the mind and language

2006-04-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

life being what it is, this blog has fallen by the wayside and there it will likely remain. sitemeter tells me that people still visit here, and i think it fair to tell you that after this, i probably won't update here anymore. but for the sake of symmetry i offer the following.

fall semester ended rather torturously, but successfully. i got the grades, i got the letters of recommendation, i finished the apps. i was accepted everywhere i applied. i guess it was a combination of a genuine love for the field, playing the game reasonably well, and some amount of dumb luck. hopefully i can preserve all three of these factors as i go forward, beyond the pale...

you might expect that once you get accepted everywhere life becomes sunnywarm and easy, with butterflies lighting softly on your shoulder and birds singing songs just for you. but i am here to shatter your expectations. it can be really hard because then you are confronted with figuring out why you are REALLY in this. how you want the next 5-6 years of your life to be. and what position you want to be in at the end of that time. you have to make sure you're serious and you have to get very comfortable with making a leap of faith in practice, not just in theory. finally last week i committed to a program, and then immediately collapsed on my couch in a swarm of migraine and infection. will said once that school is corrosive, and i guess he was right. but it's so worth it, says the me with antibiotics percolating happily through the blood supply.

in the fall i will be starting the ph.d program in linguistics at uc berkeley. i'm just auditing one class now, and not very faithfully. but i'm reading like mad. for me, this is living the dream.

and i've never felt such a sense of accomplishment, in all my life.

thanks for reading, you few tenacious optimists.

xo,
amy

2005-11-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

hello school blog.
it's me.
look, i know it's been awhile.
i haven't written.
i haven't even called.

i never said it was gonna be all roses and champagne you know.
sometimes people just have to be free.
to do what they gotta do.
free to be you & me.

i still love you.
don't cry.
c'mere.

***

week 12 of 15.
let's see where the tally stands.

midterms: all done.
that's about all i can say about that.

reading: basically caught up.

homeworks: i'm rocking them. just a few left.

grad school apps: uhhhhh
hey look over there
a shiny thing!
look, elvis!

attendance: extremely good

course project/term paper: probably better than average. have to start writing now.

hmm i don't know what else to tell you.
i could tell you the funny old theory about grimm's law and germanic speakers being from the alps. how all the running up and down mountains made them huff and puff a lot, and that's why the voiceless stop series all changed to fricatives.

i could tell you about that, but i don't think you'd find it very funny.
you're just a blog, after all.

2005-10-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

8/15.

the halfway point of any difficult and extended task is always so psychologically significant for me. i wasn't very focused this week but i did manage to acknowledge the exact moment on wednesday morning when i crossed the line. now i am closer to the end than to the beginning and that is a relief, and that is scary. so much left to do between now and then: another midterm, term paper, grad school stuff, finals.

i love framenet in a way that transcends the work and its usefulness to my study, to my qualifications (i still can't get around to thinking of a summary of my preparedness as a 'cv' - such a pretentious term). i love to go there and sit in the windowless little office shared by a fulltime frame developer (who also serves an important role as chief answerer of my general pondery questions) and the two real annotators, i.e. those who are paid for their efforts. the former is a previous ling grad student, the latter a first year grad student and a last year undergrad cog sci/music double major. she plays tapes of brahms and air-pianos them on her desk. wednesdays when i'm there all afternoon and it's just me & the fulltime guy i play kalx. always we play with language, whoever is around. i feel a warmth for these people although i don't really know them yet.

this week at framenet i learned about pangolins.

hmm, what else...i've been pointedly avoiding the needy gaze of the grad school application process. obviously that needs to change.
why not today?

2005-10-13T21:45:00.000-07:00

midterms: could've been better, could've been worse. no permanent damage done.

i've begun my framenet annotation work in earnest. i think my next song will be titled "ballad of the lexicographer." we may have to get the flying saussures back together, blues brothers style. i get to be elwood. wait, jake. wait, which one always ordered dry white toast? i wanna be that one.

i think i'm not totally bad at it. lexicography, that is.
i helped fix a couple of frames today. Secrecy_status and Be_in_agreement_on_action, if you must know.

what i'm really trying to avoid discussing here is that i had some direct and strong confirmation of some worries that have been simmering around in my fretty head for awhile. about the direction of the department. it's not quite to the point of a crisis of faith but the pedestal is teetering a bit.

i found out some stuff i probably shouldn't know.

bah, i'm grumpy.
go away now.

2005-10-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

quote of the week:

"the first rule of comparative linguistics is that you've got to know what to compare."
-professor holland

at the risk of this blog becoming a serial love letter to historical linguistics, just let me say that this is one of those statements that really struck me as quiet brilliance. it seems obvious on its face, but not only is it the kind of thing that gets slippery in practice (that's part of what makes this stuff fun though, guessing at dropped first syllables, metathesized sounds, etc.) but it can also be metaphorically extended to other things in life. deep thoughts from my 9a class, fun!

midterm tomorrow, another on tuesday.
i'm not really worried.

(well maybe a little)

2005-09-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

my internet broke last night (ha ha) so i panicked for awhile because i had to look up some etymologies in the venerable OED which i was accessing by proxying through the ucb library. 'cause you need to subscribe etc. i briefly considered a crazed midnight call to some friend who might have the OED or a working internet (ha ha) or both. then i just decided to go to bed. lo, upon waking everything was right in the world and i finished without any trouble whatsoever. you can do an advanced search for "folk etymology" and "back-formation" and that makes historical ling homework fairly straightforward.

so today was:
class
coffee
section
class
icsi meeting.

by tuesday i will have an icsi account and email address, and a card key. i'm going to start with frame-based corpus annotation which is a change from their initial plan to exploit my programming skills. i'm certainly happier with annotation. i still haven't figured out how i managed to impress them, but i'm glad that i did.

today i am rather proud that i have made it through five weeks relatively unscathed. 1/3 of the semester done and i am on steady ground. and there's still plenty of fight left in me.

so bit by bit i implement my takeover stragety.
today: icsi.
soon: a tropical island-state!

2005-09-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

unbelievably gorgeous day. sunny and 80's, my face is sunburned a little but i'm happy. the first of my new no-work-wednesdays and i stayed on campus all day long, caught up on all of my reading and wandered through cafes and the bookstore. walked through parts of campus i'd not been to before, just to explore.

visited my summer professor whom i love. she agreed to write me a grad school recommendation, one little box checked off, long long column of them still empty but i think i have it figured out. i think i have it under control. i told her about my master plan and she didn't laugh, so that's something. she didn't snicker at my oppenheimer caveat, either. will did, but that's to be expected.

in historical we are learning about the comparative method for reconstructing proto-languages. i get it, so that's nice.

study group tonight. srini's talk at icsi tomorrow ("Beyond Keyword Search: Semantic Structures for Question Answering"). meet collin friday. midterms next two weeks. statement of purpose draft within two weeks.

so my life is set. it all (mostly) fits into my schedule and i've relaxed into the pace and now i just have to follow through. all of this having things lined up is new for me. i've been feeling a little boring lately but maybe that's just another word for grownup. no time for hard living when i have all those unchecked boxes...

now i have just enough time for a little nap before i go back into the fray.

2005-09-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

"Linguistic history is basically the darkest of the dark arts, the only means to conjure up the ghosts of vanished centuries. With linguistic history we reach furthest back into the mystery: humankind."
- Cola Minis 1952

at my first college i worked in the library for two years. it was the most desired of all student jobs; the head librarian was a patient of my dad's. lucky me. i mainly worked at the circulation desk which was in turn the most desired of all library jobs; it was good because you could study and chat with people passing by...there was only one library at this school so everyone passed by at some point. and you could chat with your shift partner (the only one i remember now is alan, a boy who was a year ahead of me and on whom i had a slight crush, who spoke german and loved the alarm above all else) and make fun of things people checked out, after they left.

but what i also loved was shelving, which everyone else hated. you'd load up your little two-shelf rolling metal cart with all the books people had checked back in, or just left lying around. first you'd have to put them in order of where they needed to go in the library (there were four floors of stacks plus special collections areas, it seemed huge to me at the time though i expect now i'd feel differently). then you'd trundle around the library putting them away. it was mindless and tedious but for me it afforded both the time to indulge in my inner world and the motivation to explore every square inch of that library. i can still smell it, too, hundred-year-old musty paper. i knew all the best secret spots.

historical linguistics reminds me of libraries. dusty, old, arcane. it seems right to approach it respectfully, systematically, dreamily even. most people seem to think it's boring, but i think i could explore its hushed corners for hours at a time, totally happy, totally insulated.

