compound stress

Here's an interesting and timely article from Language Log: Chinese takeout and Watergate: Discuss. (Language Log should really go in my links section, but it'll have to wait till my next bout of updating.) It's about the way that words in a phrase can sometimes combine into a single compound word, which is a syntactic change that's associated with a change in stress pattern.

The article mentions the textbook example of the phrase black bird, which refers to any bird that's black, versus the compound blackbird, which is the name of one type of bird in particular, like sparrow or eagle (and the females can actually be brown, I think). If you'll excuse the boldface attempt to represent stress, you'd pronounce the compound something like blackbird, and the phrase something like black bird.

It intially sounds like a neat and tidy process of lexicalisation (things are lexicalised when they enter the vocabulary/lexicon) - the phrases become compounds and get kitted out with the appropriate stress pattern to match their new status. But inevitably it's slightly more complicated than that - there can be compounds with mismatched stress. Eg some people would say that things like red herring are compounds, but they don't have so-called compound stress (kudos if you can spot a possible flaw in that argument btw) and again you don't have the expected stress pattern in words like player-manager either. Stress is arguably only a rough guide to compound-hood, in other words.

smeaton quotes macdonald

From George Smeaton's book, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, p366-368

The Church of God is in her right attitude only when she is waiting for the fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who comes from Christ and leads to Christ. We see combined in all successful preachers of the gospel right views of the Spirit's operations, an undiverted gaze upon the cross, and a proclamation of the fact that the Spirit comes to glorify the Son in his Person and in his offices. Thus we hear one exclaiming: "Spirit of preaching, that is, Spirit of Christ, come down upon me." [The missionary Macdonald.] They have always set forth that spiritual life flows from the historical Christ the Surety through the Holy Ghost, and that though the Spirit comes not of necessity, but of free condescending love, he comes as the Spirit of our risen Lord, the organ by which he acts, the executive by whom he rules, the comforter sent in Christ's name. ...

With regard to the spasmodic efforts to awaken by human appliances a religious interest in the minds of others, we must distinguish two things that differ. There is, on the one hand, a noble revival spirit, burning with a pure and steady flame, which is kindled and kept alive in proportion as the Holy Spirit inhabits and quickens the Christian heart to sustained and strenuous efforts for the salvation of others. It springs from the Spirit of grace: it leads to dependence on the Spirit's supernatural operations; and they who cherish it never forget that success is not by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord (Zech 4:6). But, on the other hand, there is effort of a different sort - spasmodic and fitful, from self and for self, arguing impatience at the slow progress of the kingdom of God, and prompting measures of the earth, earthy."

This book starts by going through the Bible expositing the various references to the Holy Spirit, then devotes the second section to different themes or aspects of the doctrine, and finally concludes with a historical overview of the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Christian church. I found it very interesting and helpful. It's not terrifically quotable, because the arguments are so detailed, but that's hardly a criticism. Smeaton (d 1889) was professor of exegetics in the New College, Edinburgh, and was a friend of Hugh Martin and James Begg. His books on the atonement are being recommended in the light of the ongoing controversies about penal substitution.

what am i doing again

One thread I'm trying to follow up at the moment is the overlap between spoken language and written language. People who are literate have a different perspective on spoken language compared to, eg, people in cultures where literacy doesn't feature. One significant characteristic of people who are literate is that they conceptualise spoken language as if it was written - you hear speech as consisting of words and sentences and letters. But this isn't actually a very realistic idea of spoken language, as you can tell by listening to someone speaking a foreign language - it all flows out in a continuous stream, and you can't tell where one word ends and the next begins. You can also tell by recording speech and graphing, say, loudness/intensity (in decibels) against time - the gaps in the waveform won't necessarily correspond to the boundaries between words or sentences.

One of the major issues in linguistics, particularly developmental linguistics, is how people manage to end up perceiving the continuous stream of spoken language as if it consisted of units - like sentences, words, and smaller segments like syllables and phonemes. And one of the major factors, it turns out, is people's process of learning to read and write. That's what makes people so good at knowing the difference between a "t" and a "p", even though they're acoustically pretty similar. (It's also what makes it so hard for people to believe that there's a "t" in pencil and a "k" in taxi.)

So given the influence that written language has on people's (conceptualisation of) spoken language, what can you make of the argument that people who have difficulty in learning to read and spell must have problems in their spoken language skills? That's the predominant explanation for the difficulties experienced by the roughly 5% of the population who have dyslexia - their literacy difficulties must be caused by a linguistic impairment. It's backed up by countless studies which unanimously report that people with dyslexia aren't as good as non-dyslexics at counting the number of sounds in a word (eg three sounds in t-o-p; four sounds in s-t-o-p), or judging whether light rhymes with might. This is called the phonological deficit in dyslexia.

