Collaborations: As far as different subfields, we

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CollaborationsAs far as different subfields,
were all, Aint no reason we shouldnt work
together

• John Rickford
• Thomas Wasow
• Stanford University

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Unlikely Collaborators

Advisor
Sociolinguistic interviews observations
Methods
Introspection
E-language Shared, social phenomenon
I-language Feature of individual psychology
Focus
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But Friends Neighbors Talk
Johns house
Toms house
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Common Interest Alternations

• Generative grammarians look at what forms may
  alternate with others
• Variationists look at factors conditioning
  alternations
• Both concerned with the question of why forms
  alternate
• But focus on different aspects of the answer

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However

• Focus on different aspects of a question can be
  complementary, not competitive
• Language is a product of both individual
  psychology and social interaction, so both
  perspectives contribute
• Collaborations across subdisciplines are both
  possible and enlightening (cf Sociolinguistics
  Phonology plenary by Beth Hume Naomi Nagy
  other papers, LSA Chicago, Jan 08)

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Overview

• Summarize the four projects we have collaborated
  on so far
• Topic-restricting as far as
• Negative inversion in African-American English
• Intensive and Quotative all
• Relativizer omission across dialects
• Draw lessons from each and from them collectively

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The as far as Project

• Syntactic Variation and Change in Progress
  Language 1995 (71.1102-31), by Rickford, Wasow,
  Mendoza-Denton, Espinoza (1 grad, 1 undergrad
  student)
• For years, as part of interest in relatively
  understudied syntactic variation, John had been
  collecting examples like
• As far as filling out the details Ø, that isnt a
  problem
• People think Im constantly in motion, as far as
  making films Ø
• When is the sentence coda (goes or is concerned)
  omitted?
• Is omission of coda increasing?
• Tom joined the project after John asked him about
  the syntax of the NP after as far as

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What we did

• Collected examples
• First through listening and reading
• Then through corpus searches
• Read usage manuals on this alternation
• Did questionnaire study, getting intuitive
  well-formedness ratings (4-point scale)
• Coded for factors we thought might matter
• Ran VARBRUL analyses

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Our Findings

• Studying syntactic variation requires methods
  other than sociolinguistic interviews
  recordings (egs overheard on fly, corpora,
  elicited intuitions)
• Various factors favor coda omission spoken
  modality, younger speaker, female speaker,
  syntactically complex NP, prosodically branching
  NP, sentence-initial position of as far as
• Coda omission has been increasing, both in
  frequency and in range of environments where it
  occurs (in keeping with Baileys wave model)

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Factors in afa verb absence
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Implications for models of language change
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Historical evidence for wavelike spread

• Env a Sentential NPs, e.g.(61) And I will own to
  you, (I am sure it will be safe), that so far as
  our living with Mr. Churchill at Enscombe Ø, it
  is settled. 1816, Jane Austen, Emma, p. 460
• Env b Prepositional or Conjoined NPs, e.g.(66)
  The cabin ... was in perfect condition so far as
  frame and covering Ø until 1868. 1939, Henry
  Seidel Canby, Thoreau
• Env c Simple NPs, e.g. (3) As far as the white
  servants Ø, it isn't clear. Renee Blake, 22,
  1987

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But We Learned Much More

• A major turning point in Toms career
• Got him started thinking about syntactic
  complexity, a topic central to the next decade of
  his work
• Convinced him of the importance of looking at
  usage
• Also valuable for John
• first paper whose data did not come from creoles
  or AAVE
• Contributions to models of lg change

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Syntactic Complexity

• Coda omission sounds better when NP is longer
  more complex
• As far as Gore Ø, I make no predictions
• As far as the former Vice President who won the
  Nobel Prize Ø, I make no predictions
• VARBRUL indicates complexity (depth of embedding)
  matters more than length
• Later found some evidence for same conclusion
  regarding heavy NP shift, the dative alternation,
  and the verb-particle construction

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Judgment Data

• Questionnaire 20 sentences, rated by 180
  speakers on a 4-level scale of acceptability
• Results showed clear patterns, but none were
  categorical of 80 possible responses (20
  sentences x 4 ratings), none occurred fewer than
  10 times.
• Bottom line well-formedness judgments from a
  single speaker are highly suspect
• Aside People who said they would never use
  coda-less afa sentences were heard doing so

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Corpus Data

• Reviewer questioned the high rate of coda
  omission we reported, suggesting sentences w/o
  coda might be more noticeable
• Searched a small portion of the Switchboard
  corpus and found a much higher level of coda
  omission there
• Convinced us of the value of electronic corpora
• Corpus studies continue to play a big role in our
  research

