My favorite Linguistic Relativity (Neo-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) References

I received a number of interesting comments on my recent post about the Moken, most of them pertaining to my lead-in "[w]hile I consider myself a fan of some of the basic premises of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis…"
I've been asked by a couple of folks to give some references elucidating the neo-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a much more tenable, plausible theory of how language affects thought and the conceptual structure of speakers. A good place to start is the volume Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development edited by Bowerman and Levinson. A few of the articles I like are:

• Carey, Susan. 2001. Whorf versus continuity theorists: bringing data to bear on the debate. In Bowerman and Levinson (eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development.. CUP.
  
• Gopnik, Alison. 2001. Theories, language and culture: Whorf without wincing. In Bowerman and Levinson (eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development.. CUP.
  
• Bowerman, Melissa and Soonja Choi. 2001. Shaping meanings for language: unverisal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In Bowerman and Levinson (eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development.. CUP.
  

Some of these articles provide summaries of previous work by these same, or other, authors with further references therein.
Other seminal articles include:

• Boroditsky, Lera and Michael Ramscar. 2002. The roles of body and mind in abstract thought. Psychological Science 13:2, 185-189.
  Discusses how particular metaphors and the embodiment of certain abstract ideas manifest in logical operations.
  
• Bowerman, Melissa. 1996. Leaning how to structure space for language: A crosslinguistic perspective. Chapter 10 of Language and Space, eds Paul Bloom et al. MIT Press. pp. 383-436.
  Shows how the language Korean speakers use for space affects some of their cognitive processing.
  
• Levinson, Stephen. 1997. Language and Cognition: The cognitive consequences of spatial description in Guugu Yimithirr. Journal of Linguistic Anrthropology 7(1): 98-131.
  An article on some of the striking studies that pioneered some of the neo-SW work.
  
• Slobin, Dan. 2000. Verbalized events: A synamic approach to linguistic relativity and determinism. In Evidence for Linguistic Relativity, eds. Susanne Niemeier and Rene Dirven. Amsterdam:John Benjamins. 107-138.
  A good intro to the distinction of verb- and satellite- framed languages and to impact being a speaker of one type of language or the other seems to have on certain aspect of cognition.
  

If people have any other articles that made inroads into convincing them of the veracity or utility of the neo-SW hypothesis, please post a comment.

The veto vs. the filibuster

There was a report today on how George W. Bush was planning to veto the stem-cell bill about to be passed by Congress and it struck me: how different is the priniple of veto power different than tt of the filibuster? How can GWB demand that judges be given an up or down vote in Congress - claim that they deserve one in the true spirit of Democracy - and with a straight face override the aight up and down voteof Congress with a veto?

I personally believe strongly in the filibuster and veto power despite the fillibuster's dark past. Democracy is, by no means, the perfect solution to the problems of government and luckily we have a few safeguards against the "tyranny of the majority." The Constitution, and the judicial branch's interpretation of it provides some, protecting certain rights that the oldsters thought should be nearly inalienable and the filibuster and veto provide the other - one power safeguard for each branch of government.

I hope someone picks up on that in the progressive world.

The Piano Man

I've been a fan of Billy Joel ever since a NYT MAgazine profile on him a number of months (perhaps years) ago. "NY State of Mind" has always given me the chills, and though I don't really like anything else he's done, he seems like an extremely earnest guy. The NYTMag article made it seem like was by no means a sell out, but honestly felt invested in he music he made. He also seemed genuinely hurt that critics received his music so poorly.

That background made this McSweeny's article all the more funny. My favorite bit:

Who am I kidding? She'd never go out with me. She was dating that actor for a while. What's his name? Benicio? What kind of name is Benicio? A stupid name, that's what kind. Hi, I'm Benicio. I'm so cool. I'm sooooo cool. I should start going by Billicio. I'm Billicio Del Joelio. I play pianolo.

Lacking want and when: Moken on 60 Minutes

While I consider myself a fan of some of the basic premises of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I do get slightly irritated when I hear news stories reporting on the dearth or plethora of words in a particular language for a particular concept.
Perhaps Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log said it best :

Here's some advice. Whenever you hear someone starting to say something that begins with "The X have no word for Y", or "The X have N different words for Y", never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's still there.

This is, of course, the same Geoffrey Pullum who wrote The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language.

Well, tonight, 60 Minutes had a report on the Moken, a group of people living in and around the Thai and Burmese islands in the Indian ocean. While the story was primarily about how the Moken managed to survive the tsunami, Bob Simon incredulously yet gleefully reported that the language (Moken, Austronesian), lacks words for want and when.
This was vexing on several levels.
First, it feeds into the stereotype of unindustrialized cultures as lacking a sense of urgency and not caring about material possessions.
Second, let's take a look at a few of the quotes:

And Ivanoff says "when" is not the only word missing from the Moken language. "Want" is another. "Yes, you use it very often," says Ivanoff. "Take that out of your language and you see how often you use it. 'I want this, I want that.'"

This is French anthropologist Jacques Ivanoff, who I hope wasn't playing to the straw-man Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that is so plainly wrong and is being taken out of context.
What does it mean, exactly, to miss a word from your language? It seems to imply that there is a universal collection of words from which languages' lexicons are built which goes agaisnt the well-supported theory that languages package semantic concepts in different ways; languages will almost always lack one-to-one word-to-word mappings with any other language.
Also, are they including bound morphemes or other grammatical constructs in the definition of word? Could the language have an irrealis marker or some way of marking epistemic stance through tense, for example, as a way of indicating that something hasn't happened, but the speaker wants it to? What about a word for hope or need?