2005-09-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

so. nearly a month into the semester and my schedule is finally set. the historical professor is going to let us in, he told me after class today that he sent his approval to the department for me to enroll. i am in the classes i want to be in. i am starting to figure out what my involvement with framenet will be.

i dropped my work hours down again. something had to give.

i am absolutely committed to this, and yet it feels a little shaky to be investing so much in a course of action that i haven't been admitted into yet, in any formal way. there is certainly no guarantee of acceptance here or anywhere. and sometimes i'm not quite sure how i ended up in this place.

but my good friend julia says "i find that the times i don't recognize my own life are the times i feel really alive," and i think she's right.

2005-09-18T22:39:00.000-07:00

the thing about school is this: it is not life or death but it really can feel that way. everything condenses, right? it gets so focused, so compressed and heavy that you start to feel like one little wobble this way or that and you're gonna get squished.

so the gsi says it doesn't look good for me getting into historical and that really sucks. which is crazy because i never even thought about taking it at first, not in seriousness. and then when it was suggested i never thought i'd like it. and now i feel like what i want most in the world is the privilege of sitting in 141 giannini at 9am on mondays, wednesdays, and fridays.

far right row, second seat back.

summerclass girl said "what are you doing here? you were all into the cognitive stuff..." and i said something about demonstrating breadth of interest. but at some point in there it all shifted and i found out that the boundaries of the category "linguistic topics that interest me" aren't what i thought they were. i guess i did it a little backwards, first i decided what i wanted to study, then i fell in love with it.

anyway. i know that the world doesn't hinge on this class. probably nothing hinges on this class. but since i talked to my gsi on the bus i've been generally cranky and distressed, and if i don't get in i expect it will get worse before it gets better. consider this my open apology (in the classical sense) to the world.

2005-09-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

well, my telugu consultant will be on vacation for the entire month of november which was really bad news for my project. so i talked to a few other people i know from southern india and somehow my idea morphed into this: i will meet with speakers of malayalam, tamil, AND telugu, and do a comparative phonology project. they're all dravidian languages from neighboring areas, it could be really interesting to find where they contrast & overlap.

yeah yeah, because i don't have enough to do! i need to make things a bit harder for myself. am i punishing myself, or what?

i know i probably shouldn't do this but...it sounds so cool.
i'll talk to the prof tomorrow.

there are two obnoxious people in my historical discussion section. ugh. i wanted to tell them to shut up, they were saying mean things about the gsi whom i love already. for the better part of our meeting today i was convinced that one of them had tourrette's. i'm still not sure she doesn't...

our historical homework is hard. like, the kind of hard where i looked at it at first and thought i don't even know how to DO this. but i keep looking back at the data set and noticing new things, and it's really all about pattern recognition. and it's still hard but that just makes it interesting.

i can do pattern recognition.

2005-09-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

well i'm still not sure about the waitlist situation but i've committed to the optimistic course of action of auditing 100 on the assumption that i will be able to enroll in both phonology and historical. it's not as c.y.a. as i'd like to be, but i simply didn't have the energy to do all that homework and attend all those sections this week. a.s validated my decision by pointing out that even if i didn't get into historical, the ridiculously high cost would probably NOT be justified for 100, so i might want to just audit it anyway.

felt so great & lucky again, just hanging around campus. 9a class, 11a section, 12p class, 1p section. coffee, walking around hearing the bell ringing. i love the stuffy old building smell in the mazey dimlight corridors of dwinelle hall.

this weekend in addition to regular schoolwork i am going to work on my statement of purpose and attempt to learn how to pronounce a trilled r (like the sound in the spanish word 'perro'). 7 years of spanish classes didn't teach me, we'll see what a pile of detailed articulatory phonetic instructions can accomplish. wish me suerte.

2005-09-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

i am terrible at producing non-english vowel sounds.
this is a bad thing for a hopeful linguist.

still trying to work out classes and waitlists and sections, etc. my current ideal scenario is to enroll in phonology and historical. and audit 100. this is funny on several levels, which i won't go into here.

these days i'm tired and worried all the time and some of it goes deeper than just simple fretting, but still i think that this is the right thing for me to be doing. well actually, i don't think that, i believe it. there's a difference.

can i have another three-day weekend, plzthx.

2005-09-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

best. day. ever.

1. first the ling100 professor said yes, i can take his course. he also suggested that i instead might want to take something more advanced. but that if i want to be in his, i can. the thing is, his course is a prereq for almost everything else, so as far as future classes i maybe should get it out of the way. but given that the goal is to get into grad school, i will investigate other options. not sure if anyone else will let me in at this point, but then i didn't really think this guy would say yes either.

2. then i wandered around finding offices & writing down office hours. found my summer prof's new office but she wasn't there. i think i'm starting to figure out dwinelle, amazingly.

3. then i got my calnet id all sorted.

4. then i was able to look up my summer grade.

5. then i went to phonology. and learned a little about how birds mimic human speech. among other things. my phonology professor is awesome, he indulges in interesting digressions and i for one appreciate that.

2005-08-31T14:38:00.000-07:00

the ling100 professor says that everyone on the waitlist will likely not get into the class. which is very VERY bad news for me because concurrent enrollment students are supposed to come after the waitlist, i believe. which i understand; if i were the professor i'd want to let in all the real students first, of course.

but if i don't get into this class i am screwed.
screwed! fucked! deeply irreversibly jacked!
i'm serious.

so tomorrow i'll go to his office hours and i will beg abjectly. there are all kinds of pride and the pride that compels me to do everything i can to get into school is now superseding the pride that says don't beg for anything, ever.

this time is very stressful; i hate waiting and i hate when things are up in the air. i feel like no matter how hard this semester is gonna be (if i do get into both classes)...it CANNOT be as bad as this initial sorting-out period.

my one small hope is this:
if i were the professor, i'd let me in.

not only is that my hope, it's also a mental space built by a counterfactual. the "i" is the real me in the base space, and is the teacher in the hypothetical space. ah cogsci101, those halcyon summer weeks when i was actually enrolled!

2005-08-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

i'm in phonology!
not officially, yet. but i have a verbal.

i will be doing a semester-long project where i find a native speaker of a language that i choose. interview & record & transcribe the sounds of the language. prepare a term paper presenting the results.

i was gonna tell you more but i'm tired now.

2005-08-29T22:49:00.000-07:00

ling100 has 100 enrolled, 30 waitlisted. it's not hopeless, but not a sure thing either. i already bought all my books. after class i set the stage for my potential future pestering with a simple "i have to take this class this semester. do you have a sense of whether you'll be able to take concurrent enrollment students?" i tried to temper it with a smile. it is all such a delicate game and i am hyperaware now that i don't know all the rules and that makes me feel even more careful.

if you were a professor, what would motivate you to let me in? what angle should i be working here?

the reader for my summer class is a gsi for phonology. a couple of his sections would work for me, time-wise. i can't decide if i should try to get into them...he's tough, high standards. but basically fair i think, and i'd probably learn a lot. if i weren't so horribly overcommitted this semester already it'd be an easy call.

2005-08-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

so i will go in and meet with the framenet principals during the week following labor day. this gives me some time to finish reading the framenet book and hopefully some papers written by these guys.

also on monday i begin the process of attempting to register for ling100 and ling110 through concurrent enrollment. the process-oriented questions of a friend last night reminded me that i really have no idea how this is all supposed to work. i'm not even sure i can get into these classes, and i don't know if/when/how to manage whatever extension paperwork there might be.

so everything is a bit up in the air right now and instead of falling into my trademark panicked state i am just going to take refuge in denial for two more days. nothing to be done now, anyway, might as well enjoy my last free weekend.

i forced my way over half through the johnson book, and haven't read any more since returning from vacation. now i'm reading camus. the ironic thing...my avoidance reading is CAMUS?? i should've assigned myself the adorno, then i'd certainly have finished the johnson by now, in protest.

2005-08-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

"Balancing is a preconceptual bodily activity that cannot be described propositionally by rules. As Michael Polanyi has argued, you cannot tell another what steps to take to achieve the balanced riding of a bicycle. One can give the beginner a few more or less empty rules, but the balancing activity happens when the rules, such as they are, no longer play any role."

mark johnson. the body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. 1987, the university of chicago press. p 74.

