Linguistics, Science, and Critical Thinking

In the urge to make sciences and critical thinking more fundamental in our education system, I hope administrators, curriculum writers, and teachers see the potential (and importance) of using linguistic principles as a conduit of teaching critical thinking skills. Over at the Language Log, there is a great post today about teaching science through language.

My students know how passionate I am about telling anyone who will listen that linguistic study really complements any major and profession--this is just one more example of how linguistics can stretch is interdisciplinary reaches.

Want a linguistic challenge?

There is an annual International Linguistics Olympiad, and they are kind enough to share their problems with the public (once they've been used, that is). If you're up for a challenge, you can head over to their website and start with the sample problems and then move up to the archived problems. There are some neat data sets you can work on--I'm tempted to put a whiteboard in the hallway with a problem written on it Good Will Hunting style.

What Linguists Do

One of the most prototypical questions linguists get asked is, "How many languages do you speak?"

Linguists get asked this question so often because the number one misconception about linguists is that we sit around all day and learn new languages.  While linguists study language, we don't necessarily study languages.  How does that make sense?  Studying language means you're studying the system that allows humans to communicate--for spoken languages, this means you're studying how sounds are made, transmitted, and perceived; how sounds are put together and which sounds are meaningful; how words are built to create meaning; how words come together to form sentences; and so on.  For signed languages, you're studying how gestures are made and perceived; how the differing aspects of those gestures work together to create meaning; and so on.  For all types of language, you can study how societies create meaning, how our brains can handle language input and output, how language changes over time, how our language use reflects our identity, how we can acquire language, and more.  The important thing to remember is that you could feasibly study linguistics without ever once studying another language.  You could be a morphologist, studying how individual morphemes are put together to form meaningful words, without speaking any language but your native language because you can study the patterns found in the world's languages without speaking them.

Even though speaking another language is not necessary for being able to perform linguistic analyses, many linguistics programs require that their students take at least two years of a foreign language at the collegiate level (as does our minor here at SFA).  Learning another language opens your mind and helps you, as a student, get past thinking that all languages work like your native language.  Even if you never become fluent in that language you are studying, learning the new vocabulary and new grammatical structures of another language can open up doors for making connections in your linguistics courses that you would otherwise not be able to make.  A simple example is the History of the English Language course.  Students in that course who had studied other languages constantly found connections between that other language and the concepts being learned to study the history of our own language.  Students who studied Latin noticed that Old English had a rich case system like Latin; students of German noticed that the Old English vocabulary sounded more German-ish than English-ish; students of French noticed that Middle English gained familiar-sounding words after the Norman Conquest.

Another misconception about linguists that I have been facing lately is that linguists study grammar.  It is true that one area of linguistics is grammatical analysis; however, grammar in linguistics is not the grammar of middle school textbooks or college style guides.  In linguistics, we do not study things like punctuation placement, subject-verb agreement errors, or faulty parallelism unless we are looking at them in a wider context.  For instance, we might study punctuation placement in the terms of societal conventions used to standardize written language.  Or we might study so-called errors in language to better understand the different patterns available within a language for expressing the same idea and society's judgments on those patterns.  Linguistics, though, is so much more than grammar.  Some of us (like myself) rather enjoy grammar, but that doesn't mean that is all we do.  So if you take Structures of English at SFA, you will not once be tested on where commas should be placed within a sentence.

If you are interested in learning more about studying linguistics, the Linguistic Society of America has an online publication titled "Why Major in Linguistics?" that covers the basics of linguistic study and the possibilities for jobs as a linguistics student.  The link to this article is also in the LingLinks section in the sidebar of this blog, along with other valuable links to linguistic resources.  And, of course, linguists are happy to field questions about linguistics--if you're at SFA, feel free to stop by my office if you'd like to chat about just how fascinating studying linguistics is.

What misconceptions about linguistics have you heard?  Or, what questions do you have about what linguists actually study?

