*Note: this paper is part of the FLA Proceedings and has been accepted in revised and expanded form for inclusion in the 2017 FLA Journal of Language. Paper was presented: March 13, 2016. Gainesville, Florida, USA

I’ve been straddling the fence between creative writing (publishing poetry mainly, also short fiction) and linguistics for awhile now. I published my first book of poetry before I ever heard of “linguistics,” or at least before I understood what it was—I probably would have answered “stuff to do with language” as an answer to the question “What is linguistics?” (Sound familiar?)  Or, perish the though, I might have even said “A linguist is a person who speaks a bunch of languages.”  My second collection of poetry was released in 2013, just as I was finishing my Ph.D. in the Linguistics Department at the University of Florida.  I had come a long way in my understanding of linguistics as an academic field, and my love of literature, creative writing, fiction, and poetry in particular, hadn’t waned—though it probably had changed in some ways, due at least in part no doubt to my newly gained scientific view of language.

I graduated from college with a BA in English Literature and a BFA in Creative Writing, after gearing up to be a medical doctor for most of my life, including my first 2-3 years as an undergraduate. With linguistics, I thought I had found a fresh, new, scientific way to play with language, one that allowed me to mesh my love of the beauty of language with my desire to discover, model, and analyze things in the natural world. Actually, I sometimes view the rift as being between Creative Writing (artistic production) and English Literature (criticism and analysis), rather than creative language (creative writing and literature appreciation together) and the scientific study of language (linguistics)—including theoretical modeling of sound and grammatical structure, anthropology of language, neurological, psychological, and pathological aspects of speech production, and other aspects that are encompassed in the scientific approach to language that “linguistics” represents as a field. Literature studies are typically seeking to open the box of creative literary work and examine the parts. Literary criticism and linguistics are not all that far apart on that point–looking to dissect the patient, just that literary studies are breaking down the works as a whole and linguistics is at the communicative language level—a bottom-up approach to the same task. The divide that I see is between creatives who want to leave the mystery of beauty through language intact, since that’s usually how it arrived to their pen, rather than considering the “colorless green ideas” as a Chomskian lab rat for syntax class–and worse, concluding that it is “semantically nonsensical, though grammatically correct.” Ditto on considering a novel as a ‘paradigm of post-colonial ambitions’ or the like, rather than an artistic work with only two primary, inherent phases to its biology—production and appreciation/consumption.

At the University of Florida, the English Department was just down the hall in the same building from the Linguistics Department (keep in mind this is on a gigantic campus with 9 libraries, multiple gyms, multiple Starbucks, museums, you name it). And not too far down the hall from there, with a little turn and a twist from English, was Creative Writing. Those two departments shared some faculty, no doubt—they likely shared a good bit of curriculum as well. Down the elevator from the 4^th Floor of our large building and just across the street was a building with Asian languages inside, and next to that was a building that housed European and other languages.  And in the basement of that building were sound laboratories and speech pathology, including the laboratory where I did my doctoral thesis experimentation on vocal typology, while a student completing the requirements of the Linguistics Department, not Speech Pathology. None of this geographical proximity on our large campus was a coincidence of course.  The geography represents how the university community currently views the academic proximity of these fields. But yet, I had to slog my way well across to the other side of campus to Shands (the massive university hospital system) to get to the Rhoton Brain Laboratory (sadly Dr. Rhoton, a giant in his field, passed away recently) to participate in human brain dissection with brain surgeons from around the world. All this is probably why some linguistics programs around the country prefer to remain “programs,” rather than transitioning to formal “departments,” regardless of how big they become. When I was presenting at Purdue University as a graduate student, I was told that their Linguistics Program even encompassed the speech pathology folks. For many at University of Florida (which did transition from a program to a department some time ago, as an acknowledgment of its largess in faculty and student enrollment numbers) this academic inclusion would have been too broad of a definition of “linguistics.” Still, there were many speech pathology graduate students in my phonetics and phonology classes, and I eventually found myself in their laboratories, doing experiments on voice types. I was told once by my advisor that I had essentially strayed outside of “linguistics” as such with my research—though my committee was stilled packed with linguistics professors at my defense.