2005-08-16T21:14:00.000-07:00

while on vacation i am attempting to read mark johnson's the body in the mind, but i am feeling lazyheaded and the bukowski has been so much more enticing. plus i just found out it was his birthday today. bukowski's, i mean.

but forcing myself through the preface (a quick overview on the classical objectivist view of cognition versus the embodied view) i started thinking...in a way, i envy linguists who were schooled before the 80's. because i read all this work on embodied cognition and i think "well of course, of course all knowledge is filtered through our human experience with the world. of course all reason is necessarily grounded in imagination." and i remind myself that these ideas seem to have been revolutionary (and still be somewhat controversial) in the field and that at one time it didn't sound like of course, it sounded like the sound of a paradigm snapping.

there's nothing like the feeling of an intellectual (or emotional, experiential, other) shift-and-click and i rather wish i had started with the before so that the after would seem more like after. perhaps i'm just overthinking this.

but i think it's like how people probably thought of course the earth is round...after the fact.
you can never really go back to what it was like before everything changed.

maybe i should be reading work that is critical of embodied cognition because somehow i feel i am missing something here.

2005-08-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

welly well. ended strong, i hit all my outlined points on the "final" and had time to look over it at the end. i think i have an a in this class, not the a+ i was hoping for, but that will be fine. it occurred to me on the walk home today that i have accomplished everything i set out to do this summer. i learned a lot of cool stuff and figured out that this really is what i want to do. i am committed now (or is it that i SHOULD be committed...to a very quiet and clean safe place...with soft walls...). 8/29 i'll start two new classes and hopefully around that time i might be starting a project at icsi, if all goes well...

best, i met some awesome people and some of them will be in my fall classes, and i will be staying in touch with my professor as well. i have been laughing for a couple of days now because i applied for the linguistics grad program last year & didn't get in...so i just went anyway. take that, berkeley, you can't keep me away.

but seriously, thanks you guys for taking this ride with me. all of you, especially my friends who initially heard this crazy summer school idea and said "wow you should definitely do that!" and supported me and read my early papers when i didn't know if i could even still write papers, and who didn't get annoyed with my endless babbling about frames and metaphors. and my boss who said okay we can figure this out...working group people who challenged my brain...professor who encouraged me and gave invaluable grad school advice...other classmates who contributed to some totally interesting conversations...people who read this and people who never will. this was a fantastic experience. i've said it before and i will say it again: i am a lucky, lucky human.

so yeah, guys...we totally did it!!

love,
a

ps. i will probably continue writing here from time to time with general school related info...but i will be even busier in the fall so i'm sorry up front that it likely won't be a daily thing. and i probably won't be staying on top of the "gold stars" anymore but thanks so much for reading & commenting, everyone.

2005-08-10T17:12:00.000-07:00

gearing up for my in-class pseudoquasifinalesque essay thing.
a summary case study which sounds like it will involve all/many of the topics we've covered during the class. we discuss it in our working groups tomorrow, and then write it up in class on friday.

more blue books, y'all.

2005-08-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

an hour and half of class time is NOT enough time to discuss and write up three multipart questions on mental spaces and blending.

i'm just sayin'.

2005-08-08T17:50:00.000-07:00

last week of class. we've been talking about mental spaces and conceptual blending. very interesting but i just don't have the words in my fingers right now. i am psychically tired, tired in my neurons. i just want this week to be one long deep oblivious nap.

today after class i went and bought blue books. blue books! you want an instant lesson in the power of framing, just think about blue books.

but i'm still totally excited that i get to take more classes in the fall.

2005-08-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

here is an example of the sort of academic writing i do not enjoy:

"the general epistemological position of cognitive semantics has been characterized as 'experientialist', in contradistinction to 'objectivist' (empiricist, positivist) approaches and to 'subjectivist' (versions of idealist and phenomenological) approaches."

i used to think i didn't like it because i couldn't understand it. but now that i have learned some things about linguistics i realize:
i just don't like it.
it uses fancy words just for the sake of using fancy words.
it obscures its own meaning.

it reminds me of just the kind of writing george orwell harshes on in his excellent essay "politics and the english language" which i'd read awhile ago and our professor just reminded me of today.

now we're talking about metaphors in use. yesterday we brought in print ads and presented their use of metaphor. they are everywhere and it was interesting to see what people came up with (and it was also interesting because i don't usually pay that much attention to advertising). today we had an awesome talk about the use of metaphor in the current war on terror, or however one chooses to brand it.

2005-08-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

today was most likely our last working group meeting outside of class. i'd forgotten how easy it is to make friends when you're in school...i definitely feel like i've known them longer than 6 weeks or so. so this is a little homage to my working group.

kroeber anthropology lounge. this is where we've had most of our working group meetings. it's sunny and warm and quiet, and the faculty lounge is just next door which affords many coffee and water stealing opportunities. we've been told very politely a few times that it isn't really an "open lounge" but we just keep going there anyway. yesterday we met a woman and her dog, they came in & took a nap on the couch. bye, anthro lounge, you're the best!

carlton and nancy, packing up to leave. pretty light. newly painted orange wall behind carlton. those couches really are good for napping, by the way.

i think will is demonstrating a metaphor, but is that TIME IS A LANDSCAPE or TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT? i'm so confused...

2005-08-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

let me tell you, friends, i am ready to enter a phase in my life where i don't have a four-page essay due every few days. i was figuring it out this weekend...given that there are ten assignments for this class, and given that i seem to write around 6 pages on average for each, which i then edit down to the maximum 4...i will have written around sixty pages of decent quality stuff in an 8 week stretch. that is...crazy. worse than nanowrimo even, i think, because the writing has to be coherent and informative.

blah blah, whine whine. today at 1:50p i was lying on a grassy hill in the sunshine listening to my ipod, waiting for class to start. i know how damn lucky i am.

today we talked about framing in the linguo-politico-lakoffian don't-think-of-an-elephant sense. i read the sunday nytimes magazine article "the framing wars" (longish but an easy read, and worthwhile) last week so this has been on my mind again lately anyway. i went through a fascination with the rockridge institute and i still think what they're doing is valid and important, but i think my energies are drawn elsewhere these days.

anyway, in class someone brought up the fact that they have renamed the war on terror, have you guys heard about this? yes, it's true; we are no longer involved in a war on terror. we are now locked in a global struggle against violent extremism. every single word of that sentence just SCREAMS framing. i can't even begin to talk about it here, if i do i might never stop, and there are conceptual metaphors to be analyzed and written about...

(i wonder if this means that all that "terror level orange" silliness will go away.)
(one can hope.)

2005-07-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

super special bonus sunday photo update:

as seen on the way into kroeber for class last week.
notice the reward offered.
haha.

2005-07-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

today one of my classmates told me i should update this blog more often.
so here we go.

on time:

we talked about metaphor and metonymy all this week. yesterday was pretty cool, we talked about metaphors for time. mostly in english, though one of the readings was about differences in time metaphors for native speakers of english and mandarin, and whether they influence the way one thinks about time (they do).

anyway, there are two basic metaphors for the way we experience/conceive of time. one says that TIME IS A LANDSCAPE and we are moving towards points of it. (christmas is a long way off, we're getting closer to your birthday, etc.) the other is TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT, it comes towards us, past us, and away from us into the past. (fall is coming, the days are flying/crawling by, etc.)

we also have a bunch of other metaphors for time: TIME IS A RIVER (the weeks flow by, go with the flow/where the current takes you), TIME IS A RESOURCE (spending/wasting/saving/using time, out of time, special case: time is money), TIME IS A LIVING THING (killing time, father time).

other metaphors can intersect with time metaphors. someone brought up 'overtime' and we discussed it. my thinking is that you can think of the usual or expected amount of time it takes to do something as a container, a 40-hour work week, e.g. you can imagine that time is flowing into that container, filling it up. when the time spent exceeds the time expected (limits of the container), it overflows. overtime.

2005-07-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

today i learned the difference between metonymy and synecdoche.

i've always been somewhat confused about that.

i think i may write a song, and have all the lines of the chorus end in obscure linguistic terms:

...polysemy
...homonymy
...synecdoche
...metonymy

we'll call it "linglish" and our band will be the flying saussures. who's in?

2005-07-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

and the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers,
and we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words!
while across the sky sheet the impossible birds,
in a steady, illiterate movement homewards.
--joanna newsom, "this side of the blue"

ah, finally, metaphor theory!

classical linguistic theory relegated metaphor to a literary/poetic domain. metaphors were not the stuff of plain language, language to communicate about ideas, events, observations about the world. in the cognitive view of linguistics, that has changed; metaphors are an important part of our conceptual system, our background knowledge which structures language.

i'm in a bit of a hurry so i'm just going to copy some examples from lakoff & johnson's metaphors we live by, 1980, university of chicago press, chapter 1. hopefully nobody will sue me.