Spotlight on Linguistic Tools: IPA TypeIt Keyboard

Anyone in my courses right now is either already working on or will shortly be working on learning the IPA and putting it to use through transcriptions.  As someone who has had to use the IPA quite a bit--and has had to type it into documents--I understand the frustration of trying to easily put IPA symbols right into a typed document.  I used to be "old school" about how I did it: As I typed, when I came to a place I needed to insert a special IPA character, I'd go to "Special Characters" (when working on my Mac) or "Insert Character" (when working on a PC) and manually insert the character I needed.  That works fine and all, but it can get quite cumbersome--especially if the document is a lengthy one or requires a lot of IPA.  I've spent the last few months trying to get more tech-savvy with linguistics tools so that I can more readily put together fancy-looking linguistic analyses and so that I can help my students find shortcuts to putting together professional-looking documents, whether they're working on homeworks or a final project.  As a new feature of the blog, I will be spotlighting some of the more useful tools I've found (not all of them will focus on using the IPA), in the hopes that other people will benefit from them as much as I already have.

The first tool is an online IPA keyboard: IPA TypeIt.  When you click on the link, you will be take to a screen that looks something like this:

The bulk of the screen is a blank text box, where you can simply type using the keys on your keyboard; then, when you reach a symbol you need that your keyboard doesn't already have, you simply move your cursor to the row of symbols above the text box and click on the one you need.  The symbol is automatically put into the text where the cursor is, and you can keep typing from there.  Once you've finished creating your text, all you have to do is copy the text from the webpage and then paste it into whatever you're working on--whether it's a document or another webpage or even an online chat.  You can even specify the font you want and the size of that font.

Here is another screenshot, this one with text typed into the box:

Notice that you can enter down to start new lines and that you can type in regular orthography side-by-side with the IPA you're using.  Here is that same text, copied and pasted into the body of the blog:

You can more easily type in IPA

ju kæn mɔr izəli tɑɪp ɪn ɑɪ pi eɪ

The only drawback is that you can't use the tab key while in the text box; what that means is that if you want everything lined up so that each word's IPA transcription appears directly below the orthographical word, you'd have to rely on the spacebar to make that alignment happen.

The advantages of the online keyboard are that you don't have to download anything because it's an online tool, it's user-friendly, and you can use it for more than just IPA (look down the options on the left-hand side of the screen, and check out the Russian keyboard because it's just that cool).  The disadvantages are that it is an online-only tool, which means you can only use it if your internet is cooperating, not all the IPA symbols are represented, and you can't use diacritics with the symbols (only needed for more advanced transcriptions).

For beginning linguistics students, I'd say the advantages definitely outweigh the disadvantages.  Here is the link again in case you're so excited to check it out that you don't want to scroll back up through the post to find the original link: IPA TypeIt.

Have fun with the keyboard, and let me know what you think about it.  In the next spotlight, I'll be focusing on a more technical tool for using IPA in typewritten documents.

Advice: Keeping It Simple

Foxtrot by Bill Amend

Students often don't believe me when I say that if your linguistic analysis is getting really messy and complicated, it's highly likely that you overlooked something that would make it simpler.  But it's true.  For example, if you are trying to describe when a phoneme is pronounced as one of its allophones and need five different descriptions for one set of environments, you're most likely overlooking what the environments have in common.  The other day, my History of the English language class had a data set to analyze in order to determine when the letter f was pronounced like a v.  Some of the words were fifta, fif, fiFel, and oFnas (the two fs that are bolded and capitalized are the only two that are pronounced like a v).  As a student of linguistics, you should expect that a generalization can be drawn and that you will not have to answer "between these specific letters."  Look for what the environments have in common: i, e, o, and n are all voiced phonemes.  In fact, the only time f is pronounced like a v is when it occurs between two voiced phonemes.

One of the things I love about linguistics is how methodical it is--there is a method to the madness of language if you look for it.  The voicing in the above example changed to match the voicing of the surrounding segments--it makes sense to do that.  It wouldn't make much sense to say that the voiced v occurs only in the environments i_e and o_n.  That wouldn't tell us what is special about those particular letters to change the pronunciation of another.  Generalizing gives us the opportunity to say, "Ah, being surrounded by voiced sounds causes the voiceless phoneme to become voiced."  Again, it makes sense.  There is a method to the madness.  If you're doing a linguistic analysis, go with the KISS method: Keep It Simple, Stupid.