Babies in Space

Taking a quick break from my compling musings to spew some information about prepositions, spatial cognition, and infant development at you all. Enjoy!

As adults, the way that we carve up the physical world around us seems pretty straightforward: objects can be close to us or far away; they can be in front of or behind us; they can sit on top of or underneath one another. We as English speakers have established that certain types of relationships between ourselves and the physical world are important to share with one another, and we express those relationships linguistically using prepositions like in, on, next to, under, behind, etc.

What you may have noticed, though, is that we don’t tend to focus on all the details of those relationships. For example, a lid on a jar is not quite the same thing as a book on a table: lids tend to interlock with the things they are closing, whereas a book rests freely on the table, with no insertion of their respective surfaces. There are other features that differ between the two scenarios: you might notice that a jar tends to be round and cylindrical, while a book and a table are both long and flat. A jar can contain other items, while a table (usually) cannot. In fact, one of the only things they do have in common is that one item sits on top of another. Nevertheless, as English speakers we have mutually concluded that the most salient characteristic of both these relationships is the A-on-B setup, and thus we use the same preposition (“on”) to talk about both.

This leads me to my first point: not all languages assign the same types of preposition (or verb, adjective, or postposition) to the same types of physical relationships. If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you may have noticed this when trying to translate spatial words from your native language to your target language – sometimes native speakers correct your use of a word that seems perfectly acceptable to you. This is because the way we talk about space is somewhat arbitrary; we are trying to carve up reality in such a way that makes sense to us and other members of our speech community, highlighting the details that we find important and ignoring the ones that aren’t relevant or useful. Thus, some languages might make distinctions where you do not, or they might have completely different ways of talking about space than you are used to.

For example, Korean, which would indeed use two different expressions to talk about the lid on the jar versus the book on the table, doesn’t necessarily care about containment (English “in”) or surface contact (English “on”), but rather tight fit (like a lid on a jar, a coin in a slot, or interlaced fingers) and loose fit (like a book on a table, an apple in a backpack, or a pencil in a drawer).

On the other hand, languages such as German and Dutch have the same basic concept of on, but further distinguish between vertical and horizontal contact, so that the picture on the wall (surfaces are in contact vertically) and the picture on the table (surfaces in contact horizontally) use two different words (an and auf, respectively). So in these languages, the orientation of contact is also important. In other languages, neither the orientation nor the contact is important: in Mandarin, the same word (shàng 上) expresses both above and on, regardless of whether the two surfaces are physically touching.

Suffice it to say, there are a lot of tiny details that can add up to salient differences in the way that we talk about space, and make it really hard to adjust to a second language. It’s actually pretty remarkable that we are able to do so without even thinking when we use our native language!

Thus, we come to my second point: how on earth do babies figure it all out?

Linguists and cognitive psychologists have long been interested in the way that infants learn to 1) represent spatial relationships conceptually, and 2) map those concepts onto language. The way that we address the development of cognition (= general thinking abilities) and language very much depends on the theoretical background you subscribe to.

Which Came First, the Language or the Thought?

Most linguists would hiss and retreat if you were to call linguistics a subdiscipline of cognitive science, but in reality the two fields tend to overlap pretty frequently, especially when it comes to language acquisition. After all, language doesn’t exist in a vacuum; we use language to share our thoughts and ideas with one another, and of course those thoughts and ideas are the result of various cognitive processes like abstract thinking, intention reading, and visuospatial representation. When we study infants’ and toddlers’ linguistic development, oftentimes we are faced with a “Chicken vs. Egg” scenario, wherein we have to decide whether the linguistic milestones coincide with, precede, or follow the relevant cognitive concepts they represent.

Some people, like Jill de Villiers, have argued that certain language structures actually trigger cognitive development in relevant areas. In other words, the language provides a way to conceptualize and, thus, think about things like false belief or space. If this were the case for spatial language, we would expect that children do not demonstrate any sort of knowledge about space until they start to understand words that express that knowledge. I suppose it would depend on how you test that knowledge, but given that newborns have demonstrated basic understandings of physics and gravity, I am inclined to believe that they do have some concept of space even before language sets in. So, although I am a fan of Jill’s work with regard to theory of mind development, I don’t think we could extend the theory to spatial language.