So, what does all this mean? Let’s return to the 4^th Floor, where the Linguistics and English Departments shared the same hall. Despite the proximity, we couldn’t have been further apart. The difference was something akin to the difference of majoring in “English” in the United States and majoring in “English” in Europe or Asia, for example. An English major in the United States is typically assumed to be continuing the studies that they began in elementary school or junior high school—that is to say after “English” class stopped meaning prescriptive grammar and mechanics and started to mean the study of literature.  So “English” is shorthand for “English Literature,” while “English” as a major in Asia, for example, continues to largely mean prescriptive grammar, usage, competence, communication, etc.—as opposed to reading and analyzing literature as a specialization. The second example (focus on language competency) is actually closer to “Linguistics” in nature and relevance than the first (literary criticism). In fact, the sole faculty member who was briefly shared between our two departments at UF, before he retired, was an EFL specialist. These days, second language acquisition forays outside our department are limited to another slog across campus to the Education Department, in which is housed the English Language Institute—where Linguistics Department graduate students can go for non-departmental Teaching Assistantships, field work, and classroom observation of practitioners for requirements related to SLA and ESL graduate certificates issued by the university. ESL, EFL, and SLA now have nothing at all to do with the English Department. That association retired along with the last faculty member who represented it. So the ties are severed completely now, though the geographical proximity remains. It might be easier to find animosity than kinship in that hallway. In the Linguistics Department, you might find, often self-unaware, dismissive attitudes towards literature—as happened to me in my first Syntax class, when I suggested that I found “colorless green ideas sleeping furiously” to be beautiful and that perhaps there was another layer to language that represented indefinable beauty, even a metaphysical layer. I was roundly slapped down by the professor, who suggested that I was “in the right field if I was looking for a fight.” I was too bewildered to respond, because it truly hadn’t been my intention to pick an intellectual “fight” with the professor. I honestly thought I was taking class discussion in an obvious direction that the instructor would appreciate and might have planned to address anyway. In the same way that two competing syntactic theories, after being judged to be equally sufficient in their ability to render consistently correct outcomes, can then be judged against each other on the criteria of “elegance”—which usually implies simplicity, but often involve an aesthetic evaluation as well, which is not always strictly scientific in nature. I think this concept of elegance of theory is a tip of the hat toward the limitations of science in language analysis. This was the answer I suspected I might receive in class. Not only was it not the one I received, it’s one I’ve never received from a theoretical syntactician or any other linguist in my graduate studies. Perhaps if there were a bridge between the departments intellectually, an outreached hand from one side of the hall to the other in ideology, it could be there. Sadly, even from the English Department, my old undergraduate academic home territory, there was on occasion a complete dismissal of linguistics. Perhaps not dismissed on its merit, but on its relevance. It was difficult to find a faculty member in the English Department over 40 who had taken even an introductory level undergraduate class in linguistics. This was disheartening, in no small part because second language English instructors and first language English mechanics instructors continue to be recruited from English departments in native speaking countries, not from the far smaller pool of linguistics departments. This means that language instruction, no matter how effective, talented, or passionate the instructor, continues to be taught with a strict prescriptive perspective and with a general unawareness of the scientific aspects of language that allow instructors to handle a host of questions and issues that arise while teaching students striving for basic competence in either their second of even first languages. This includes everything form accent correction to imparting a perspective that allows students to compare their own native language to others and understand the universal and non-universal aspects of human language and the linguistic limitations and uniting features of the human mind. This perspective is invaluable in a student’s strive toward competence in a language and an instructor’s ability to teach with maximum efficiency. The idea that many English departments in universities, English departments in high schools, and ESL programs are populated sometimes exclusively with people who have up to Ph.D. levels of education in the target language, but lack the background of even a single undergraduate class in linguistics is a travesty and an embarrassment. Most are even unaware that this is the case, as they don’t really know what linguistics is exactly.  This could and should be corrected by requiring every undergraduate at every  university to take at least an introductory level linguistics class as a requirement of any language major, even if it makes older faculty in English departments and elsewhere uncomfortable in becoming self-aware of their own hither-to-for intellectual deficits. This is harsh and comes across as self-righteous I’m sure, but I’m a person who came out of those shadows. I always thought I might continue on to a Ph.D. in English, and I believe I might have continued all the way through to a faculty posting without ever realizing what I was missing. For me, it is that important, and I’m confident that English Departments could retrain faculty who might have deficiencies in the new requirements and curriculum. Where should the growing number of Linguistics Ph.D.s find employment in academia?  For one, in English Departments across the United States, and not just as ESL specialists. Every department needs at least one linguist to offer all of the undergrads a taste of the scientific side of language. Professors of literary theory and appreciation teaching mechanics and English as a second language, under the moniker of “English” is not cutting it.

Having said all that, back to the question at hand: Are linguistics and literature in conflict?

Of course, if one were just talking about appreciating literature as a reader, not as a literary criticism specialized academic or even as a creator of literary works per se, then there are other (though I think surmountable) challenges. The biggest is that linguistics training can lead to a kind of conscious attentiveness to the structure of language that is hard to switch off when it’s time to actually enjoy language holistically. On the extreme side, it can be hard to converse verbally at times without analyzing every sound and morphosyntactic structure that comes out of your ones mouth. It’s akin to talking on the phone or on Skype with a bad connection, where you hear your own voice repeated back to you on a one to two second delay while talking. Difficult to compose under those kind of conditions, difficult even to appreciate and savor. I suspect the same would be true of a linguist, in the analytical throws of composing a complex scientific paper, who takes a break to appreciate the musical flow of Steinbeck’s prose, or the verse of Wordsworth.. that’s a hard square to circle. I’ve chosen to explore this point of conflict as a research question—friction or symmetry? Optimistic minds like mine hope for the later, but that sure was a long few steps down the hall from my old Linguistics Department to the English Department at the University of Florida. Those few steps were longer in intellectual bridging than the slog across campus to the neurosurgery laboratories on campus, because in fact we had a neurolinguistics specialist in our department and many more that were interested in the field. While research and collaborative forays into neuroscience and neurosurgery were far from required of graduate students in our department, they were far more welcome than collaboration with the literati and creative writing types down the hall.

Phonology deals with the sound structures of languages. A linguist who focuses on this subfield is known as a phonologist.

A crucial precursor to phonology is phonetics. By studying phonetics, linguistics get to know the sounds of languages themselves, that is, how sounds are produced in the mouth, what the tongue does, what the glottis does, what the lips do, etc. There are many more sounds in any given language than any native (or non-native!) speaker can perceive and hear. Phoneticians seek to explore and describe these sounds scientifically. All phonologists need a solid grasp in at least the basic concrete facts of phonetics for their study of language to make sense.

