More Examples, Please!

[stoutfellow]

The Tensor complains that linguistics instructors seem to use the same examples of the same phenomena over and over again, and presents a brief quiz to make the point. There are twenty-three questions, of the form "Name a language that..."; the prediction is that anyone with training in linguistics is likely to give most of the same responses.

My last formal training in linguistics was twenty-seven years ago. I hit eleven of the twenty-three. I think the Tensor's on to something. (Hmm. I wonder how mathematicians - say, group theorists - would rate on a similar test?)

Comments

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

The fact that you have continued to keep abreast of what's going on in linguistics, I think, accounts for the 11. My last formal linguistics was also about 30 years ago...I would have gotten the SVO question and the tonal question...I'm not sure I could have answered the others.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

The fact that you have continued to keep abreast of what's going on in linguistics, I think, accounts for the 11.
Not continued, exactly; I only got back into it heavily a few years ago. (There were some occasional book purchases in between, but not many.) I was shocked to discover that the core ideas in syntax that they tried to drill into me back in the '70s have been discarded, in favor of "the minimalist program", whatever that is. On the other hand, I've always been more interested in comparative and typological matters (and I've always been deeply suspicious of Chomsky), so maybe that sort of thing is what I remembered best...

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

Speaking of linguistics, I started - finally - The Alex Studies last night. This is the African grey parrot that Irene Pepperberg (UofA) conducted studies of/with in language acquisition, and meaningful speech and cognitive abilities studies. I get distracted by the cites at the ends of the sentences - but then, I'm easily distracted (g) - but so far, it is very interesting. She was describing the methods of earlier studies based on Skinner (of whom she clearly disapproved) in which, among other experiments, the bird was kept in isolation and received a treat for learning which button to push, extrapolated then to teaching the subject to say "hello" when the trainer entered the room, thus earning a treat. What did the bird learn? Did he think that "hello" was the name of the food? The trainer? A greeting? There would be no way to tell! It reminded me of a seminar I once attended on a novel method of language learning called - I'm not making this up - The Silent Way. I came away from the seminar thinking it was a good thing that there was only one person propounding it...

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

When you're done with it, I'd be very interested in a recap. The questions you raise remind me of a story I was once told of a young linguist who was studying a new language, following the usual point-and-query methods. She grew increasingly frustrated by the great similarity of all of the responses; clearly they meant different things, but for the life of her she couldn't distinguish them. Eventually it was learned that, in that society, one points not with the finger but with the lips; her informant had been amused by her gyrations, but puzzled by why she kept asking the same question over and over... ("I told you, that's a ______!")