Alternatively, we could argue that the concepts exist independently of the language, which of course is how we are able to understand the way that another community talks about space without actually speaking the language in question. What do children have to do, then, to link them together? And, is there any rhyme or reason as to how spatial language develops?

In one of the first studies on this topic, Johnston and Slobin (1979) looked at the production of spatial words in English, Italian, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian, and found that certain concepts tended to emerge at the same time in all four languages, even if those languages do not distinguish between the concepts in the same way. In the first stage of acquisition, the children in their study produced words for the concepts in, on, under, and beside. In Stage Two, they added words for between and behind/in front of, specifically when talking about objects that had an inherent front or back (such as people or houses, but not e.g. a cardboard box). In the final stage, the children were able to talk about the concepts of behind/in front of for all objects, including those that did not have a static front or back. Johnston and Slobin concluded from these findings that the non-linguistic development of the relevant spatial concepts triggers children to look for ways to express them with language.

Melissa Bowerman and her colleagues agreed that infants and toddlers have preconceived ideas about space and location that exist independent of their linguistic knowledge. They support this view with evidence from child speech, namely the fact that children tend to overgeneralize or misuse spatial language early in the acquisition process (e.g. saying “book up” for the book is on the table). However, they have taken this a step further by demonstrating that children as young as 18 months old understand basic spatial language, including the details that are relevant to how their target language expresses ideas about space.

Bowerman and her co-author, Soonja Choi, ran a looking preference task with 14- and 18-month-old infants acquiring either English or Korean. Looking preference paradigms are a common way to test preverbal babies to see how much language they understand, and it works like this: the baby sits with their caregiver in a room, with two screens in front of them. On one screen, there is a video of e.g. a pen being put into a bag, while on the other screen, there is a video of e.g. a book being placed on a table. The baby then hears a sentence like “Put it on there!” The independent variable is how long the baby looks at each screen, because if they understand the sentence, they should look longer at the screen with a scene that matches the language they heard. In control trials, both videos would be valid matches to the sentence, so the baby should not show a preference for either screen.

Using this setup, Bowerman and Choi found that by 18 months old, Korean and English speaking babies were sensitive to the way that their specific language talks about spatial relationships. Korean infants distinguished between loose and tight-fitting relationships, while English babies distinguished between containment (in) and support (on). Furthermore, in trials where the target word indicated a different relationship between the objects in English than Korean (e.g. both objects were on in English, but one was loose and one was tight in Korean), children adhered to language-specific preferences when selecting a video to look at. This suggests that they are not simply mapping the language they hear onto universally-available concepts of space; they are acutely aware of the potential similarities between notions that are expressed the same way linguistically. In other words, they use their amazing pattern-finding abilities to determine what is conceptually similar between a book on a table and a lid on a jar, and they hone in on these differences very early in the acquisition process.

Basic spatial expressions are actually among some of the earliest produced words in many languages, although they are typically not used in a completely adultlike manner. As I said previously, small children may go through a phase of over- or undergeneralizing certain spatial terms while they figure out exactly which concept a given word maps onto. They might also use them a bit more liberally than adults, in some cases, like the infamous “Up!” which is actually more of a verb (denoting the action of being picked up) than a preposition. All of these phases are just stepping stones on their journey toward mastery of their language(s), but each one can actually provide incredible insight as to the state of their linguistic, cognitive, and social development. Next time you talk to a toddler, if you’re so inclined, you can try giving them some basic instructions like “Show me the pen on the table” and see what they do in response.

How do you “spell” in Chinese?

It’s no secret that one of the most attractive and intimidating characteristics of modern Chinese languages is the writing system. Characters are, of course, beautiful, which is why so many Westerners love to get things like “chicken soup” tattooed on their biceps. From a language learning perspective, however, Chinese orthography can be incredibly daunting: there are thousands of characters, although only a fraction of those may be required for most communicative functions.

鸡汤
-Some guy at the gym’s arm

Given these facts, it is no wonder that teaching L2 learners to read and write characters is also a hot topic in CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) literature. In fact, that’s what I mostly focused on in my CFL classes. I spent a lot of time researching about the best ways to break down the structure of Chinese. The good news is: characters are not completely random, abstract pictograms! They are actually composed of various subcomponents that you can learn to recognize. The bad news is that there are still more components to learn than there are, say, letters in the English alphabet.