ARGUMENT IS WAR is a "metaphor we live by." it is grounded in our conceptual systems and is used in everyday language in a systematic way. for example, "your claims are indefensible." "he attacked the weak points in my argument." "his criticisms were right on target." "i demolished his argument." we don't just use this metaphor for language...we win or lose arguments, the person we argue with is our opponent, we attack her positions and defend our own. the metaphor not only structures language, it structures thought. it structures our shared understanding of the world, of what it means to argue, of why we do it.

it is a metaphor simply because it maps elements of one domain onto another. WAR, here, is the source domain; ARGUMENT is the target domain. not all elements of WAR will map into ARGUMENT. but these types of expressions are various and widely used in nature. they are clearly not literary devices; the sentences above commonly occur in natural, everyday language.

also it's possible to create novel extensions of the metaphor by using unmapped source domain elements (or, presumably, mapping already-used elements in a novel way). for example, i could refer to an argument i had as "gettysburg" and you would understand some things about it (assuming you know things about that battle, that it was the largest north american battle, and very bloody. and the turning point of the war). it's not something you've heard often, if ever, but because it fits in with already-existing conceptual structures in a sensible way, you know what i mean without thinking about it very much at all. but if i had used an element from a different source domain, let's say dance, i called the argument a "tango"...you would have to wonder what i meant, why i would call it a tango.

okay, i just made that one up on the spot. it's kinda dumb. sorry.

behind-on-my-reading-ly yours,
a

2005-07-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

today i heard from my working group that some people in class found this blog. hello, people from class.

which...is a little weird because originally this was just to efficiently communicate with the four or five friends who were interested in what i was gonna be learning...well...what i was learning. which in turn is funny 'cause i don't think they really read this, not that i have been writing much these days. and they still ask me "so how's class?" and so i still have to answer that question all the time.

which is okay, because class is good.
class is good, friends!

anyway, all this is to say that i got that momentary camera shy thing but i'm over it now. no big deal, right? will says i'm just seeking fame & i want to be the "de facto mouthpiece" of summer 2005 cogsci101/ling105. yes, will, i am DRUNK WITH POWER. (drunk, ha.)

okay, enough talking to people.

today i turned in a paper on modifiers. i think i did okay, i worked pretty hard on this one because my last two papers i didn't do as well as i wanted. you can really get crazy about this stuff, though, i know i said that before but when it's 2am and you just want to be done writing and you look at your paper and say out loud to an empty apartment "does this even make SENSE?!" you know you're losing it. plus our reader is tough and sometimes writes snarky comments.

lately we've been talking about image schemas which i find very interesting. the idea is that we all represent language with pictorial images in our minds. like if i talk about "keeping someone at arm's distance" (read about this in a lakoff article)...it's very common for people to have a pretty specific picture of what that looks like. a person, standing, arm out horizonally, palm turned up towards the other person. the ones we're working on are prepositions which seem like they would be more basic, but they aren't really because each word has many different related senses. like the word 'over':
"the bird flew over the hill"
"i walked over the bridge"
"she lives over the bridge"
"hang the picture over the fireplace"
"i walked all over town"
"we've travelled all over the world"
etc.etc.

so you start with a schema for the most basic conceptualization...in this case, it was a landmark (stationary object w.r.t. which the trajector is moving) with the trajector moving above-and-across it. i'll try to draw it:

--------TR------>

------
| LM |
------

and from here you can manipulate and extend the schema in different ways. for example, the pointlike, moving trajector can become a solid line ("the telephone line ran over the house"), e.g. then that can become a plane ("the board is over the hole"). and you can get metaphorical extensions as well, and you figure out where to hook them into the whole system. it's cool, i like it. so today we just talked a lot about that in working groups.

blah blah blah.
happy weekend, all.

2005-07-12T21:12:00.000-07:00

class time was spent sitting in the shade on the grass outside kroeber hall, having a working group meeting about our "essentially contested concepts" assignment. there are worse ways to spend an afternoon. this is a challenging couple of weeks though, we have three overlapping assignments clustered together, hedges is due tomorrow, e.c. concepts monday, modifiers next friday. and i'm out of town this weekend...the whole work-school-life thing is getting tricky.

but i have a great topic for my essentially contested concepts paper (see yesterday's entry for a description). i'm going to write about punk rock. it's perfect...there are clearly a few early exemplars of what a punk band IS, they defined the genre. and everyone else who has come after has successively modified and split the genre and now we have sub-sub-sub-genres (punk metal, pop-punk, ska, skate punk, cowpunk, hardcore, speedcore, emocore, etc.etc.) and the adherents of each think that they've got it right, they think they've distilled the right parts of the original recipe of what it means to be punk. i think it will map well onto a clustered model also.

i guess it's a bit risky, say if the reader hates punk rock. or doesn't care at all. and then he's all like "uh whatever. 7.5"

at any rate, maybe it's like will said. one aims to palliate the reader's experience of having to read thirty papers saying the same thing in the same way about the same topic. at least this will be different.

2005-07-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

today we talked about essentially contested concepts. this philosopher named gallie wrote a paper about them in 1956. the idea is that there are some concepts which will never be agreed upon. their nature is that they are undecideable. examples: definition of art, religion, democracy, feminism. these things all look like different things to different people, if i talk about feminism using the set of related vocabulary, it might evoke a whole set of different ideas in your mind than what is going on in my mind. there are a lot of definitional criteria that gallie laid out. but the most important thing is that there are different sets of people who believe that they have the "right" definition or version of the concept, and that there is no way to really prove which is the "right" one.

as an aside, it kind of blows my mind that the guy wrote this paper in 1956 and it's still the definitive work on the subject. talk about a legacy.

so then this guy jason patent who i think was a berkeley grad student at the time wrote a paper resituating gallie's ideas in the cognitive linguistics world. these concepts can be represented by cluster models/radial categories. or by a langacker schema. the former contains a richly specified central case, the radial cases contain subsets of the central case's attributes. patent calls this model 'intrapersonal'--it represents the sum of conceptual knowledge contained in one individual. the latter is characterized by an incompletely specified and abstract core case, and each non-central case adds details to flesh out the core. patent calls this the 'extrapersonal' knowledge model - the core contains information shared by all individual members of a speech community.

now i am going to go finish my hedges assignment first draft. and try to think about what i'm going to use for my own contested concept assignment topic. i'm thinking maybe 'freedom' but that could get hairy.

i am pondering writing a paper and possibly...possibly trying to get it published in a journal or something. a classmate might collaborate with me. does anyone have any experience with this? we have no academic credentials to speak of, but we do have a pretty good idea, i think. and one that doesn't seem to have been written about before. will the ubiquitous "they" totally laugh at us, or what?

2005-07-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

it has been pointed out to me that i have been remiss in my blogging. i humbly cry your pardon. but i assure you, i am still doing my best to kick some cognitive linguistic butt on a daily basis.

third paper is due tomorrow, you see; second was due tuesday. that plus working group meetings & keeping up with reading makes for a busy week. we have discussed radial categories, prototypes, and hedges. been reading more rosch and lakoff and kay. totally interesting stuff but that's not what i want to tell you about now, sorry.

i want to tell you about how i stayed after class to talk to my professor about grad school and how she was so amazing and full of good advice, and how she offered to help me with things and how i later found out something i can maybe help her with. and how she introduced me to richard rhodes and we talked about a problem with lakoff's "nation is a family" metaphor and how i realized...i'm standing here in the linguistics department hallway at uc berkeley and i am talking to two brilliant people about stuff that totally interests me. i realized...this is exactly where i want to be.

also i told her that walking through that department hallway and looking at the doors with names like "george lakoff" and "eve sweetser" and "paul kay" and etc. was so amazing for me. these people are names on these brilliant papers and books, they're not even people to me, they're these mythical giants. and she smiled and said yeah, i walk through here all the time so i guess i don't think about it anymore, but you're right.

anyway, now i have a million people to email and also a paper to write and the best way to tell you how i feel is this:

i feel like i finally got a seat at the adult table!