The difficulty with those kinds of study is that you could equally argue that it's only if people are good at spelling that they'd think of top as having three sounds in the first place (rather than, say, five, as in t-h-o-p-h, or two, as in t-op). So if someone gives you an unexpected answer to the question of how many sounds are in a word, you can't tell whether they got it "wrong" because of a difficulty processing spoken language, or just because they're not too competent at using alphabetic letters.

In order to investigate whether the phonological deficit in dyslexia is really phonological (really comes from a spoken-language deficit) or whether it's a re-statement in different words of what we knew already (that people with dyslexia have difficulty with reading and writing), we basically need to look at areas of spoken language that don't have a counterpart in written language. And this, dear chaps, is where the toy factories come in. But I've gone on too long already, so will have to break here for the night.

What a cliff hanger eh!

wato newsletter

Shaun Ley's newsletter this week features correspondence they received after the archbishop's call to reduce the time limit for abortions, now that we're better able to treat premature babies. Some bright spark wrote in to say that that's not a reason to change the time limit - since an infant "has no memory or awareness of what's happening until about three or four years of age," it doesn't matter when the termination takes place.

It's a flawed argument anyway developmentally - just because an adult doesn't remember back to when they were two years old, doesn't mean that two-year-old children fail to experience things at the time. Nor does your inability to remember your past experiences prevent them from having repercussions on your later life. (It's the same in principle actually for foetuses before they're born - just because you don't now remember what it was like, doesn't mean you weren't experiencing things then, and doesn't mean that your experiences in the womb don't have any lasting impact on you. Remind me to tell you about the language abilities of newborns sometime.)

But what's really absurd about this guy's argument is that it's something you'd never say about any other thing that you could do to an infant. Parents who batter their pre-school children can't justify themselves by saying it doesn't really matter because children have no memory or awareness of what's happening till they're three or four. It's basically only an ad hoc justification for this one type of violence, ie 'termination,' and it only needs to be stated for its absurdity to become obvious.

preliminary findings

Okay, I couldn't quit writing even though I tried. So I've started running experiments this week. To date I've learnt the following.

1. Students will do *anything* if you pay them, including sit in front of a computer listening to random words and pushing buttons when they see funny pictures.

2. Not all students appear to observe an adequate hygiene protocol prior to turning up in the experiment room. The experiment room being small, in the basement, lacking windows, and not ventilated.

3. Booking systems are very fragile things. When one person gets it wrong, anything up to three researchers may all turn up at the same place wanting to run multiple participants at the same time. In the basement, in a confined space, lacking in windows and ventilation.

4. The phrase "native speaker of English" can take on unexpected nuances when it becomes part of a list of criteria for giving money to students (see (1) above). I'll know for next time to clarify that as "someone whose only or dominant language has been English from birth; late bilinguals need not apply."

5. It is within the realms of possibility to survive for many days on less than one square meal per day and less than one full night's sleep per night, given the right dosage of coffee and apricot flapjacks.

6. On the other hand, too much coffee can give you the illusion of being able to anything at all at any time of the day or night, regardless of how inappropriate it would seem under a rational approach, even include your blog in your to-do list.

a sad state of affairs

This time last week I was planning that today would be spent sitting in the garden and seeing what I could do about developing a tan. Alas, it was not to be.

For one thing, there was the weather, which drizzled all morning and is still a bit humid. Even more significantly, there was also the series of last-minute minor changes which had to be made to the experimental procedure which I'm scheduled to unleash on some (paid) volunteers on Monday. It was ready on Friday, as I thought, to show to someone for a second opinion, and that wasn't exactly painless either. But by Friday lunchtime I had a list of these supposedly minor things to fix, a list which just kept growing, and right now I'm too scared to calculate just what proportion of the past week I've spent down in the basement lab, deprived not so much of natural light as fresh air, twiddling things in various pieces of software which I'm not even particularly confident about using, and negotiating room bookings and when and where to meet the kind folks who're due to lend me their language-related skills for the purposes of this research project.

Upshot: maybe once I've caught up on sleep and reading I'll be back at the blogging keyboard. But this also seems a good time to flag up the growing pressure to allocate my energy to other things & places ... all I can say is, sign up with bloglines and you'll get notified when I add something here ... which hopefully won't too seldom, cos blogging is fun, but I better not promise, because stamina never was one of my strong points =)

the uses of apricot jam

I used to have one fool-proof recipe for chocolate cake which served me well for, ahh, many years. It came from the Be-Ro cookbook, the edition whose cover picture is three generations of smiling women in a kitchen surrounded by assorted tempting pies, cakes, and flans of various descriptions.