But don’t let that stop you! Let’s talk about the building blocks of Chinese characters, and how one goes about using them to dictate characters to one another.

Components of Chinese Characters

Strokes

Starting from the most basic level, characters are composed of individual strokes which can be divided into eight types (the character 永 yong encompasses all of them). They are called strokes because they can be drawn with a single stroke of a pen/brush. Most strokes are straight or nearly-straight lines (except for 点 dian, which is basically a dot), and each one has its own name. Particular combinations of strokes that tend to frequently co-occur may be referred to as a single word that combines the two names (e.g. 竖 shu “a straight vertical line” + 提 ti “a diagonal line drawn from left to right” = 竖提 shu ti)

There is a long-standing tradition of adhering to specific rules dictating the order in which these strokes are added to the page. Nowadays, stroke order rules underlie some of the mechanisms used to enter Chinese characters using a standard keyboard. Some examples of stroke order rules include things like:

Top before bottom
Left before right
Horizontal before vertical
Inside before outside

Radicals

Another important component of characters is radicals. Radicals can be standalone characters or a combination of strokes that appear frequently together and denote a fixed meaning. Individual strokes typically do not entail a fixed meaning, but radicals do. For example, the “grass” radical 艹 is used in the names of plants 草, flowers 花, and tea 茶. There is no inherent pronunciation associated with radicals; they only indicate a character’s meaning.

Radicals are a closed class of about 200 members, although some are certainly more common than others. They are sometimes derived from standalone characters (e.g. the “sun” radical is just the character for sun 日) and can therefore appear on their own, but not always. Radicals often appear as components of phonosemantic characters, which leads me to my next point…

Other Characters

That’s right – characters can be recursively embedded! Love that for us.

So, if you’re reading a Chinese text and you encounter a new character, you might be able to break it down stroke-by-stroke, and maybe you can assign it a vague meaning based on its radical. That still doesn’t help you know how to pronounce it, though.

That’s where other characters come in.

An estimated 85% of characters in Modern Standard Mandarin are considered phonosemantic characters, which means that they consist of two parts: one part indicates how it might be pronounced (“phono-“), while the other part indicates the general meaning (“semantic”). Since neither radicals nor strokes have any associated pronunciation, the phonetic component is conveyed using other characters.

For example, the word for “grass” 草 cao is actually composed of a radical 艹 and another character: 早 zao “morning.” Grass and mornings don’t really have much to do with one another semantically, but the pronunciation of zao is pretty close to that of cao.

(To add another layer of complexity, 早 can actually be further broken down into a radical and another character: 日 “sun” and 十 shi “ten.” Fun!)

Explaining how to write a character

Even native Chinese speakers may occasionally forget a character, especially in this day and age of autocorrect and speech-to-text. And of course, learners may often need to ask native speakers to explain how a character is written. In both cases, one person could help by verbally breaking down the target character into individual strokes, radicals, or smaller characters. Let’s look at an example of how that would go.

A: 张三，你知不知道草字怎么写？

B: 我告诉你。上面是草字头，下面是早上的早。

A: Zhangsan, do you know how to write the character cao?

B: I will tell you. On top is the grass radical, and on the bottom is zao as in “morning.”

In this example, the target character is phonosemantic and contains a very common subcomponent, so it is very feasible that Speaker A would not need any more instruction beyond “zao as in ‘morning.'” If they did, of course, then Speaker B could further elaborate:

A: 那么，早怎么写呢？

B: 上面是日，下面是十。

A: 你说哪一个shi? 有很多啊！

B: 中间写横、竖的十。

A: Well, how do you write zao?

B: On top is “sun,” on the bottom is shi.

A: Which shi? There are many!

B: The shi that is written with heng and shu.