2005-07-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

today we got our first papers back. i'm satisfied with my grade.

we talked about prototype theory. different kinds of prototypes: typical examples, ideals, salient examples, stereotypes, cognitive reference points, generators. rosch & lakoff mainly. it's been an intense week. lots of reading, writing, lots of thinking. i am going away for the weekend and i've already packed my notes away so i think i will not write much tonight. i'll bring my laptop though and try to write up a short essay about color terms and maybe something on categories & prototypes to post here when i get back.

oh, i read the greatest article this week. by eve sweetser who teaches at ucb. i'd heard about this before, but had never read it...she basically developed (awhile ago) this new model of communication and described a subspace that is a simplified folk based information exchange context. based on the ideas that 1, people should help each other when possible; and 2, knowledge is beneficial. it follows that communicating knowledge, being informative, is helpful, which is good. anyway, there had been all this thought and writing about how one defines a 'lie' and she, by redefining the context, was able to reduce the definition of 'lie' to: "a false statement." because in this little idealized world, we don't have to account for other kinds of untruths and we don't have to break out intent of falsity from actuality of falsity. she logically equates (in a loose folk-based way, acknowledging that in the "real world" it doesn't work this way) belief with truth. in our subspace, when the system functions, people assert things that they believe to be true and we assume that they don't do this if they don't know anything about the subject. it's a little more complicated than this but she ends with the conclusion that belief=fact, again, in our limited subsystem.

anyway, it was really cool to see the transformation from this really complex but disconnected definition to a very simple, elegant definition set against a complex background context.

also, a question i have for you: do you think we have stereotypes about our own cultures, whatever groups we ourselves identify with? it seems to me that they always tend to be directed at the "other"...at people who live somewhere else, people who are of a different social/cultural/ethnic group, or even things that are located somewhere else (will brought up the idea that there exists a stereotype among many americans that cars in europe are little bitty things with small wheels that just sort of putter around town...likewise, i would guess that elsewhere there exist stereotypes of what american cars are like, maybe huge gas guzzling suv's rolling over anything in their path)...can you think of any cases where an individual or a group subscribes to stereotypes about their own domain?

2005-06-30T21:06:00.000-07:00

today we talked a lot about color research, and what that has proven/disproven/indicated about categories and prototypes. it's really interesting and involved and unfortunately i don't have time to write it up now. i am sleepy and behind on my reading.

i will write about it for you at some point though, promise. it's too cool not to talk about.

but let me just tell you, the funniest thing happened in class today. we were playing a family-feud like game, it was to illustrate ad-hoc categories. categories which we assemble on the fly, for a specific purpose. they are typically goal-directed. they display many of the same properties as standard categories, they have prototypes (best examples of membership in the category), they have gradations of membership. but they typically have no common image or motor program, in fact you might not be able to determine the relationship of the things in the category if you didn't know in advance. examples are "things you are taking on your camping trip," or "things people open" (mail, jars, minds, mouths, books, doors).

you can see the family feud connection. so we played a modified version of that game in class. i wondered aloud to my classmate nancy if the prof was going to start kissing us...i don't think she got it.

so we were calling out answers for the category "things that are hard to eat with chopsticks." we said ice cream, pudding (my answer!), steak, sandwich, soup, and some others. then she read the real family feud responses (she had a pad of questions&answers from some family feud home game, apparently) and soup was #1 but guess what was #2...

"spaghetti/noodles"

and the WHOLE class went into an uproar! people were gasping and groaning and jeering and disbelieving very loudly. you see, this class is probably 2/3 asian students, and they strenuously object to the idea that noodles are hard to eat with chopsticks. as do i, actually. but really, it was pandemonium, will and i looked at each other like "what just happened?!"

and pudding wasn't even IN there. hello!

anyhow, once we all realized the contextual disconnect (that they had probably surveyed midwesterners...and i say this with love as a product of the midwest) everyone had a good laugh and then went back to the game.

and i'm sure this proved to be a better example of how culture & context influence ad-hoc category formation than the prof could have ever foreseen.

2005-06-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

she accepted the long paper! i pathetically flipped open my folder with the four-pager nestled in the left pocket and the five-pager snug in the right and gave her my best "i swear it's not fluff i tightened as much as i could i just had a lot of thoughts about this" hardsell and she said okay but just this once since it's a different reader for this assignment. from now on it's only four, it's okay though, i can take it. my lovely little frame baby is intact.

then she handed out the next assignment, due tuesday. it's about categorization levels. yeah that thing i was ranting about yesterday. which reminds me..uh..never mind what i said before. this stuff is not always so easy. although i must say...cases where it's ambiguous, it seems appropriate to me simply to say "here is why can sometimes be at basic level and sometimes be at subordinate level" for example. this happens, i guess it makes sense given that categories are analog, they aren't so discrete. the bounds are fuzzy and always shifting. this is me trying to eat yesterday's words by covering them up with some smart sounding words today.

how'm i doing?

so i'm gonna have another questionnaire for y'all like the "protect" query but it will be more fleshed out and probably visual. keep an eye out, coming soon to a blog near you!

2005-06-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

i didn't get around to writing last night, i was finishing my paper. the most painful part was editing for length. max is four pages, at its longest point mine was six. i tightened up the language and got it down to around five without much trouble. then i had to take a pickaxe to it, violently, bloodily severing big chunks of my intellectual progeny. so so sad. i printed out the five page version and will bring it to class also, hoping that she will accept it even though the assignment page says "papers greater than four pages in length will not be graded!" it just seems ridiculous to me, we also have to 1.5 space it and font can be no smaller than 12pt times new roman. that doesn't leave room for a lot of information, you know?

so yesterday...we talked about levels of categorization. for example, think of the concept represented by the word 'chair.' this is a basic level concept. superordinate level is 'furniture.' examples of subordinate class members include 'rocking chair,' 'kitchen chair,' 'armchair,' 'wheelchair,' etc. there are a lot of general characteristics/qualifiers for which concepts fall into the basic level. discussion ensued, people got SO hung up on discussing every word to death and whether it fits here or should we recategorize it to there...when the whole point of this in my mind is that categorization happens naturally, mirroring structures present in the real world...in terms of how we as humans with our particular brains and bodies interact with the world and the things in it. it's not supposed to be so intentional, not a matter of how you "decide" to break it down. it exists, and we are trying to describe it, not to prescribe it.

the cool thing is, it's been shown that there is remarkable correlation (even cross-culturally in many cases) among subjects in classifying objects at the basic level. this structure is fundamental, it's mirrored in language, three-year-olds do it without having or needing the first glimmer of an idea about categories or prototypes. and i get that this can be somewhat individual, that things like expert knowledge or an atypical context can shift the levels around, and that distinctions can sometimes evolve over time. but still...it seemed like some people were missing the point and i got frustrated, because it seemed so obvious to me. i feel like tightly focusing on just the words misses the interconnected beauty of the whole structure...which is the really great part of it all, for me.

okay, rant over.

probably i'll write more about categorization later on with my entry for today's class.

2005-06-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

spent a lot of time on my first paper this weekend. prof says "include what you think is important." current draft is already 5 pages and i haven't even finished talking about all the things i think are important. paper max length is 4 pages. i've got some editing to do...this is going to be dense, like a little black lump of coal.

you can think about this stuff too much, you know. you can think about it until you start to go a little mad with it, following all the threads hoping to reach the end but they never end, they just branch out and out and out. you can think about it until you forget how to talk about other things, normal things. someone maybe says something to you about their boyfriend or about their car and you say "oh okay. but another cool thing about frames..."

lecture today was uninspiring. we started talking about cognitive models which i thought would be really interesting, but instead we spent the time sketching out rough descriptions of models for "apple" and "cowboy." where each model consisted of associated entities (e.g. for apple you might associate "newton" or "william tell" or "washington state" or "teacher" or "orchard"), descriptors (round, red, sweet, juicy), scripts (peeling an apple - there is a shared conception of the steps involved, first you get a knife & cutting board...), stories (eris & the apple of discord, adam&eve), entailments, etc. basically a structured schema of all of the information we have stored in our minds about an apple, including its relation to the rest of the world. i guess it was okay as a practical introduction, and i suppose it could be that the best way to teach these things is just to do them...but i wanted more. there weren't any "wow that's cool" moments, just filling in the blanks.

i especially wanted more from lecture since our readings for today didn't seem to directly address the issue. the first was about script-based understanding and it made me want to go write a computer program. very algorithmic, very structural. cool article, but kind of old, i wonder whether that information still pertains. (my classmate will says "i don't trust anything that makes me want to turn it into a computer program." yet he's a programmer also. i'm not sure but i think he meant that it's too algorithmic, and deliberately so. that no real-world situation is ever that neatly defined.) i guess this is somewhat relevant as an aspect of a cognitive model as shown today is what scripts are associated with the given concept.

the second article for today was about decision-making heuristics and biases. it discussed three means (representativeness, availability, anchoring&adjustment) by which people make probability judgements and predict values, and several problems or statistical biases particular to each. it was rather dry and mathy with very small typeface...which didn't bother me that much, i guess. but i don't yet see how this information will be relevant. it was an tversky&kahneman article, though, and i have heard them mentioned before as important figures in this field.

tonight, three rosch articles to read...paper to work on...due wednesday. nobody in my working group has written anything yet, i don't know why i feel so anxious. i guess it's because i thought i had a solid grasp on things, then more questions were raised in a group meeting today after class and now i am frustrated...how does one ever feel "done" with a concept? how can i be sure i've got it when i could probably keep teasing at this for weeks? will pointed out that i was looking at one question from a truth perspective, rather than an understanding perspective. and he was right, too...i was completely missing the point. not a good thing. my brain hurts.

but finally i had a good insight about the difference between the concepts "safe," "protected," and "unharmed." i'll write more about it later, after the paper is done and turned in.