Phonologists, however, are less interested in the sounds themselves and more interested in how the sounds form a system in a given language. In other words, how are those sounds structured into units? These units may or may not be audible to an external observer as a set in terms of their phonetic characteristics, but nonetheless might make up a real set conceptually and in terms of their distribution in language data. Below, using ordinary data from our own common-sense, personal knowledge of English, we will talk about how the “T” sound in English behaves a certain way. It is this level of imaginary structure, the phonemic or phonological level, that native speakers perceive most easily. Phonologists thus seek describe sounds accurately while honing in on some logical relationships between the sounds.

For a relatively simple example, let’s take a look at the English sound “T.” It’s represented by the letter  “T/t,” and is actually made up several different consonant realizations or “phones” (more audible to non-native speakers than to native speakers!). The “T” sound, at its most basic level, can be understood as a single phoneme (or abstract sound) with several possible allophones of it (or concrete sounds):

1. Top is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar stop with aspiration (a puff of air)
2. Stop is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar stop without aspiration (no puff of air)
3. Tot is pronounced as an unreleased (begun but not ended) voiceless alveolar stop, and is often simply reduced to a glottal gesture, at least in casual speech
4. Butter is pronounced as a voiced alveolar flap

None of these allophones or pronunciations of abstract English /t/ (written in slashes to designate the phonemic level) is more “t” or less “t,” at least not in English. For the phoneme to exist in its full state, we need all the allophones.

Another part of phonology is to go about describing in which cases (or “environments”) each allophone occurs and proving that “T” is actually unique from, say, “D.” To continue our with example–leaving out more data and an adequate phonological argument, since they are beyond the scope of this article–allophone 1 above appears at the very beginning of a word and in a stressed syllable, allophone 2 appears after /s/ even if the rest of the previous conditions are satisfied, allophone 3 appears at the end of a word, and allophone 4 appears between two vowels as long as the second isn’t stressed. To prove that the allophones of /T/ belong to a separate phoneme class as those of /D/, for instance, we notice that “tot” and “Todd” have different meanings and are distinguished phonemically only by /t/ vs. /d/. This proves that, in English, “t” and “d” are unique from each other or, in phonological jargon, “allophones of separate phonemes.”

We at Florida Linguistics hope you’ve enjoyed this short article and found it useful. The next article in the Subfields of Linguistics series will deal with morphology.

In a video that has since gone viral, a recent contestant on Wheel of Fortune was penalized for the G-dropping in her pronunciation of the correct answer “Seven Swans A-Swimming.” This should trouble linguists for 3 reasons.

First, the incident reveals the stigma against users of non-standard accent or dialect. Although a convention of standard American English does require that progressive aspect “I-N-G” verbs be pronounced with a special “NG” sound (called the “velar nasal” by linguists), no native speaker of English would claim he or she did not understand  the contestant’s answer. As far as spelling is concerned, it has long been established that English words may be spelled differently from how they are pronounced. When two native speakers pronounce words differently, this doesn’t change the spelling. Although there is of course a literary tradition to alter standard spelling to reflect different regional accents—in the novels of Mark Twain for instance—this practice really has no standard rules and is certainly optional. Otherwise teachers would have to count alternate spellings correct on tests depending on each student’s dialect. No teacher would ever attempt such a ridiculous plan.

In other words, if you go to NPR’s website, you will not read about a show called “Cah Talk.” As Gershwin put it, I say potato, you say “potahto,” but I only spelled it that way so you get the joke. Let’s call the whole thing off, and spell them both “potato.”

Maybe you’re thinking,  “At least he didn’t spell it ‘potatoe!’” Clever you. Let’s take a side note before getting to the second part of the Wheel of Fortune trouble.

If the video about Dan Quayle is to be believed, this spelling is tempting. But do you know why? Even though “potatoe” is of course wrong, the spelling interestingly enough happens to reflect a well-established pattern of sound change that languages go through in their development called “analogy.” The spelling with “e” in the singular could be analyzed as a back-formation from the plural form, in which the “e” fulfills no phonological purpose. It even touches on the grammatical issue of mass vs. count nouns.

The basic contradiction is this: I assume that the Wheel of Fortune judge would contend that if the answer were really “a-swimmin,” then it would have been spelled with an apostrophe in the game. But this is getting the facts backwards! As anyone who’s ever watched it knows, the point of Wheel of Fortune is to spell words, not pronounce them!!! Such stupidity is regularly held as up conventional wisdom in a linguistics-ignorant society. Meanwhile, the underlying contradictions go unnoticed.

The second way in which the Wheel of Fortune incident should be troubling to linguists is that it reveals a lack of understanding of the linguistic facts grounding the alternate pronunciation. I became familiar with the phenomenon of Appalachian A-Prefixation when I took my first Linguisitics class at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2004. Many dialects historically and today have been “G-dropping” for years. It turns out that Appalachian English, as one of the many, also has “G dropping.” But it is the only dialect I know of that still has A-Prefixation. This would suggest that the pronunciation “a-swimmin’” is not only not wrong, but actually preferable to the non-dropped version expected by the judge! Furthermore, although I’m using the term “dropping” as a shorthand in this blog post, the velar nasal phone is not an alveolar nasal with something added, and which, as suggested by the term, can be “dropped” to become an alveolar nasal again. What makes the difference possible for the two stops (yes, stops; yes, “nasals” are really nasalized stops/plosives!) is that the stoppage of air is located at a different place in the mouth, with the rest of the physical characteristics unchanged. Although also true that the “g” sound is also voiced and velar, strictly speaking, the difference should not be what linguists call “ordered.” It is only in the spelling that “NG” equals “N” followed by “G.”