Finally, the quote:

But the Moken don’t seem terribly worried by all this. Perhaps that’s because "worry" is just one more of those words that don’t exist in their language.

feeds into the misconception that lacking a word (whatever word means here) in a language prohibits speakers' conceptualization of the idea. It seems unlikely that the Moken have no concept of desire, or want and is even less likely that they have no concept of time. Lacking the (wh-question) word when says very little about their ability to question temporal aspects of events. English lacks an single WH-word questioning degree or amount so that we have to say "To what degree does ...?" or "How much ...?" Does this say anything about our conceptualization of quantity? Perhaps the Moken simply use the paraphrase "At what time...?"

Taking Geoffrey's quote to heart, I sincerely question the accuracy of Ivanoff or Bob Simon's claims on all levels. Unfortunately, this story perpetuates this grating linguistic myth in the eyes of public and not even for positive ends, such as the drawing of attention to cultural diversity, but rather to corroborate the misconception of unindustrialized island dwellers as not having a care in the world.

At first, I just found the story mildly annoying, but now I'm starting to get a little mad... it's Miller time.

Return of Linguistic Band Names

Eric, back at phonoloblog, laments at being scooped on Richness of the Bass, but comes up with a few more excellent ones himself. My favorites: Counterbleeding Interaction (or even just Counterbleeding), Factorial Typology and Generalized Alignment. Are these my favorite because of how they sound or because they happen to be some of my favorite phonological processes? This I don't know.
Nor do I know what makes something a good band name or how certain band names connote certain genres. Definitely something worth thinking about though. If corporations pay millions to naming consultants for their products, why not Geffen...

Definite plural nouns, or even just definites, for example, convey being from England or having a British sound. Witness The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Pogues and The Stone Roses. I think that even the American band The Ramones were hoping (perhaps subconsciously) for a The Clash/The Sex Pistols English punk association with their choice of names.

Mono-syllabic words used to connote guitar-riff-heavy artiness, or the mirage of artiness a la Yes, Kiss, Rush, and Cream. What of the current crop: Eels (note the absence of "the), Air and Muse?

This is something to come back to, but no discussion of band names and linguistics is complete without reference to the new band !!!, pronounced, as you IPA junkies might expect, as 3 alveolar clicks. I don't know the origin of the IPA symbol, and this band may be alluding to whatever led the IPA to choose ! for this sound in the first place, but I think this is the first popular band name to directly use an IPA symbol that isn't otherwise an English or European orthographic convention.

Linguistics Band Names & The Patriots

The always excellent Phonoloblog has had two recent postings that warrant comment.

First, Bob Kennedy writes about the appropriateness of this year's Americana-themed Superbowl match-up. Eagles. Patriots. How much more American can you get? He goes on to list some other hypothetical semantic matchups like the Wizards vs. the Magic but he left off a semantic pairing that actually *did* happen AND caused quite a stir: 1995 Word Series: Atlanta Braves vs. Cleveland Indians.

Second, Eric Bakovic writes about linguistically-inspired band names. He's an OT phonologist and I can't help but wonder how he missed out on "Richness of the Bass". Well, I'm calling dibs on the title if I ever get my drums out of storage.
There is also a band (or hip-hop group) that calls themselves the CunninLynguists who have a song on their album "Will Rap For Food" called "Lynguistics".
My favorite lines:

We're cunning linguists with stunning English.

Those cats are are square like rubick's cube.

Y'all know how we do? Actually, you probably don't know how we do.

and I can swear I heard them say something about Grice.
All to the background repition of the word "linguistics" over and over.

Sturm and drang: Calquecorn?

Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum coined the term "eggcorn" here to refer to expressions that get reinterperated to another, homonymic expression like eggcorn for acorns, or "play it by year" for "play it by ear". A calque, on the other hand, is a word-by-word translation of an expression from one language into one's own - my favorite is "Passover" for Hebrew peysax 'pass (over)' or "flea market" from the French "marche aux puces".
Recently, I came across "sturm and drang" in a newspaper article instead of the standard "sturm und drang" which means, literally, 'storm and stress'. The expression, borrowed into English like "deja vu" or "schadenfreude", has now apparently been partially calqued for some speakers, replacing the German 'und' with its English equivalent 'and'.
"sturm and drang" has 10,000+ ghits compared to "s und d" with 44,000 - pretty robust.
Could this partial calque happen with other borrowings?
"Esprit de body"? "That's la vie?"
My intuition says no.

Instead of a partial calque, perhaps it is better to see it as an eggcorn because of the phonetic similarity of "and" & "und"?

Or maybe it's a little of both where the phonetic similarity facilitates the partial calque. A calquecorn, then?

When I start hearing or reading "deja viewed" or "ad nauseous" then I'll think I'm on to something productive and maybe even interesting.

UPDATE: "ad nauseous" and "deja viewed" clock in at about 150 ghits, below, I think, threshhold of significance requirements. "deja view" however, is all over the place and though I'm not sure why a lot of the hits seemed to refer to TV shows, movies, business names and the like.