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AAVE Negative Inversion

• An Optimality Theoretic Approach to Variation in
  Negative Inversion in AAVE Natural Language and
  Linguistic Theory 1996 (14.3591-627). Sells,
  Rickford, Wasow
• Dealt with examples like
• Cant nobody beat em
• Aint nothin went down
• Goals
• Improve on old analysis of Labovs, which posited
  two distinct analyses
• Explain why this inversion is limited to
  negatives
• Method Elicited judgments from native AAVE
  speakers

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Origins of This Collaboration

• Tom got interested in AAVE by student in intro
  syntax course (Renée Blake), who noted
  divergences in judgments
• Formed reading group on AAVE syntax with John,
  Peter Sells, Arnold Zwicky, and (later) Lisa
  Green, who visited as a postdoc
• Wont go into details about our analysis

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AAVE as a Real Language

• Linguists claimed for decades that AAVE is not
  just bad English, sloppy talk, etc.
• But most previous work focused on social factors
  surrounding AAVE and its relationship to standard
  American English
• This paper was a formal syntax paper, whose
  object language happened to be AAVE
• Appeared the same year as the Ebonics controversy
  in Oakland

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Syntactic Variation and OT

• This paper was also an early application of
  Optimality Theory to syntax
• Because the phenomenon exhibits variation, we
  proposed that individual speakers may allow
  multiple constraint rankings
• This idea was being explored in morphology at the
  same time by our then-student, Arto Anttila
• Anttila has since applied it very insightfully to
  syntactic variation, as well

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The ALL Project

• Intensive and Quotative ALL Something Old,
  Something New American Speech, 2007. Rickford,
  Buchstaller, Wasow, Zwicky.
• The Sociolinguistics of a Short-Lived
  Innovation Tracing the development of quotative
  all across real and apparent time under
  revision. Buchstaller, Rickford, Traugott, Wasow,
  Zwicky.
• The lady was al demonyak historical aspects of
  Adverb all English Language Linguistics.
  Buchstaller Traugott.
• Lots of other collaborators In addition to
  co-authors, students Zoe Bogart, Tracy Conner,
  Rowyn McDonald, Nick Romero, Laura Whitton,
  Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Lauren Hall-Lew, Laura
  Staum and others

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The Phenomena
She was all mad at me.
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Origins of the ALL Project Johns Dream

• Email sent 3/18/04, to full departmental mailing
  list
• OK, this isn't Black History month, and this
  is not about MLK Jr.'s famous speech.
• It IS about a dream I had a few hours ago
  that we (Stanford Linguistics faculty and
  students) were working on a common linguistic
  project that drew on the expertise and experience
  of our respective subfields, showcasing the value
  of collective effort on a scale unprecedented in
  linguistics, and highlighting what is distinctive
  about linguistics at Stanford. I'm here at 5 am
  trying to see if there's any hope of making the
  dream a reality. We could devote a small
  portion of our time and say, one faculty meeting
  or colloquium a month to the collective
  enterprise, building up a pool of data and
  readings ..., and resulting in conference
  presentations and publications under a common
  name, like the "Stanford Linguistics Collective"

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Data for ALL Study

• 1990/94 recordings of native California
  adolescents young adults collected by Ann
  Wimmer (Stanford undergrad senior thesis)
  Carmen Fought (Pitzer College, LA area)
• New 2005 recordings of high school college
  students from Palo Alto, Stanford, San
  Francisco
• Multi-source corpus--incl. examples from
  conversation culled from publications (Waksler,
  American Speech 2001), web pages, TV series
  (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) movies (Clueless).
  Lots of all tokens (597 intensifiers, 253
  quotatives), but not accountable like recorded
  corpora.
• Google Newsgroups Corpus, 1981-2005. Billions of
  words, including at least 354 examples of
  quotative all.

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Results Intensive ALL

• Intensive all is old, examples going back to 11th
  13th c.
• But extension to full tensed verbs is new
  she all walks in ...
  I all screamed...
• In 2005 recordings, most common with
  adjectives (all spastic), PPs
  (all in bed), Verbing (all laughing)
• As a booster, a degree modifier that intensifies
  the property of its head, intensive all (7 in
  our corpus) is not as frequent as really
  (52), so (19), and very (9), but it is more
  frequent than totally (3), and is popular with
  adjectives denoting physical
  property (all shiny), age, color, speed.