Phonologically, it’s not that G-dropping dialects lack velar nasals entirely. The facts can be partially explained by invoking the concept of a word boundary. In Linguistics, a word, a syllable, and a morpheme are all types of units surrounded on the left and right by silent markers called boundaries. Thus “(a-)swimming” can be pronounced “(a-)swimmin’” because of a G-dropping process that is activated on word-final velar nasals, but only word-finally. But imagine for a second you’re a speaker of a G-dropping dialect (maybe you really are!). If I’m “Singin’ in the Rain”—with a dropped G—I’m not necessary “Sinnin’ in the Rain”— with two dropped Gs, one word-final, the other not (morpheme-final as well as syllable-initial and/or intervocalic, depending on your theoretical slant). This example (singing/sinning) is a minimal pair showing the functional load of the velar vs. alveolar nasal distinction. In fact, all so-called “G-droppers” would make the distinction between “singin’” and “sinnin’,” and between “sing” and “sin,” unless of course they’ve got a radical religious belief! If it were just about the boundary, than the contrast between “sing” and “sin” would not be possible. So finding an analysis is actually quite tricky (and may in fact underlie a paper I am not aware of). Just when does the G drop (i.e., the alveolar nasal phone is used as an allophone of the velar nasal phoneme)? For us linguists, the facts of non-standard varieties (i.e., “vernaculars”) are often more interesting than the facts of standard ones, which can be watered down and stripped of their personality.

Finally, the Wheel of Fortune incident exposes linguists for not having their knowledge known by the world at large. The N/NG issue is a basic phenomenon that every foundational “Intro to Language” survey course could cover. If the issue had been in another commonly-taught field, for instance history, I think members of the audience, other contestants, or perhaps the host himself would have spoken up in protest. Yet what actually happened was that the judge on “Wheel of Fortune,” in making his or her unilateral and spurious enforcement of a dubious interpretation of one contestant’s phonology, got away unscathed while members of the audience knew something wasn’t quite right. When I watch the video, I can feel their reaction. Their acquiescence following the ensuing confusion is revolting to me, but I do not blame them. I blame our whole society. One of the missions of this site is to spread linguistics from the ivory tower of large universities out to the world.

So those are some reasons why we as a community should be troubled: the stigma, the ignorance about language, and the fact that linguists need to do more to spread the message. It is not the woman in the show that pays the highest price for linguistic ignorance. It is us all as a society.

The Florida Linguistics Association has a vision for a day when linguistics has established itself as an essential part of the liberal arts curriculum. On this New Year’s day, a day of new beginnings and an idealistic hope for the future, John Lennon’s vision for the world comes to mind. Maybe spreading linguistics will not be so “easy if you try.” But since the ways we speak affect all of us so deeply, the FLA still hopes for a day when all people will be “living life in peace” with a basic knowledge of human language. Or, for that matter, “livin’.”

PS: For those of you that are wondering, I’m not personally a regular G-dropper, but I have been known to drop the occasional beat. For more on the “velar nasal” as a linguistic parameter of cross-linguistic phonology, check out the WALS entry here. For more on the prejudice and stigma associated with non-standard dialects, just keep your ears open and listen to the junk people talk or imply. To help with the effort to spread linguistics, make a contribution to the site by sending an email to the FLA at fla@floridalinguistics.com, or take a linguistics course at a college/university near you.

One of the things I love about linguistics is the fact that languages are different. Sometimes these differences can seem small and trivial, other times maddeningly frustrating, but most of the time, sort of just “there.”

Since I’m living in a Russian-speaking country, when talking to people about my work, translating the “FLA” or “Florida Linguistics Association” caused me to face a pretty big problem. And the problem was clearly in the realm of . . . morphology. Uh-oh. Has anyone found it since the last time I was trying to find mine?

In English, N-N (that’s “noun-noun”) compounds are pretty interesting:
– the head noun appears on the right
– the modifier noun appears on the left
– case marking doesn’t come into the picture
– there are some stress issues: to make a long story short, the stress usually falls to the left of the head noun
– the modifier noun appears in the singular, even for many nouns that normally exist only in the plural. This is evidenced by such forms as “tooth decay” “drug addiction” “pant leg” (but there are counterexamples to this generalization, like a few quirky nouns, as well as variation other varieties of English, for example “a drugs problem”.)

In Russian, N-N phrases are pretty standard:
– the head noun appears on the left in whatever case is needed
– the modifier noun appears on the right, “frozen” in the genitive case

But they can also be translated with the suffix “sk” (the same Slavic morpheme as Polish names in skiy), in which case
– the head noun appears on the right in whatever case is needed
– the modifier noun is Adjectivized / de-nominalized with a suffix — /sk/, /ov/,
/in/ etc.
– the modifier de-nominal Adj appears on the left
– the modifier de-nominal Adj agrees in number/gender/case with the head noun

In English, I came up with two parsings for FLA, both of which sound the same, but which imply a different Russian translation. Here are the pictures:

1)                                                        < = = >

The Russian version of this would be

asosiaci-a                Florid-sk-oj                lingvistik-i
Association-NOM.FEM    Florida-ADJ-GEN.FEM    Linguistics-GEN.FEM

Here’s the second version:

2)                                                         < = = >

The Russian version of this would be

Florid-sk-aja                    linguistich-esk-aja            asosiaci-a
Florida-ADJ-NOM.FEM        Linguistics-ADJ-NOM.FEM    association-NOM.FEM

Ah, the gray area! The inability to make a grammaticality judgement!
Any native Russian-speaking linguists out there that can give us your intuitions?