2005-06-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

no lecture today - class time was devoted to working group discussions on our first real assignment. we, given a bunch of words, are to define a frame, discuss what each word designates in the frame, explain the entities/scenarios/action in the frame. also talk about inferences, unstated assumptions. any special challenges or difficulties in figuring out the assignment, etc.etc. and it's not as simple or clear as the example frames i've mentioned in this blog before, it's a slippery one.

i think i contributed a lot to the discussion. that felt really good, some of it i had thought out beforehand (but not much). mostly i was talking my thoughts as they came into my head and it was awesome, to feel my mind so fully engaged in something. to feel that synergy of a group of smart people who are all into it and riffing off each other's thoughts. "oh yeah, yeah! and following what you just said, then..."

i haven't written a paper in so very very long.

have i explained to you yet that i am damn determined to get an a+ in this class if it is at all humanly possible for me to do so? i am. and it's really gdamn hard to get an a+ at berkeley, i think.

oh, i learned something new today, i learned about "berkeley time." i had noticed that class always seemed to start late, finally i asked my group "is this class actually supposed to start at 2.10 or something? i thought it said 2 on my schedule." and they were all like oh you didn't go here? and i was all like no. and they were all like yeah it's berkeley time...all classes always start 10 minutes later than their scheduled start time.

and i was all like oh em gee. how weird is that.

2005-06-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

tell me what comes to mind when i say the word "protect."

it can be other/related/contrasting words...sentences, ideas, anything.

2005-06-23T18:44:00.000-07:00

j-ro left a comment. a good one, too, regarding the homework. yeah, j-ro! as the list is growing, i decided to reverse the order so that superstars who left comments more recently appear at the top. if someone already on the list leaves a new one, i'll bump you back up to the top too! i don't expect to ever get so much comment traffic that i can't keep up with all this...but i dare you prove me wrong, suckas. come on, your fleet fingers against my scads of free time and consummate geekiness. i double DOG dare you.

oh yeah also! i figured out how to turn on anonymous comments. i didn't even realize i was making everyone sign in, sorry about that. so...post your plucky li'l hearts out.

today in class prof. handed out our first writing assignment which is due next wednesday. more on the assignment at the end of this post. we also arranged ourselves into working groups, the point of which is to discuss each assignment prior to doing our own individual writing. it's an approach i haven't been part of before and i'm interested to see how it will go...our assignments will not be group projects, but rather we meet as a group to cooperatively bounce ideas off one another and share our background knowledge (different languages spoken, different discipline backgrounds) as it pertains to the assignment. but only prior to writing, the point is not to compare or share finished assignments. i'm happy with my group, since the first day i've been scoping a bit to see who i did or did not want to work with. there are five of us total, and on the whole they seem smart & insightful. our first meeting is tomorrow.

frames, part deux

today was a good class although she forgot to talk about our little homework assignment from yesterday. i had a pretty solid grasp of what frames are, conceptually, before today's class, but the work we did in class really solidified for me what they ARE. i mean to say that being able to talk about what a frame is, in the abstract, is very different from being able to sit down and specify a particular frame. that's what i learned today.

the first frame we looked at is a classic example, the commercial transaction. the steps we followed were approximately like so:

1. list the words that we thought might be central to the frame. the kinds of words you would always expect to hear/use when talking about a prototypical commercial transaction. they include:

sell/seller	buy/buyer	money
goods	cost	value
price	purchase/purchaser

2. from that word list, select the frame entities. these are typically nouns, the actors and objects in the frame. we differentiate these as entities (vs. the above words) by capitalizing them. we are using them as concepts, not as words that refer to the concepts. for example, we find in the above list the words "buyer" and "purchaser". these are two different words that really refer to the same concept, which here we call Buyer.

entities:
Seller
Buyer
Goods
Money

3. describe the starting state for the experience described by this frame.

initial state:
S has G
B has M

4. describe the action.

transition state:
S gives G to B
B gives M to S

5. describe the terminal state, following the completion of the action.

ending state:
S has M
B has G

we completed another framing exercise for the frame "THEFT" but that devolved (evolved?) into a very fine-point discussion on legality and subtleties of motivation and questions of time. for instance, one of the entities in the frame is Victim. someone raised the question is it appropriate to still call that person the Victim in describing the initial state? after all, the action has not taken place, they are not yet the victim. i said i thought that since we were talking about the THEFT frame, after all, it was a given that the theft was GOING to occur, so that time (pre-theft post-theft) was not really something we should consider when breaking it down. i said it more eloquently than that though.

at any rate, i won't write out the whole frame here. unless someone wants to see it. in which case, you know, leave me a comment. heheh.

one more interesting thing that i think must be very applicable to AI studies...frames allow us (by "us" i mean the interpreter, listener reader whatever) to fill in unstated pieces of sentences which evoke them.

e.g. i can say "lee sold the textbook to abby."
i didn't say anything about money there, but we understand that abby gave money (or some other currency, but probably money) to lee. we know this because we have an experiential knowledge of the commercial transaction frame, which is evoked by the word "sold" in the above sentence.

frames are cool, my friends.

i was gonna write up my homework assignment down here, but i think i maybe should not? i dunno how that fits in with the whole intellectual honesty thing. i'll think on it for now. i'll just say that we have a list of words and we're supposed to fully describe and specify the frame and tell what each word designates in the frame. and talk about additional words that should be included, acount for inferences, show distinctions between the words, etc. 3-4 pages. it's one of those things that seems simple but i have a feeling it could grow and grow and grow...

represent.
a

2005-06-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

well hello there.

today we started talking about frame semantics, a topic i've read some about on my own and in which i am very interested. in fact there is an super neat research project going on at berkeley now which i would very much like to be involved in one day. i corresponded via email awhile ago with charles fillmore who heads the study (and who is like so TOTALLY famous omg omg we talked about him all day) in a misguided attempt to wow him with my interest in his life's work. woah, where'd the fangirl come from? back in your box, fangirl.

hi. i think instead of just posting my notes today, i will try to write up sort of a summary of my current take on what frames are, what frame semantics is, and include some of the examples and problems we covered today.

first i need to take back what i said yesterday about there only being room for one smartypants in class. there seem to be many intelligent pants in this class and i for one have decided that i appreciate the pants. wait, that sounds wrong. but yeah there was a lively discussion today which engaged at least half of the class members in meaningful ways. i sucked it up and sat in the front row, pursuant to project Amy Must Talk More, and i did in fact talk more. but not too much. mostly...it's really NICE to be in a class full of people who really want to be there. that's not something i got often at my last school.

also today i give annie a silver star. just cuz she's so rad. and cuz she asked for one. and cuz as some of you know she used to be my work mentor & then she left & now she's back. so annie gets a star for coming back.

finally i wanted to mention that it is a 1.5 mile walk from my class to my house. 1.5 miles down college avenue which has an almost imperceptibly slight downhill grade just enough so you feel like you could walk forever, especially in your flipflops on a sunny lazywarm june afternoon, strolling down the street around 4pm with your backpack on and your mind full of frame semantics.

i'm just saying...today i felt like a fortunate human.

frames and frame semantics

feature analysis
traditionally, a common approach to linguistic semantics (remember here we're talking about studying and describing the meaning of lexical units: words, phrases, etc.) is a checklist approach called feature analysis. for example, consider the word "bachelor." this word almost begs for feature analysis, its definition consists of a set of characteristics: a bachelor is an adult, unmarried, human male. in feature analysis this is usually represented as a list of the markers with a + or - indicating whether each marker is necessarily present or necessarily not-present.

bachelor:
+adult, -married, +human, +male

so let's test the limits of this definition. is a 25-year-old unmarried man a bachelor? clearly yes. what about a 10-year-old unmarried male? clearly no, and this is consistent with our definition. okay, what about a 35-year-old divorced male, is he a bachelor? most people would likely still say yes, but may hesitate before saying so. something about this feels a little funny maybe, not quite as definite a yes as the first example. i'll come back to this later.