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Quotatives Im Like Yeah, But Shes All No
The Mr. T Experience
Boy meets girl, girl teases boy, boy looks for
something to destroy. Hes into her, shes onto
him, and thats the way its always been. Shell
be with you if you want her to, unless she finds
out that you do. Then somehow she wont want to
be, it turns around so suddenly. And Im like
yeah, but shes all no, and Im all come on baby,
lets go, and shes like I dont think so, and
Im going... The search for love and happiness
turns out to be a game of chess. You cant move
or you flip the board, and youre lying in pieces
on the floor. Im like um, and shes all hey,
and Im all come on baby, lets play, and shes
like thats okay and Im going... Every day I
just want to say I love her madly, but I do it so
badly, that when I do, I can't get through. If
she even listens, shes way off in the distance.
Success in these relationships rests more or less
on gamesmanship, and these are ships that I cant
board, or keep in order or afford. Im like
yeah, but shes all no, and Im all come on baby,
lets go, and shes like I dont think so, and Im
going. Im going. Im going..
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Results Quotative ALL

• Its new 1st noted 1982. (Switchboard, 1988-92
  Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English
  I each has only 1 example)
• In 1990/94 corpus, all is primary quotative
  introducer (all used 46, like 17, unframed 16,
  say 11, Other 8, go 2) VARBRUL analysis
  shows primary favoring factor is Present tense,
  then Quoted Speech (vs. Thought), then
  Perseverance (quotative all in 5 preceding lines)
• In 2005 corpus, all much less frequent (4) as
  quotative introducer, overtaken by like (69),
  all like has emerged. VARBRUL shows tense not
  significant, but Speech still favors,
  perseverance disfavors all.
• Google newsgroups data also suggest quotative all
  peaked in 1999, then declined steeply.

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Lessons from the ALL Project

• Even at its peak, quotative all had somewhat
  different usage patterns from other quotatives
• Linguistic innovations can be short-lived
• Mix of sociolinguistic interviews and corpus work
  can be productive
• Large, heterogeneous groups of linguists are
  capable of working together productively

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Relativizer Omission

• Ongoing work -- no joint publications yet, but
  separate conference presentations (Tom et al
  since 2004, John Laura 2008) in press
  articles
• First time we both worked on the same alternation
  separately before collaborating
• Toms work mostly with Florian Jaeger, plus
  sometimes Roger Levy or David Orr
• Johns work w grad student Laura Smith w
  undergrads Pat Callier, Cole Paulson, Doug Kenter
  plus consultant Bob Bayley (UCD)

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The Phenomenon

• Alternation in relative clauses
• The last movie which/that I saw was Ironman
• The last movie Ø I saw was Ironman
• Both interested in factors influencing omission
• Toms work largely on the Switchboard corpus
• John studying AAVE and Appalachian English and
  Caribbean English creoles (in Jamaica, Guyana,
  Barbados)

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Toms Issues

• What can relativizer omission tell us about
  syntactic processing?
• How do grammar and processing influence one
  another?
• Proposal from Wasow, Jaeger, Orr (in press)
  The more predictable the occurrence of a
  non-subject relative clause is, the less likely
  it is to have a relativizer
• If this is due to processing, it should be the
  same across dialects

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Johns Issues

• Does relativizer choice (including omission)
  pattern alike in AAVE, Appalachian (White
  vernacular) and Caribbean creoles?
• How do relativizer patterns in these lang-uages
  compare to those in colloquial and standard
  English? (NO quan. data avail.)
• What, if anything, can be concluded about the
  origins of AAVE from relativizer patterns
  (cf.Tottie Harvie in Poplack, ed., 2000)?
• How test predictability hypothesis without
  tagged/parsed computer corpora?

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Projects Mutually Reinforcing

• Predictability hypothesis needs to be tested on
  wider range of data
• Processing explanations of relativizer patterns
  undermine historical arguments based on them.
• AAVE, Appalachian creoles among dialects that
  allow relativizer omission more freely in subject
  RCs
• He the man Ø got all the records
• A yuh Ø mek dem bad (Lionheart Gal, p. 8,Jca)
• This is another place to test both the
  predictability hypothesis and similarities across
  dialects
• So are it-clefts Its in the bed (that) they
  hid the gun.

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Take Away Lessons

• Dont compartmentalize! Lx today requiring more
  breadth than before, combining observations
  experiments (Campbell-Kibler), diff subfields
  (phonetics/socio) fields (Psych, Sociol)
• Language is a multi-faceted phenomenon
• Has an intricate internal structure, represented
  in the minds of speakers, influenced by human
  information processing mechanisms
• Is a powerful social tool, shaping and shaped by
  our interactions
• These facets are not independent
• We learn more about language when we attend to
  both
• Computational tools changing both
  sociolinguistics and syntax in ways that bring
  their methods and results closer together
• Larger theorizing model building? (What we
  havent yet done)

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Thanks to

• NSF grant 1101381-100-QAOLE (Rickford, PI)
• Grants from Stanford Humanities Lab the
  Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education
• Too many individuals to fit on this slide,
  notably our other collaborators students
• and Beth Hume and the other meeting organizers
  for inviting (and helping) us.
• Slides available soon at http//www.stanford.edu/
  wasow/wasow.html