-discrete effects
This may be our inherent bias, or a habit developed in natural
sciences, or a cultural preference
But in the case of language and other cognitive processes we do
see the limits of the traditional discrete approach
It remains an open question if linguists and cognitive scientists are
able to eventually overcome the strong bias towards “pure reason”
and discrete analysis, or language will remain a Ding an sich
But it is worth trying to circumvent this bias and to seriously
explore the focal, non-discrete structure that is in the very core of
language and cognition
In the future, mathematics may play a crucial role in linguistics and
cognitive science, as it already did in physics and biology
45
Thanks for your attention

CONGENIAL QUOTATIONS

“Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically
consistent. All grammars leak.” (Sapir 1921: 38)

“Words as well as the world itself display the ‘orderly
heterogeneity’ which characterizes language as a whole”
(Labov 1973: 30)

“The mind-brain is both modular and interconnected
<...> To insist on one to the exclustion of the other is to
short-change the enormous complexity of this
quintessentially hybrid system” (Givón 1999: 107-108)
46
References
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Alexandrov, Yuri I., and Elena A. Sergienko. 2003. Psixologicheskoe i fiziologicheskoe:
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References (continued)
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Jurafsky, Daniel, Alan Bell, Eric Fosler-Lussiery, Cynthia Girand, and William Raymond.
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Acknowledgements
Yuri Alexandrov
Mira Bergelson
Svetlana Burlak
Olga Fedorova
Vera Podlesskaya
Natalia Slioussar
Valery Solovyev
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