Now I have a quicker and easier recipe (from a book with an only slightly less cheesy front cover) which involves putting all the ingredients into one bowl together, beating it up for a couple of minutes, and baking in two 8-inch tins for 25 minutes at 180 C. Specifically, you make a paste of cocoa and water (1.5 and 3 tablespoons respectively), then you just add 6 oz each of butter, sugar, and self-raising flour, plus three eggs and a teaspoon and a half of baking powder. Easy as that.

Once it's cooled, you make a fudge icing by melting butter (2 oz) with cocoa (1 oz), adding a couple of tablespoons of milk, and whisking in 8 oz icing sugar. It's the most successful icing I know, and there's enough to sandwich the two layers plus the top.

By now you can tell that mentioning the apricot jam was only an excuse to talk about chocolate: but there is actually a link here, because this particular recipe also features a use for apricot jam, which I think I've only ever experienced in its function as leftovers of a chocolate cake ingredient. You put several tablespoons of apricot jam through a sieve, perhaps warming it slightly first to make the sieving process easier, then spread it over the top of the cake and down the sides (as well as in the middle if you remember to do it before the icing). And as well as being most delicious, it also keeps the cake moist inside - which is highly convenient, if you're the type of person who ever has to store their chocolate-related baking products for any length of time.

fascinated, breathless and awestruck

This isn't so much a carefully crafted critique as a tetchy sort of grumble, so if you're not in the mood, look away now.

Several weeks ago I took a deep breath and bought the book Women's Ministry in the Local Church (by Ligon Duncan and Susan Hunt, 2006). Maybe some time I'll get round to talking through some of the issues which it raised, although that seems like too much of a can of worms to be a particularly attractive prospect at the moment.

In the meantime, what set me off on my grumble was the slighly irritating way that the argument was presented in Chapter Five (on Submission, by Susan Hunt). After writing out the passage 1 Timothy 2:9-15, the comment which immediately follows takes the following form:
"I am fascinated by the fact that [...]."
New paragraph. "Another fascinating fact leaves me breathless: [...]."
New paragraph. "Finally, I am awestruck that [...]."

Regardless of how valid and worthwhile the facts which she presents may be, it leaves the door wide open for the reader to simply say, "So what?"

If Ms Hunt gets fascinated by some doctrine, and if some other doctrine leaves her breathless, how exactly is that meant to help you and me? What you're left to evaluate is not the validity of the doctrines which she's outlining, but the likelihood of whether or not she did experience those particular emotional states on being confronted with this or that fact. Even though in this case I don't think there's anything suspicious about the technique, that trick of embedding the argument within the shell of a statement about the writer him/herself is actually a great way of distracting the reader's attention away from the content of the teaching which they're being presented with, and leaving them with an entirely uninteresting and worthless comment about someone's subjective experiences.

Much as it might make the whole book and its arguments more friendly and persuasive, it's definitely not a style to overuse. It runs the risk of being perceived as patronising - as if the reader can't decide for themselves what reaction to take to, eg, the fact that there are no aberrant ideas in the bible - does it leave you breathless? and what would it say about you if you didn't go breathless when you thought about it? It also tends to trivialise the matter under discussion - as if the doctrines can somehow gain validity or credibility by the recounting of that writer's subjective response to them. And of course there's always the embarrassing possibility that the feverish girlyness is only on display to act as proof that intelligent and well-respected women don't mind conforming to the doctrine of submission. But surely that is too embarrassing to be true.

omnipotence

For some reason I was dipping into AA Hodge's exposition of the Westminster Confession the other day, and came across this passage which it might be worth sharing.

"The power of God is the power of his all-perfect, self-existent essence. He has absolutely unlimited power to do whatsoever his nature determines him to will. But this power cannot be directed against his nature. The ultimate principles of reason and of moral right and wrong are not products of the divine power, but are principles of the divine nature. God cannot change the nature of right and wrong, etc, because he did not make himself, and these have their determination in his own eternal perfections. He cannot act unwisely or unrighteously; not for want of the power as respects the act, but for want of will, since God is eternally, immutably, and most freely and spontaneously, wise and righteous." (AA Hodge, The Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, p 52; on WCF ch 2, sec 1-2.)

The bits that were particularly striking were the statement that moral right vs wrong is not a product of divine power, but comes from the principles of the divine nature, and the last few phrases, "God is eternally, immutably, and most freely and spontaneously, wise and righteous."

Hodge was an American theologian of the nineteenth century (1823-1886); he succeeded his father Charles as professor of sytematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and was famous not only as a speaker, writer, and preacher, but even as someone who was able to popularise theology, making it clear and accessible without compromising on depth and spirituality.