Astute readers may have noticed that these strategies still leave room for misinterpretation. You have to have at least a vague idea of how a character is composed and what the end result should look like in order to apply instructions like the ones above. To be honest, there’s no easy way around that fact. But the same could be said about English spelling — you have to know the building blocks (letters) for verbal dictation to be helpful. It just so happens that there are more components to master in a character-based language.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, first and foremost — it’s my blog and I can ramble if I want to. But also, I recently was toying around with a little thought experiment that I wanted to share. This is all necessary preamble. So stay tuned for the next installment, where I brainstorm how this information could be useful for voice assistants looking to beef up their Chinese language support.

Deciphering German Compounds pt. 1: Morphology

English speakers love to expound on German’s seemingly infinite potential to create extremely specific, often lengthy, compound words by combining two or more simple words into a single term. It’s not like German is the only language to do this; in English we also use compound words with considerable regularity (e.g. doghouse, artwork), and something like 80% of contemporary Mandarin vocabulary is made up of multiple independent words/syllables (e.g. 女人 nǚ rén, literally “female” + “person” AKA “woman”). In fact, German is not even the most extreme case: agglutinative languages such as Turkish and Hungarian can express in a single word what English speakers need a whole sentence to convey. Nevertheless, German compound words continue to be (in)famous in their own right, and admittedly make up a more robust portion of day-to-day vocabulary than English compounds.

Unlike Chinese and English, whose compound words are formulated in a pretty straightforward manner, some German compounds can be a bit quirky. The long and short of it is that some compound words contain one of a handful of added units whose linguistic status is, well, questionable to say the least. Let’s start with a straightforward example that doesn‘t contain any of these mystery elements: the term for “linguistics:” Sprachwissenschaft. This word is made up of three morphemes (= meaningful units of language), two of which also happen to be complete words: Sprach(e) (“language/speech”) + wissen (“to know”) + schaft (a nominalizer somewhat comparable to English -ness or -ship. So, Wissenschaft means “science” (literally “knowing-ness”) and Sprachwissenschaft means “language/speech science,” AKA linguistics. Easy peasy.

However, there are other compound words where one of the aforementioned mystery elements intrudes between two or more of the morphemes. Unlike all of the morphemes in the Sprachwissenschaft example, each of which slightly change the meaning of the word, these intruders don’t necessarily carry any meaning on their own; they are just additional sounds that happen to appear in some compounds but not others.

An example of one such problematic compound in German is the word “birthday:” Geburtstag. Again, three units appear in this word: Geburt (“birth”) + s (???) + Tag (“day”). The -s- seems to just appear out of nowhere, without any clear motivation for its inclusion. Yet, if you were to say Geburttag, you would immediately be pegged as a non-native speaker. Unlike –schaft in the example above, the –s– in Geburtstag doesn’t do anything to alter the meaning, it just has to be there.

All together, there are six different linking elements, whose frequency and productivity varies considerably: –s- (as in Geburtstag), -(e)n- (as in Blumenstängel, “flower” + “stem”), -es- (as in Bundesliga, “region” + “league”), -e- (as in Hundefutter, “dog” + “food”), -er- (as in Kinderarbeit, “child” + “work/labor”), and -(e)ns- (as in Namensschild, “name” + “sign”).

Lately I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to find any sort of pattern in the way that these additives appear in German compounds. At first, I thought it was to prevent repetition of the same sound across two adjacent morphemes. So, the problem with Geburt + Tag would be that it situates two /t/ sounds right next to each other, so you insert another phoneme to split them up. Then I came across Schritttempo, combining Schritt (“step”) with Tempo (“speed/pace”) without a problem, so that hypothesis was out. Next, I thought maybe it had to do with the plural form of the first noun, but then I looked up the plural form of Geburt (pl. Geburten) and was disproven once again – besides, “birthsday” doesn’t make much sense anyway, unless you’re talking about twins, for instance. A quick Google search yielded nothing satisfactory either: all the articles written on linking elements in compound words for German learners essentially boiled down to “it’s random, sorry,” and that wasn’t good enough for me.

So, I decided to delve into what linguists have to say about the role of these so-called “linking elements” in compound formation. It turns out this is a hot topic that lots of German speakers – even as far back as one of the Grimm brothers in 1877 – have taken a shot at explaining. While I didn’t find any sort of quick and easy way for foreign language learners to decode or formulate their own compound nouns in German, I thought I would share some of the analyses that I came across because, well, they’re interesting, and maybe other people struggling with this particular aspect of the German language would at least appreciate some more insight than just “it’s random.”