Until next time, as RuskyEd says — DAS VIDANYAH!!

PS http://ruskyed.com/

In some of my classes, students tell me that their professors in non-linguistics classes often wax-philosophical about the inevitability of Chinese as the next global lingua franca.  Sometimes they even present it as an imminent development that has already started to take a foothold, due to the rising economic power of the PRC and the increasing frequency of successful Mandarin speaking students matriculating in American and other Western universities.

I’ve been troubled by this assumption, and its lack of scientific grounding.  In fact, it reminds me very much of other non-scientifically-based assertions about language that were profligate in years gone by, such as the “Eskimos having a hundred words for ‘snow’ in their language” as evidence for how ones environment and culture shapes ones perspective on the world.  Language scientists, namely Geoffrey Pullum, have been crusading ever since, in vein, to try and dispel this fallacy about West Greenlandic Eskimo (which in fact has only 2 root words for the “snow”) ever since.  Still, non-linguistically trained academics of otherwise excellent intellectual quality continue to profligate the fallacy, as it makes for a nice opener to a lecture, talk, or speech.

There is little evidence to indicate that Mandarin Chinese is spreading around the world as a candidate for global lingua franca status as either a second or first language.  In fact, the Chinese government has had its hands full with roping in all of the mutually unintelligible languages, or “dialects” as the one-China policy motivated government likes to call them, and their speakers into adopting Mandarin as a national lingua franca at the second language level.  This has not stopped entities from journalists to professors to science fiction writers from making the claim, however, that Chinese is becoming the new global lingua franca.  Not even the most ardent Chinese nationalists themselves or other of the most enthusiastic promoters of the idea that China is the next, obvious, and inevitable super power of the globalized world argue that Chinese is going to be a lingua franca of such a theoretical Chinese-dominated world of the future.  There are many reasons, pointed out by level-headed linguistic realists, like John McWhorter and others, indicate that this is in fact not the likely scenario.  Nearly all of Asia, with China leading the pack, is increasing their English mandatory and voluntary education at a clip that is even faster than the growth of their economies in recent years.  People all over the world are giving up minority and even widely-spoken first languages in favor of the “killer language” suspect number one, English.  Globalization is a one time phenomenon (barring nuclear holocaust or some other catastrophic global tragedy that results in a reset to medieval times and a cessation of global connectivity).  English is the language, for better or worse; fairly or unfairly; through pure incidence of circumstance perhaps, that is carrying us through this warp speed transition from unconnected world to globalized, connected, united world status.  Internet, academic publication, road sign standards, public safety announcements, the global trade language, scientific standards and collaborative organizations, international language of air traffic control, and on and on—all English!

Friends and colleagues, I say this not out of self interest or linguistic pride, though I am a native speaker of Standard American English: English is here to stay.  All scientific evidence points to such a conclusion, and we are obligated as language scientists to proffer hypotheses and theories about our linguistic futures that are based on data analysis and application of the scientific method.  English is the communication tool, for the foreseeable future, of this new, emerging globalized world.  We have been assured in the not too distant past of the near-future global dominance rise of Russia, then Japan, as well as the continued dominance of America.  We are now assured by the popular media and pop-anthropologists of the day of the inevitability of the Chinese global super power.  They may well be right or wrong in this most recent assertion.  If that is the case, or if through twist of fate China stumbles as others did and Africa or some other struggling developer emerges as the new contender for replacement of American economic hegemony, we need to heed what history has taught us about government or other powerful entities’ attempts to assert control over natural language change—namely, it cannot be controlled, but instead is governed by natural forces.  These forces, when studied objectively, indicate that the English infrastructure currently being put in place for global communication into the future will be the tool of any future super power—whether it be China, the EU, Africa, the United Nations, or even a new Latino ethnic majority United States of America.  Any power that assumes the economic and military power mantel of this newly minted globalized world will use English as the language of government, to pass on their marching orders and profligate their “soft power,” whether it be their first or second language, by choice of planning or no.  English (in whatever form it exists by that time) will be the coded language of this new shining or tarnished world of the future, and the new leaders will be forced to use this code to propel and churn this new mechanism effectively.