okay, so is tarzan a bachelor? grew up in the jungle, raised by monkeys right? gorrilas. something. but is he? most likely this example feels quite funny, the label of "bachelor" almost doesn't seem applicable to someone with such a different cultural background and social context.

this is a major problem with feature analysis. either an example fits the definition or not. the model doesn't deal well with cases where it sort of fits, or it probably fits but just feels kind of weird, or it fits at some times but not others. feature analysis describes sets with absolute limits, and provides no mechanism for explaining boundary or uncertain cases.

a second problem with feature analysis is that it does not associate any context with a given word, each word is taken and defined on its own. why is this problematic? can we really understand, for example, the meaning of the word "daughter" if we do not understand the concept of "mother"? is that even possible?

another sort of procedural problem, by the way, is that the selection of the markers to describe the sets (markers are assumed to be the simplest or most common or default case between the two choices, i.e. "+adult" vs. "-child", "+human" vs. "-animal" or "-alien") can be rather loaded with sociocultural baggage and bias. for example, we could have described the markers for being a bachelor thusly:

bachelor:
+adult, +single, +human, -female

i don't wanna be the p.c. police here, but there is something just a tad irksome about a definition (the first one) which outright says that the default condition is to be male and married. perhaps that's just me...

semantic field theory
another approach to linguistic semantics is semantic field theory, which attempts to define words in relation to their peers, other words in the same "field" or category. this presupposes the existence and knowledge of other semantically related words. examples of semantic fields are kinship words, or cooking terms.

looking at meaning in this way begins to address the importance of context in definition. here "mother" and "daughter" fall into the same semantic field - they are related concepts. but what about words which do not have any semantically related words? what about the word "not"? what kind of field does that have? i can't think of any related words offhand, yet isn't there contextual information that is important for our understanding of what "not" means? don't we need to have a fundamental awareness of what it means to negate something? and possibly an understanding of what it is we're negating, to determine whether it makes sense to apply the negation?

frame semantics
charles fillmore has been working with word groupings since his graduate work in the fifties. in the mid-seventies he became aware of the work of prototype theorists such as rosch - who studied prototype effects: the idea that categories often have a "best" example, a prototype which is clearly central in its membership in the category - and berlin/kay - studied color perception, found regularities in color categorization across languages & cultures - (lakoff, 1987). my background knowledge here is sketchy, just what i've read on my own. the class will delve into categories and prototypes beginning next week, expect more info then. for now it will suffice to know that fillmore's exposure to this research led him to see the importance of the idea of "prototype" in human categorization and, by extension, in semantic definitions.

so, in his words:

"With the term 'frame semantics' I have in mind a research program in empirical semantics and a descriptive framework for presenting the results of such research...By the term 'frame' I have in mind any system of concepts related in such a way that to understand any one of them you have to understand the whole structure in which it fits; when one of the things in such a structure is introduced into a text, or into a conversation, all of the others are automatically made available" (Fillmore 1982).

frame semantics contrasts with feature analysis in that it characterizes words not with a list of conditions, but rather by associating them to the experience-based structures shared by speakers of the given language, and members of the given speech community. defining words in terms of frames and prototypes goes a long way towards addressing the boundary problems mentioned above.

for example, let's look at the word "breakfast." the prototypical definition of breakfast is probably something like this: a meal eaten in the morning, after a period of sleep, consisting of particular menu items (which vary from community to community...in "our" culture it probably includes things like toast, eggs, juice, cereal, pancakes, etc.). but let's say that someone sleeps until 2pm (not morning), then wakes up and eats eggs and toast, do we call this breakfast? what if someone stays awake all night (no sleep) and then eats pancakes in the morning? what if someone sleeps all night, wakes up in the morning, and eats pizza and cookies (not the expected menu items)? do we still say these people are eating breakfast? feature analysis would have to say no, as the membership conditions have been violated (or else we'd have to change the definition and make it increasingly complex to accommodate each unusual, non-prototypical case). frame semantics allows us to say that yes, these cases are still considered to fall into the category "breakfast," but less centrally, less prototypically than the person who sleeps at night, wakes up at 7am, and eats their cereal.

frame semantics contrasts with semantic field theory by defining words in relation to their background conceptual frame(s), rather than in relation to other words. word meaning depends not on existence and knowledge of other, related words, but rather on "its conceptual underpinnings, knowledge of which is necessary for its appropriate use" (Petruck 1996).

i want to mention one more interesting example we discussed in class today. consider two sets of "opposite" words:
thrifty/wasteful
stingy/generous

we talked about these words and the differences in their nuances for a long time. we thought that the first set seems to be more selfcontained, to refer to the person being described as a solo entity. the second refers to sharing/interacting (or not) with others. the first set seems to refer more to necessities, e.g. a thrifty person uses a coupon to save $.20 on toilet paper. the second set refers more to luxuries, e.g. a stingy person will buy ice cream for himself but not for his friend.

our professor quoted eve sweetser, another well known cognitive linguist working at berkeley, who summed up these dualities quite nicely:
"'thrifty' praises someone for not spending at an appropriate not-spending time. 'stingy' criticizes someone for not spending at an appropriate spending time."

these pairs of words both belong to different semantic frames, they have different sets of context and experience and assumption that they carry.

this example led to a mention of fillmore's assertion that there are two different ways to negate a frame element.

1. contrast within the same frame:
"she isn't thrifty, she's wasteful."
2. contrast across frames:
"she isn't thrifty, she's stingy."

cited sources
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Petruck, Miriam R.L. 1996. Handbook of pragmatics 1996. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1982. Linguistics in the morning calm: Selected papers from SICOL-1981. Seoul, Korea: Hanshin Publishing Company.

conclusion...

goodness, i've been writing this for more than two hours. the scary thing is, i could go on...but i'll save it for tomorrow when we discuss frame semantics again. i want to talk about frames themselves in a deeper way. but now i'm off to read another fillmore article and consider my small homework assignment for tomorrow. and then sleep, and wake up in the morning, and have a prototypical breakfast! heh heh.

homework is this, let me know if you have any thoughts:

proud
conceited
modest
self-deprecating

do these words all belong to one frame? if so, account for how the words are differently used. or instead are there two frames here, two sets of oppositions? if so, justify the need for two frames.

2005-06-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

oh boy. first let me say that i have about 150 pages to read for tomorrow, so this is gonna have to be short. oh wait, the macaroni&cheese is boiling...

okay back. see, i'm even eating like a student now. soon i'll be down to just the ramen. so bye to the hazy crazy halcyon days of spontaneous dinners at the oyster bar or that yummy tapas place, bye to splurgey lunches at bastille. hello to cheap starchy goodness.

one more thing before i begin, ken and amy s get GOLD STARS for today (check 'em out over there on the left) for leaving comments. i loooooove comments. thanks guys!

so today i discovered that the 51 bus stops about 100 feet from my building! no more ass-hauling, which normally i would say is good for me but when i need to get from work in downtown sf to class in berkeley in an hour, any help is helpy. also today there were fewer people there, i would say it's down to 25-30 rather than the 35+ish from yesterday. also there are some smarrrrrt people in my class, some good comments from pretentious little well read bastards. i gotta read crick now, who the hell is crick? and searle, crap crap crap.

on the upside, i did make a comment in class that the prof said was good and that she hadn't thought about (comment on this one specific example she gave and how it could be morphological as well as semantical). it was basically the only time i talked, so i'm glad it was at least worthwhile. i have this reluctance to speak thing that i hate, hopefully it will ease with time.

well, my reader beckons...so, on to the meat. so to speak.

notes from day 2, redux

what is cognitive science?
- definitions shift & differ depending on who you ask. an umbrella answer is "the interdisciplinary study of mind, brain, and intelligence."

core cog sci disciplines:
1. neuroscience
2. psychology
3. philosophy
4. linguistics
5. computer science (computer modeling, ai, robotics, ...)

some other students brought up a belief that anthropology and sociology, etc. should also be included (and in some definitions they are). anything involving the mind, said mr. smarty. look mr. smartyboy (and smartyboy 2, while i'm at it) there's only room enough for one smarty in any class. and i hate to break it to you boys, but in this class it's gonna be me.

but i digress.

cog sci as a deliberately created & interdisciplinary field has its genesis in the mid 1900's, coming out of ai and speech recognition research going on around that time. the first official cognitive science departments were created by grants in the mid-1970's to synthesize all the research being done on brain/mind into one field.

the rest of class was mainly devoted to a somewhat scattered discussion of the original "classical" or "cognitivist" view of computer science and the newer "embodied cognition" view of lakoff and others, and comparing and contrasting the two. i'm gonna heavily summarize and reorganize the info into those two main categories here.