I’m currently between institutions so I don’t have as much access to academic journals as I would like, but nonetheless I managed to download two papers by Nübling and Szczepaniak on the role of linking elements in German compound words, which provide a pretty decent overview of recent work on this topic. I discovered that there actually are a number of both morphological and phonological explanations for different types of linking elements in German compound words; not only that, but the adequacy of these proposals is something that continues to be debated in Germanic linguistics to this day.

I was originally going to write one summary post, but it ended up being wicked long and I figured it was worth splitting into two (still lengthy) summaries, one of the morphological analyses and one of the phonological analyses. We’ll start with morphology because M comes before P.

The Morphological Analysis

First of all, it is worth noting that the morphological status of linking elements remains somewhat debatable, for the simple reason that these units don’t seem to carry any obvious meaning on their own. You may recall that the technical definition of a morpheme is “the smallest meaningful piece of a language,” which distinguishes it from a phoneme, which is just a single sound (often, but not always, associated with one letter) that carries no meaning on its own. Thus, cat is a morpheme that contains three phonemes: the individual sounds /k/ /æ/ /t/ don’t mean anything on their own, but together they represent a specific concept. Some phonemes can also be morphemes; this is the case with English –s, because it changes the meaning from singular to plural. However, the key characteristic in that scenario is that the addition of the –s influences the way you interpret the word it connects to. Adding –s– to the first word of a compound in German, like in Geburtstag, doesn’t do anything to change the meaning. This begs the first of several questions linguists have about the special additions that appear in certain German compound words: should they really be considered morphemes, and if so, what is their morphological role?

One argument for the morphological status of linking elements – and one of the most common explanations I’ve seen in non-academic articles for language learners – is that they are descended from old case endings. While not entirely explanatory, this is often true. Some compounds, especially those that transcend time and technological evolution such as cock’s comb, were formed long ago based on case rules that have now changed or become obsolete. Compounds that utilize certain plural forms or the genitive (= possessive) case may now seem completely random, but actually made perfect sense according to the grammar at the time. So, even though these compounds cannot be deconstructed according to rules of the contemporary language, at one point in time they could; and because they were used often, the old form stuck around.

Demske argues that many of the linking elements actually come from the now-obsolete possessive form of the first noun in a given compound. Many possessive forms of nouns are created by adding -es to the end of the word, e.g. das Kind (“the child”) becomes des Kindes (“of the child”/”the child’s”). By this reasoning, a compound word like Kindesalter could be analyzed as “age of the child.” However, that isn’t what Kindesalter means: it is actually “childhood,” not “the child’s age.” So while for some words, this analysis holds water (e.g. Brückenzoll “bridge’s toll”), for many more contemporary compounds it leads us down the wrong path.

This may be the case with many of the less common linking elements that appear in certain compounds such as –(e)n, -es, and -e-, but still doesn’t predict when or where a specific linking element will appear. Furthermore, the same noun can have different linking elements in different compounds, not all of which can be attributed to an outdated case ending. Kinderschuh, for example, is made up of Kind (“child”) + er (???) + Schuh (“shoe”), and includes the linking element -er-; Kindesalter (Kind [“child”] + –es- [???] + Alter [“age”]), on the other hand, uses a different linking element, and Kindheit uses none! Cases like these demonstrate that the motivation behind different linking elements cannot be entirely explained by case alone.

Worth addressing at this point is that sometimes adding a linking element to a stem noun, such as Kind + -er, creates what looks identical to the plural form of the noun. In some cases, the meaning is not altered by a plural vs. singular reading, such as Kinderschuh, which could read as “a child’s shoe” or “a shoe for children” interchangeably. Other instances, though, highlight the fact that these elements – while sometimes overlapping with the same suffixes used to create a plural noun – play a different role in the language. For example, Kindermund (“child’s mouth”) does not refer to one mouth shared by many children (a terrifying image), but rather one mouth belonging to one child. The extent to which the pluralizing versus linking version of a morpheme, such as –er, should remain distinguished is a point of contention, but is worth addressing for the sake of avoiding confusion: if you come across a compound that looks like it contains a plural, consider that it could also just be a linking element playing tricks on you.