I can still remember the first time we stayed up all night together. Clothed in a shimmering, formal dress, she sat looking at me with a mocking grin. There were two ways to go about this, she said, clearly enjoying the spectacle of my jejune inhibitions. I had to choose the right way. But the important thing was to try. She intimidated me so much, presented me with so many facets of her complex character, that I was reticent even to begin the delicious act of disrobement to attain that naked, underlying form. I dreamed of a suave caress than would remove her dress in one effortless arc of my arm; but I feared my untrained hands would snag and claw at that precious fabric while her grin would broaden in response to my feeble attempts at seduction.
I wondered whether we should stop drinking. I needed to clear my head. And, besides, I was sure that she had already had a few. There should be a rule against drinking – especially at the onset of a relationship. Was I being sanctimonious? How could I impose such Puritanical stricture in the face of her blitheness? I tried suddenly to take her glass away from her. In the half-light of evening her dress danced, its myriad patterns sparkling hypnotically before my eyes, dizzying me with the possibilities they suggested. She swept her hand away quickly, turned her head over her left shoulder in flirtatious coyness, and said: “Deletion will not work.” We both smiled, I with a pained expression of doubt, she with the maddening assurance of one who knows she is being pursued.
I reached for the vodka bottle. One more couldn’t possibly hurt; she agreed. “Alcoholic epenthesis,” she said, “is absolutely essential for the fabric of social life.” I found the way she talked both arcane and alluring. Never before had I met anyone who harbored so many secrets, whose smile sang of so many wonderful surprises. I downed the glass and poured each of us another large measure. I could see that I was going to need it.
“I’m really umprepared,” I stammered. “I mean, I feel…” A process of assimilation was at work, a moving together of two bodies in this restrictive environment, like the meeting of voices from two sides of a nave. I was feeling more at ease even as I expressed my fears. Still, I couldn’t decide whether we were complementary or contrastive; she hadn’t revealed to me enough of herself for me to make up my mind.
“This vodka’s really neutral, isn’t it?” I said, somewhat awkwardly, wanting to bide my time before making any more rules.
“Well, it’s certainly true that vodka leads to neutralization,” she laughed. I blushed. She was so perceptive.
An alternation ensued, she lowering herself on to the sofa, her voice becoming now more breathy, almost voiceless at times. We looked at each other.
“Feed me,” she said.
I had no food in the house. My heart bled for her. I could see that she was hungry.
“I’m sorry, I can’t feed you,” I said. “I have no food.”
“It’s okay. Is not being able to feed me the result of another of your silly rules?” she asked teasingly.
I was pleased to see that my inhospitableness had not offended her. But just as I thought we were moving closer together, she became more abstract. I had been comfortable with our few playful rules and had begun to consider which should come first; which should be considered the more important; even which should apply more than once in case of absolute necessity. After all, setting boundaries was going to be essential if we were to get along. She was quite prepared to talk about boundaries, but kept mentioning the myriad exceptions under which they could be breached. And as she did so her true self – all that was underlying this flirtatiousness of hers – seemed to recede even further. Would she ever be tamed? I asked myself with a sinking heart. Her face was half-hidden by the shadow of the bookshelf and her voice emerged now from blackness: a nasal and liquid flow, riding a hierarchy of sonority, that refused to stop, as she talked about the stress in her life.
“How do you feel about all these stresses?” I asked gently.
“I don’t know. I feel sometimes that they’re so fixed, you know? Like they’re never going to go away. At other times I feel free, like the stress is free. Do you know what I’m talking about? And then I feel that I can reorder my life and, okay, so the stresses might still be there, but they might be secondary to something else. Oh, it’s so hard to explain.”
At that point, I turned on the lamp light to go to fetch another bottle of vodka. On the wall, a portrait of Prince Smolensky stared out at the two of us. The portrait showed the great soldier commanding from horseback in the Crimean War, his face suggesting both boldness and fear. Surrounded on all sides by enemy forces, he had raised his sabre aloft and was declaring his faithfulness to the Russian cause. This interpretation I related to her in the narrative tone people sometimes use to tell such tales.
“Who told you that?” she asked disbelievingly.
“That’s the official version that I read in the Hermitage,” I said, cowed by the critical note in her voice. She had obviously still to overcome the discussion of rules that had seemed so necessary at the time but now seemed like an embarrassing obstacle to true intimacy.
“Sounds plausible,” she said. After several moments of intense reflection, she declared: “You know, I think that’s really an optimal theory…No, really it is.”
As she gazed at me with dreamy, kohl-lined eyes which blended into the darkness of the corner of the room I realized that the onset of this relationship ranked with the best I had known. I smiled at her, wondering whether she would remain as faithful as Prince Smolensky. Or would she add new conditions in the future? That was a marked possibility, but a risk I had to take. And what was to be the conclusion to this evening? I wanted so much for it never to end, for this minimal pairing to attain maximal projection in the realm of bliss.
“No coda!” I said suddenly. “May it never end.” And that was the condition, the single utterance, that won her heart. We sat ourselves at the small, lined table in the middle of the room and entwined our limbs in a matrix of expectation.
She smiled at me through grateful tears, pointing a finger at the portrait of Prince Smolensky. I nodded in mute accord.
“Just promise me one thing,” she said.
“Anything,” I replied.
“No more rules, please.”
We both smiled. Our lips met, contorting our features [+delayed release, +labiodental, +coronal, +long] with pleasure and we sank into each others arms with a feeling that this was going to last.

