Hi Steve, thanks, > I do suspect that the EPIC2014 folks chose Googlezon specifically for it's > phonetic reference to Godzilla...
Yes, I think so too. > I have tried to follow some of the Neuro Linguistic Programming literature > but got put off by the cultish mind-control factions there to the point of > letting that line drop. If you have more serious references to send me to, I > would appreciate it. May I recommend Morten Christiansen at Cornell: http://www.psych.cornell.edu/people/Faculty/mhc27.html perhaps also in his collaborations with Nick Chater at Warwick http://www.wbs.ac.uk/about/person/nick-chater/ Of the two, I know Morten's work better, and I also happen to think extremely highly of the person. The parts I have seen focus on the induction problem of child language learning. All of the following have to be solved: syllable boundary identification, syllable rules of structure, the languages phoneme inventory, parts of speech, syntactic rules, and lots more if one had the patience to list it all. What clues do kids have to do all this? How much is their own prior expectation (a proper constructive approach to "universal grammar"), and how much is the language responsible for carrying to help them? One piece of Morten's work concerns patterns of sound shape that are systematically different for nouns and verbs in English, and which Morten can demonstrate (if I recall) kids do use to realize that these are different word categories, and then iteratively, knowing that the categories exist, to start figuring out what are their syntactic roles, attaching those roles to morphological rules, and from this what semantic tokens they might carry. A nearly-triivial example is the way modern English has systematically begun a first-syllable/second-syllable stress distinction for words that have both noun and verb/adjective uses. It isn't stable yet, and it isn't pervasive. The noun is a COMplex, the adjective is comPLEX. But for this one, we still use the noun form when we COMplex (fold together) fats and meats in a braise. Other words are better behaved. When inVITE came to be used as a noun, it became an INvite. If I don't mistake, this is not the original pattern in English. These words used to have a single stress marking in all usages. The stress division is a thing that has been taking shape over the past several decades (maybe as long as a century). I can still remember my parents' indignation (incoherently expressed, of course, as such things can only be) at the east-coast mobsters in the entertainment industry who would HARass each other, when everyone knew that the "right" pronunciation was harASS. (Forgive the association of having a hair (or hare?) up one's ass, which this capitalization pattern makes it hard to overlook.) This "misuse" was a sign of their low class and criminal proclivities in the eyes of decent people, who however poor, at least knew how to speak. I actually have no idea what the original word is, but I suspect it was probably HARass in both usages, and my PARents were responding to the shaping distinction of their generation. Morten's work contains things much more subtle than this, which require an actual scientist, usually doing statistics on a computer, to recognize, and I don't remember any examples from seeing this many years ago. He and Nick have at least one book out together, which I think is on topics related to these. I share your pleasure in the shape of sounds, though unfortunately, philistine that I am, I am no more connaisseur of that than of any other form of art. But to listen to Joyce rehearse that in one of the childhood chapters of Portrait was perhaps the first example I have had in a long time of being able to resurrect the state of childhood experience as it was felt as a child (when things still had time to be interesting just for existing), which is somehow trapped inside the old person but mostly no longer accessible. The interest in synesthesia too. A topic I would learn about with another life to do it in. All best, Eric > Thanks, > - Steve >> Don't mean to thread hijack, but it seems this thread was pretty far gone >> anyway. >> >> I must say that the English phonotactics are really on display here. >> >> Googlezon sounds like something big, heavy and vaguely dangerous, a kind of >> Golem but somewhat clunky and difficult to take seriously, like the monsters >> in old Japanese semi-animations. >> >> Amazoogle sounds like something from a Douglas Adams book, with a long >> wiggly trunk and lumpy multicolored skin, probably involving purple and >> green coloration and perhaps spots, and even more difficult to take >> seriously. >> >> Now why would that be? Syllable-initial stops versus vowels and sibilants? >> Stress on the final versus the penultimate syllable? A reduced final vowel >> in the latter that kind of dribbles away? Must ask my psycholinguist >> friends for a breakdown. I'm sure they have nothing better to do. >> >> > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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