Nübling and Szczepaniak point out that not all linking elements are equally productive, either. They note that only -s- can be combined with a large number of nouns, whereas others such as –n- or –es- are limited to a handful of specific words. In other words, if you were to guess blindly at which linking element should go between two nouns you want to smush together, you’d be more likely to be right if you chose –s- compared to the others. That is not to say that –s- is the default linking element in German compounds, just that it is more widely distributed in the contemporary language.

The final point on the morphology of –s– that I thought worth sharing is that it appears to serve another functional purpose in certain contexts, namely the formation of complex compounds (i.e. those containing three or more nouns); the consolidation of a phrase into a single compound; and the reopening of a “closed” suffix e.g. –schaft. For each of these functions, Nübling and Szczepaniak offer the following illustrative examples:

Complex compounds: Hof (“courtyard”) + Mauer (“wall”) = Hofmauer (“courtyard wall”), vs. Friede (“peace”) + Hof (“courtyard”) + Mauer (“wall”) = Friedhofsmauer (“graveyard wall”)
Phrase -> compound: Richtung (“direction/trend”) + weisen (“to point”) = Richtungsweisend (“trendsetting”)
Reopening a closed suffix: Freund (“friend”) + schaft (“ship,” a closed suffix) = Freundschaft (“friendship”), vs. Freund (“friend”) + schaft (“ship”) + Preis (“price”) = Freundschaftspreis (“special price”)

Other linking elements are more limited in scope and applicability to different kinds of nouns. In fact, Nübling and Szczepaniak argue in their more recent paper that, aside from –s-, German linking elements are still very much influenced by their historical function(s) as inflectional markers, and that this in turn impacts how they are understood and used by native speakers.

The –(e)n- linking element, for instance, is derived from the genitive form of weak nouns (i.e. those whose possessive form requires the addition of –n, rather than the standard –(e)s) and, when applied to weak feminine forms, often allows a plural interpretation. Similarly, –er- is also often associated with a plural reading, and is dependent on other morphological features of the noun it attaches to, such as gender and declension.

Sometimes the same element can be traced back to two distinct grammatical origins, and these origins impact the rules by which it combines with other morphemes nowadays. For example, –e- is historically a possessive marker for plurals, but it also emerged as a linking element for short words like Tag (“day”). In the latter case, there are a set number of cases where –e– occurs, and it cannot be paired with new words. In the former case, we see it pop up often with compounds involving animals, e.g. Hund (“dog”) + e + Futter (“food”) = Hundefutter (“dog food”), where a plural interpretation of the noun it attaches to is often preferred.

Finally, there are –(e)ns- and –es-, both of which can only be used with a set of specific nouns in defined contexts. Compounds involving these elements are the ones that are probably easiest to just memorize.

Although the purely morphological explanations are perhaps more palatable to a general audience, the fact is that different aspects of language – like morphology and phonology – don’t exist on entirely different planes. They have no choice but to interact, and typically not in very clear ways. Thus it is not surprising that many scholars have begun to argue that neither morphology nor phonology on its own accounts entirely for the quirks of German compound formation. Additionally, Nübling and Szczepaniak assert that grammatical rules that apply at the phonological level – are more formalized and, thus, easier for speakers to deduce compared to those that apply at abstract levels like inflectional class. In other words, rules that apply across-the-board to certain phonological contexts, such as after specific vowels or when two specific consonants appear next to each other, are easier to figure out than those that target more abstract notions like grammatical gender.

So next time on Things Nobody Asked Me to Write, I’ll summarize what I found out about the phonological analyses of German compound linking elements, and what that means for me as a second language learner.

Sources

Aronoff, M., Fuhrhop, N. Restricting Suffix Combinations In German And English: Closing Suffixes And The Monosuffix Constraint. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20, 451–490 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015858920912

Nübling, D., Szczepaniak, R. On the way from morphology to phonology: German linking elements and the role of the phonological word. Morphology 18, 1–25 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-008-9120-7

Nübling, D., Szczepaniak, R. Linking elements in German Origin, Change, Functionalization. Morphology 23, 67–89 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-013-9213-9