To get the basics of what grammar is and the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, please read Lee Ballard’s blog post  “What is Grammar?”
Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar in the Classroom:
Perhaps the term prescriptive grammar is more relevant when one is teaching a language to people who already speak it, teaching language A to so called native speakers of language A. In this way prescriptivism is trying to change someone’s language because he or she speaks (writes) in an “incorrect” manner. I placed write in parenthesis because writing does not hold to the same degree of naturalness as does speaking.
The absurdity of prescriptivism in this setting can be witnessed when normal school children who live in an English speaking community and have English speaking parents have to lament that they are failing English. However, their lamentations are perfectly natural to all the English ears around them. Naturalness and descriptivism go hand in hand, as to be discussed later. Furthermore, the prescriptive situation described above also involves a lack of understanding or explanation from both parties involved. In the case of the student, he or she sees no need to change or modify his or her speech. In the case of the teacher, he or she often feels that no explanation for advocating Form A over B is really needed because what is being taught is “correct”. (Look I found a book that claims to be a grammar book that says what I am saying, and no one ever lies in a book.)  This situation is important to recognize because it further distinguishes the type of prescriptive grammar given here, the more textbook definition, from prescriptive grammar as is taught to non-native speakers. I will call the type of prescriptivism above “formal prescriptivism”.
On the other hand descriptive grammar attempts to capture the patterns that native speakers produce competently. In other words, it is the patterns native speakers use naturally without self or peer correction. It is theoretically impossible to ever say you have the absolute correct descriptive grammar because no one has ever accounted for all the data because the data is theoretically infinite in size. Moreover, languages change in perpetuity and thus what was once an accurate description is no longer true. Linguistics feels that when we arbitrarily decide that a past form should be imposed upon present language use, we are committing one of the prescriptive sins. The other prescriptive sin is deliberately trying to add grammatical features from one language to another because there is a belief that the latter is superior. (We all should know that languages borrow from each other naturally though, however, argument could be made on this point.)   Thus while seemingly all prescriptive grammar comes from descriptive grammar, at times grammarians prescribe descriptions from other languages or mathematical logic, the story of Robert Lowth and double negatives. This often amounts to giving Type A blood to a Type B person. Nonetheless, rules from natural language can be successfully learned and incorporated just as one learns a foreign language. It is unclear how much foreign grammar interacts with native grammar, how much remains on the periphery versus how much percolates to the core. However, it most certainly interacts. Thus teaching grammar prescriptively can have effects even if it is far removed from actual description.
To recapitulate and clarify, descriptive grammar is recording language patterns in natural settings from a roughly homogenous group. Prescriptive grammar is elevating Form A over Form B because Form A is believed to better. Again, a reason for such belief is not necessary. Also teaching pronunciation is teaching a type of grammar (i.e patterns of speech).
When teaching  a second, third etc… language you have to be prescriptive. In the field of SLA the idea of inter-languages is well established. This is the idea that language learners create/innovate grammars as they travel from their native language to their target language.  This is why many, perhaps all, errors are systematic. Mistakes on the other hand are more like slips of the tongue.    Now if students were happy or content with the inter-language they have developed, then they would not be enrolled at a language learning institute. Forgive my idealization for a moment. Thus they believe they are incorrect, most of the time, and so do the teachers. This is a big difference from the setting that creates formal prescriptivism as described above. Foreign Language learners want to change the way they speak to get closer to the target language. In this way teachers must prescribe to them patterns that are unnatural for them.  We certainly are not going to just describe what they are already doing and say that it is interesting because such action is not what we are hired to do. There should be no issue here. However, there is a choice as to deciding what the target really is.
Let’s consider English.  Is the target GMAT or IELTS English or is it Engineering or Literary English? Beyond that, is it news anchor English, Ebonics, Appalachian English, some other noticeably accented form of English, or just the dialect of the teacher mixed with some notions of “Standard English”? Students are never given and rarely inquire about so much specificity regarding their target because they too believe that they are just learning English, as if such a thing neatly existed.
The reason the choice of the target is important is that just like with formal prescriptivism this prescriptivism, while unavoidable, lends itself to the same biases. Gender and culture can be marginalized. It may be important for student A to be able to speak in a quote on quote masculine or feminine manner. As an aside, most western men who go to Japan speak in a feminine manner because they were taught by women. This does not ostensibly aid them in the business world.
To move along, Black and Appalachian Englishes are looked down upon, so those forms will not pragmatically be the target. No English language learning program uses them as the target to my knowledge. Thus the target would appear to be the most prestigious or advantageous form of English. Can anyone tell me what this is?
If ethics are now formally injected, they must compete with such pragmatic sensibility. If I am in the business world of America, I don’t want to speak or write one of the varieties of Appalachian or Black English because we believe they are not perceived as being educated forms of speech. One’s perception will undoubtedly carry them a long way with regards to raises and promotions. Are we not ethically responsible for enabling our students with the best chance possible? I will temporally rest with this.

