March 17, 2008
childhood dreams and academic careers
it's a problem:
One of the pieces of advice given to me about writing statements of purpose for grad school applications is that you should refrain from writing about your childhood. This wasn't advice in response to anything I had said or written, apparently this is just a common mistake that people made. What's really wrong with too much life-holism? I think this chart makes it pretty clear, no one studies that anymore. Whatever it was you decided you wanted to do, and still, whatever it is you and your friends think are really cool ideas, no one is studying them and therefore your advisor is going to laugh at you and you're going to have to pick something fairly boring. Man! Why does academia work this way!
Um, yeah, Spring Break is over, I'm feeling fairly jaded, trying to write the abstract for yet another paper that I feel like I've been assigned a topic for. I'm tired and worried and I'm twenty-five and afraid of academic commitment. I'm too young to die! I miss college, sweet sweet non-committal papers on whatever the hell was exciting to me at the time.
March 10, 2008
verbs, and how they are the key to secrets
This is from the New York Review of Books review, by Colin McGinn, of Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought that came out last fall. I think it's a really good explanation, by a non-linguist, of why I am studying verbs. Levin and Rappaport Hovav, who he mentions near the end, have kind of defined the field I'm exploring. I haven't read any of Pinker's work on verbs, but he's a cognitive linguist, not really my type.
"To my mind, by far the most interesting chapter of the book is the lengthy discussion of verbs -- which may well appear the driest to some readers. Verbs are the linguistic keyhole to the mind's secrets, it turns out. . . .
When children learn verbs they are confronted with a problem of induction: Can the syntactic rules that govern one verb be projected to another verb that has a similar meaning? Suppose you have already learned how to use the verb "load" in various syntactic combinations; you know that you can say both Hal loaded the wagon with hay and Hal loaded hay into the wagon. Linguists call the first kind of sentence a "container locative" and the second a "content locative," because of the way they focus attention on certain aspects of the event reported -- the wagon (container) or the hay (content), respectively (the word "locative" referring here to the way words express location). The two sentences seem very close in meaning, and the verb load slots naturally into the sentence frame surrounding it. So, can other verbs like fill and pour enter into the same combinations? The child learning English verbs might well suppose that they can, thus instantiating a rule of grammar that licenses certain syntactic transformations -- to the effect that you can always rewrite a content locative as a container locative and vice versa. But if we look at how pour and fill actually work we quickly see that they violate any such rule. You can say John poured water into the glass (content locative) but you can't say John poured the glass with water (container locative); whereas you can say John filled the glass with water (container locative) but you can't say John filled water into the glass (content locative).
"Somehow a child has to learn these syntactic facts about the verbs load, pour, and fill -- and the rules governing them are very different. Why does one verb figure in one kind of construction but not in another? They all look like verbs that specify the movement of a type of stuff into a type of container, and yet they behave differently with respect to the syntactic structures in question. It's puzzling.
"The answer Pinker favors to this and similar puzzles is that the different verbs subtly vary in the way they construe the event they report: pour focuses on the type of movement that is involved in the transfer of the stuff, while neglecting the end result; fill by contrast specifies the final state and omits to say how that state precisely came about (and it might not have been by pouring). But load tells you both things: the type of movement and what it led to. Hence the verbs combine differently with constructions that focus on the state of the container and constructions that focus on the manner by which the container was affected.
"The syntactic rules that control the verbs are thus sensitive to the precise meaning of the specific verb and how it depicts a certain event. And this means that someone who understands these verbs must tacitly grasp how this meaning plays out in the construction of sentences; thus the child has to pick up on just such subtle differences of meaning if she is to infer the right syntactic rule for the verb in question. Not consciously, of course; her brain must perform this work below the level of conscious awareness. She must implicitly analyze the verb -- exposing its deep semantic structure. Moreover, these verbs form natural families, united by the way they conceive of actions -- whether by their manner or by their end result. In the same class as pour, for example, we have dribble, drip, funnel, slosh, spill, and spoon.
"This kind of example -- and there is a considerable range of them -- leads Pinker to a general hypothesis about the verb system of English (as well as other languages): the speaker must possess a language of thought that represents the world according to basic abstract categories like space, time, substance, and motion, and these categories constitute the meaning of the verb. When we use a particular verb in a sentence, we bring to bear this abstract system to "frame" reality in certain ways, thus imposing an optional grid on the flux of experience. We observe some liquid moving into a container and we describe it either as an act of pouring or as the state of being filled: a single event is construed in different ways, each reflecting the aspect we choose to focus on. None of this is conscious or explicit; indeed, it took linguists a long time to figure out why some verbs work one way and some another (Pinker credits the MIT linguists Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin). We are born with an implicit set of innate categories that organize events according to a kind of primitive physics, dealing with substance, motion, causality, and purpose, and we combine these to generate a meaning for a particular verb that we understand. The grammar of our language reflects this innate system of concepts.
"As Pinker is aware, this is a very Kantian picture of human cognition. Kant regarded the mind as innately stocked with the basic concepts that make up Newtonian mechanics -- though he didn't reach that conclusion from a consideration of the syntax of verbs. And the view is not in itself terribly surprising: many philosophers have observed that the human conceptual scheme is essentially a matter of substances in space and time, causally interacting, moving and changing, obeying laws and subject to forces -- with some of those substances being agents -- i.e., conscious, acting human beings -- with intentions and desires. What else might compose it? Here is a case where the conclusion reached by the dedicated psycholinguist is perhaps less revolutionary than he would like to think. The chief interest of Pinker's discussion is the kind of evidence he adduces to justify such a hypothesis, rather than the hypothesis itself -- evidence leading from syntax to cosmology, we might say. Of course the mind must stock basic concepts for the general structure of the universe if it is to grasp the nature of particular things within it; but it is still striking to learn that this intuitive physics shapes the very syntax of our language."