classical/cognitivist model
metaphor of mind as machine. mind is like a computer, processing data, it has an internal state which is not affected by what is going on outside.

symbols - have inherent natural meanings that are independent of the world around them.

reason is pure truth, apart from the self. disembodied.

the brain is viewed as a mechanical processing unit...thought is simply processes performed on inert symbols. thoughts can map to algorithms. (amy note: i guess it makes sense given that this came out of early ai research.)

language is a formal, rule-based system

problems with the classical model
no room in the model for cognitive processes like emotion
how do we model consciousness?
what about our environment & how that affects our thinking?
our body - how does that affect our thinking?
what about social/community roles in human thought?
what kind of modeling system do we use (i got a bit lost on this one, something about dynamics, something about math)

embodied cognition model
key difference: the kind of body holding the consciousness affects the way we think. all of our interactions with the world are filtered through our body processes. aliens with totally different bodies would necesarily experience the world in different ways, this will affect their understanding and thought.

cognition is a constructive process. it isn't just given to us, it isn't inborn. we build it continuously based on our interactions with the world.

cognition is goal-directed (goals of organism both motivate and constrain cognition).

language is in the service of constructing and communicating meaning.

from the two models, we moved into a short section on how the field of semantics has changed along with the currently happening shift in emphasis from classical to embodied cognition.

then we touched on the work of langacker, an important cognitive scientist but one whom we won't be studying much in this class.

we ended with a brief discussion of a thought brought up by a student that these models don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive, as long as one isn't fanatical about insisting that his/her model explains EVERYTHING about cognition. which, unfortunately, many of the top proponents of each view does. chomsky hates the embodied folks, who in turn disdain his mechanical approach. each side says that their model is how it is, and there isn't anything more or less than that. this "you're with us or against us" duality is a central tension point in the field...in fact, there is a book called "language wars" the prof mentioned chronicling the battles between chomsky linguists and cognitivists through the last several decades. that goes on my reading list for...sometime not tonight.

conclusion...

my own closing thought is that this rivalry seems to be relaxing these days, perhaps the field is waiting for a new wave of theorists either to integrate the best parts of these approaches with newly emerging thoughts (optimistic angel amy on my right shoulder) or come up with some wholly different way of describing cognition and then set up another false duality, claiming that everyone else who came before, on whose life's work their research builds, is totally wrong and a discredit to the field (devil amy on my left). personally at this point (total neophyte perspective) i lean heavily towards the embodied model but also recognize that there are important parts of the classical view which are worth keeping, and certainly worth recognizing that without having come through that stage the field would not be where it is today. hooray for the giants on whose shoulders we stand!

okay, send me awake and smart reading thoughts y'all.

a

2005-06-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

the first day of class and this blog. welcome!

i'm going to try to keep a daily record of how class is going and what we talk about. this benefits us in several ways. and when i say "us"...yeah, i mostly mean me. to wit:

1. it will give me a chance to revisit the material each day, thereby reinforcing the neural pathways in my mind that are even as i type are shifting around to store the new information they received today. see, i sound like a cognitive scientist already, right? berkeley is good, i'm telling you.

2. another benefit is that you might be interested in some of this stuff, too. you can ask me questions in the comments if you want, and i will answer them. i could even bring them into the teacher the following day if i can't find the answer. see, you get the benefits of the class and you didn't even have to pay the g.d. berkeley visiting student fees!

3. finally, if i start to slack on this blog it means i may be slacking on the class and in that case, i humbly request that y'all put the smack down. cognitive style.

okay, convinced? let's go...

prologue, in which i realize i'm way out of student mode

after visiting campus yesterday and going to two - not one but TWO - bookstores to get all of my books, only one was required but 8 recommended, and one of the recommended i already owned, but that still meant i had to buy a metric buttload of books...and then after visiting the cal id office where i had to stand inches from a computer screen and stare into the webcam to get my lovely spaced out photo taken (see me in all my spacey glory? the vacant stare, the smooooove hairstyle? this is me BEFORE finals, fear the future)...after all that, i was set for class today. i loaded up my trusty north face backpack with all the school supplies a budding cognitive scientist needs and i set off for campus...

today, in which that realization is concretized

and promptly got lost. okay, have you BEEN to the berkeley campus? my god, that shit is large. trying to find moffitt library (which apparently is different from the several other libraries flung about the general north-central campus region) i ran into another lost student and we set off together to find moffitt. which we finally found with about 5 minutes until classtime, perfect. but wait, what's that little sign on the door? "class moved to 155 kroeber" huh, okay. where's kroeber, it must be near here somewhere, right? wrong. hauled ass all the way to the southeast side of campus.

but, since that's the worst that happened all day, i can't really complain. the rest of the class was mainly an intro to linguistics.

notes from day 1, redux

what is linguistics?
- the scientific study of language. how it's structured, used, what makes it tick.

historically the emphasis was on structure and not usage. until chomsky's work in the 60's, he described a duality between "performance" and "competence" where competence is the set of internal rules and constructs we have around language. he thought the best linguistic approach was to study competence.

another historical linguistic duality:
- "descriptive" - how people really do use language
- vs. "prescriptive" - how people SHOULD use language, i.e. you should not split infinitives, you should not end sentences with prepositions.

overwhelmingly, linguists are descriptive. prescriptive is considered a pejorative generally, but can be useful for example in social integration...when use of the standard dialect ("correct" english can indicate class or level of education) is necessary for desired power roles

definitions - a whole bunch, i'm not gonna rewrite them all here. instead i'll try to explain what terms are as they come up.

the idea of data sources - when we study language, what do we study?
1. informants - native speakers of the language. through their speech we learn about the sounds and formations of the language.

2. introspection - a chomsky approach. because of his focus on competence (internal structures) chomsky believed that you only really need one informant, not many as had traditionally been used. and additionaly he believed that that informant could be your own self, if you are a native speaker of that language. so you're using your inbuilt native speaker intuition introspectively. this approach is problematic in that it neglects contextual information such as speech communities, regional dialects, etc.

3. corpus data - massive compendia of textual language, useful for computational study. corpus linguistics is the only branch that does not focus heavily on spoken language.

4. experimentation - not commonly used (some in AI, some in child language acquisition study) and not defined very thoroughly today.

5 linguistic subdivisions - the major disciplines of the field
**note: this was run through fairly quickly as an intro level knowledge of ling was assumed

1. phonology - the sounds of a language. the smallest units of speech, there is a special alphabet (international phonetic alphabet, or ipa) for describing the superset of all sounds in all languages. most phonological work is theoretical, but there are applications in computer speech processing and speech therapy. phonemes are things like "th" or "a" in english, or "rr" in spanish, any basic speech sounds. they aren't typically written this way though, the ipa specifies e.g. what type of "a" it is, long, short, etc.

* for those who don't know, my good friend "the other amy" has her master's degree in french linguistics and was particularly interested in phonology.

2. morphology - word formation, putting the sounds together, which combinations of phonemes are allowed. e.g. the opposite of logical is illogical. il- is a negating morpheme. the opposite of grammatical is ungrammatical. here, un- is the negating morpheme. but we can't say "unlogical" or "ilgrammatical" - these are morphologically incorrect.

3. syntax - sentence structure. what are legal ways to combine words. e.g. english and many other languages use a standard subject-verb-object construction. "the man went to the store." but in japanese the formation is subject-object-verb.

4. semantics - meaning & reference. this class will largely focus here. how language semantics map to mental structures.

5. pragmatics - how we understand meaning that transcends what is actually said.
- indirectness
- relevance
- politeness
- etc.
e.g. if i say "goodness, it's hot in here." that could be, in addition to a statement of fact, a request to open the window or turn on the a/c.
e.g. if i come to your door & ask you "is fred home?" and you answer, "his car is in the driveway." that statement on its face doesn't appear to directly answer the question. but as native speakers of english and as humans who live in this culture, we understand that fred's car being in the driveway probably means that he is home.

diachronic linguistics - study of language change over time

then we had a little exercise where we worked in pairs and went through lists of questions to determine which branch of linguistics would be interested in that particular question. my favorite is a classic example of chomsky's:

"colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

this sentence is perfectly correct, syntactically. semantically though, it's nonsense. in other words, adjective-adjective-noun-verb-adverb is a legal construction for an english sentence. but the particular words chosen, because of their semantic definitions, render it meaningless.

conclusion...

so that's basically all we did today. i expect other days will be more info-packed (today we had to do all the enrollment hoohaa and go through the syllabus, etc.) and i probably won't be rewriting all my notes here every day. maybe i'll put in some pictures or something though.

hugs and brainwaves,
a