For awhile now, I’ve been working on a site that deals with issues related to Japan, Japanology, and the Japanese language.  What originally started as a kind of “Japan Fan” site, assisting and entertaining people who study Japanese, enjoy “things Japanese,” have lived in Japan, or hope to live in Japan, took on new meaning for me when I started studying linguistics.  I realized that I was doing a disservice to my visitors, especially those who are studying the Japanese language, if I don’t provide a scientific view of the Japanese language that is geared to the mainstream and literary student of Japanese.  In fact, the mainstreaming of the linguistics discipline for literature and foreign language discipline-based students of language generally has become a very important issue and goal for me.
When talking to a friend from Taiwan, I was somewhat surprised to hear that Taiwan has not a single undergraduate linguistics department, although they do have graduate programs.  What was even more surprising was the fact that all students of English, and presumably other foreign languages, in Taiwan are required to take at least an intro course in linguistics.  So, while the Taiwanese do not have any universities who have reached the level of offering an undergraduate program in linguistics, they appear to understand the importance of linguistics and the scientific study of language to the average language learner better than Americans, though we have many undergraduate programs in the US.  We are missing something important here in The Sates.  Our view of “language” seems incomplete somehow.
My TenColors.com site now contains a “Japanese Linguistics” section, which, to my amazement, appears to be the first of its kind to appear in a non-linguistics-geared language and culture site.  I have been trying to impress upon my site visitors and Japanese language-studying friends the importance of gaining a scientific appreciation for the language you are studying.  Japanese language sites are littered with blog posts and questions, where advanced Japanese L2 language learners (and sadly, even native and second language instructors of Japanese) are puzzling over questions that are fairly easily answered by students of Japanese Linguistics.  The only way to Japanese Linguistics is through Linguistics departments, not through Japanese Language or Literature departments.  Fellow linguists, this can’t be the way.. and this situation is not unique to Japanese, unfortunately.
There have been some strides though.  We can see that the scientific and theory driven field of SLA has started to show practical linkages to and appear in required course lists for students of ESL/EFL/TESL.  We can expect, or hope at least, to see more and more linkages between the science of language and the application of language.  This is not simply the old “theory vs. applied” rivalry, it’s deeper.  What we are talking about is the mainstreaming of linguistic basics outside of linguistics departments.  The rift is not between applied and theoretical experts within linguistics departments, it is between the literati and the linguists.  This is the rift that we need to bridge.  At least the basics of linguistics should be a set of courses that cross departments and are equally important to all, not simply a set of teaser courses for linguistics departments to recruit more linguistics majors form the liberal arts colleges.  I teach one of these course, and in my view, the strategy is misguided.  Likewise, “Structure of Japanese,” “Structure of English” and the like should be required courses not only for foreign language students and student teachers, but even for English Literature majors who are native English speakers.  These students have the need for a scientific perspective on their own languages, perhaps more than anyone.  Certainly it must seem strange to linguists to hear that someone who has a PhD in “English” from a major US, UK, or Commonwealth university doesn’t know what the aspiration rule of English is—though it’s one of the most basic phonological rules of the English language, and highly systematic and predictable.  Sadly, this is the norm.  I feel a sense of this mission, perhaps not least because I come from a literary, creative writing, business, and EFL background and am now studying linguistics.  I plan to devote a lot of my future efforts to building bridges from linguistics to the world of business communication, literature, technical writing, and foreign language learning and teaching.  www.tencolors.com is one of those efforts, and the marketing of linguistics to the generalist that you see taking place on Florida Linguistics is another avenue.  I hope others will join me.
And let’s not fool ourselves, fellow students, about the rift between so-called “prescriptivists” and “descriptivists” in this infant discipline of ours.  It is no less erroneous than that between “applied” (the so called applied linguistic sciences, which have their own theory and need theory to apply in any case) and “theoretical.”  It is yet just another manifestation of our (thus far) failure to market our field to academics of other departments.  The grammarians and prescriptivists of secondary schooling that we have been told are the enemies and villains of language science are just other teachers of language that have not been given the motivation or training to apply a scientific perspective to either English or “foreign” language instruction.  The threshold is high for acceptance of such a radical injection into traditional language teaching to be sure, but isn’t it our responsibility to market our theory as accessible, significant, and relevant at a basic and non-threatening or intimidating level?  And if this is so, then so called “prescriptivists” are really just pre-Chomskyan language professionals and experts who haven’t received the “good news” of modern language science.  People, linguists, let us set the record straight.  It is the so-called “descriptivists,” not the “prescriptivists” that are to blame for this oversight.

The Five Minute Linguist is an excellent book to introduce beginners or laypeople to topics of current interest in linguistics. Composed completely of short chapters on subjects like what the original language was, who speaks Italian, and  how children acquire grammar, the authors of the articles are often leaders in the subfields they

explain (for instance Mark Baker on grammar, and Peter Ladefoged–who wrote the essay on phonetics shortly before his passing). The essays are all short enough to be read during a morning bus ride, and can be read in any order. Each chapter ends with an “about the author” and suggestions for further reading, including other chapters in the book and web resources. Although probably not entirely sufficient for the only book used in an introductory course, The Five Minute Linguist makes a great companion text. While not a must read, if you read it, you will have a good understanding of what linguists study, and may even be reminded of some ideas you forgot about.

Carnie’s Introduction to Syntax is a decent place to begin an exploration of syntactic theory. Carnie is often cited in many syntactic papers and proves himself to be a fairly easy read.  If one is serious about syntactic theory or if you are an instructor of syntax, problems might arise from both the length of time spent on the subject of X-bar Theory and the lack of a complete explanation of the Minimalist Theory of syntax.  X-bar Theory certainly has its merits, but it has been largely replaced by Minimalism for quite some time.  The same would go for the chapters on Government and Binding.  It is important to know these things to understand some of the reasoning behind present theories and to understand older papers on syntax.  However, since syntax has changed so much over a short period of time, students can easily get skeptical about the merits of any of it.  Also while the inclusion of competing, Non-Chomsky governed, theories such as Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is good, they are placed almost as optional chapters at the very end and are thus easily ignored.  Moreover, the problem sets at the end of each chapter could be helpful for an instructor, but as a beginner may not be helpful, as no solutions are provided.  Nonetheless, I would recommend this book to both true beginners and those who have completed an introductory course in Linguistics.