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.

A book on a table

A lid on a jar

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 could your virtual assistant “spell” in Chinese? (Part 1/2)

** For relevant background on Chinese orthography, read my last post. **

As you may or may not know, in my spare/procrastinating time I like to read about machine learning and computational linguistics. As I do so, it’s made me more and more curious about how certain things in our daily lives work… like virtual assistants. Back when I first started taking a computational linguistics class during my Master’s program, I drafted a whole blog post about how much it taught me to appreciate the mechanisms behind virtual assistants. That appreciation does indeed continue to this day.

A few weeks ago I was reminiscing about a particular Mandarin teacher I had in middle school. Whenever we asked her how to write something, instead of writing it on the board, she would verbally dictate it to us using strokes, radicals, or other characters. It drove us crazy as teen language learners but of course, in hindsight, it really helped me understand the way that characters are constructed.

Anyway, that sparked an interesting idea: namely, what if I were able to ask the lady in my phone for help when I forgot a character nowadays? That would be pretty neat! I started wondering how we could actually make that happen from a linguistic perspective. That, of course, is precisely what I wanted to talk to you about today.

As far as I’m aware, this isn’t an actual function that’s available on any of the major current virtual assistants (although I’m not as familiar with the current offerings in Mainland China). So of course, this is all just a thought exercise – the best kind of exercise, IMO.

What goes into speech recognition

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a huge and rapidly-expanding field that I certainly can’t condense into a single blog post. But just for some appreciation, let’s think for a moment about how computers have to go about understanding spoken human language.

At its core, oral language is just a bunch of acoustic signals organized in a certain way. There are patterns and rules that govern it: for a simple example, the two sounds /p/ and /f/ never appear together at the beginning of a word in English. At the sentence level, there are also certain combinations of words that just never appear together – like the happily. And in other cases, there are groups of words that appear together quite often, like the and woman, or language and acquisition (okay, that one might be a stretch, but it is certainly the case in my sphere of influence). Discovering many of these rules and patterns is a simple matter of statistics and probability: babies amass a huge amount of firsthand data throughout the first few years of life and use their predictive abilities to determine what is and is not a possible word/sentence in their language(s) before they can even speak for themselves.

Computers, as you may know, are even better at math and statistics than babies… or at least, they’re faster. That means that we can teach them to recognize speech using statistical learning, just like babies! All they need is a bunch of data (and maybe some rules).

When it comes to creating a virtual assistant, the basic task is to teach the computer to link a particular sequence of sounds to an action. The tricky thing is that it also has to tolerate natural variation in the speech signal (because every voice is different and can be impacted by environmental factors like the position of the body), syntax (because there are many ways to say the same thing), and word choice. At the same time, the model you’re using shouldn’t be so tolerant that anything can trigger a response. This is the basic task that computational linguists working on NLU need to accomplish.

Generally, an ideally tolerant NLU system can be accomplished with a whole lot of data and machine learning algorithms. Since I’m first and foremost a linguist, the details I’m interested in have more to do with the way the training data can be prepared, understood, and validated, rather than the actual algorithms being used.

Suffice it to say that you need a lot of data (also known as “training data,” which is what you feed into the model), in the form of annotated audio clips to help the algorithm learn how to segment speech, interpret variation, and translate all of that into actionable requests. For a more concrete example of what that means, let’s look back at my original question and consider some potential problems it could present for NLU and, by extension, a virtual assistant.

Setting up the Answer

Before your favorite virtual assistant can respond to a request for information (like how to write a character), it of course needs to be able to access the answer. In this case, that means you need to compile a database of individual characters, their components, and rules for breaking them down. If you need a refresher on the ways that Chinese characters are written, check out my last post.

Learning Radicals

As we know, there are a finite number of radicals (somewhere around 200) used in Chinese characters, many of which evolved from pictographs thousands of years ago. Some radicals have different appearances depending on their position in the character: for example, 日 “sun” may appear more narrow when it makes up one side of a character, as in 明, or it can be short and stout when it appears on the top, as in 早. It might also be smaller or bigger depending on how much real estate it takes up compared to other parts of the character, since all characters should fit into a s square box. If we want the computer to be able to recognize all the radicals, then the different possible forms of each radical should be included in the training dataset. That means you need several instances of each radical so that the algorithm has an opportunity to note its appearance in multiple characters.

Learning Strokes

There are also a finite number of strokes, each with their own name, along with rules for the order in which you combine them. This means that the virtual assistant has to know the names of strokes as well as the proper ways to list them when describing a given character. That isn’t necessarily straightforward because the rules that govern stroke order tend to depend primarily on visuospatial characteristics. In other words, it isn’t an absolute rule that all horizontal strokes have to precede vertical strokes: a vertical stroke might come first if it is to the left of the horizontal one, or some such thing. Certain rules must give way to others, depending on the particular character in question. That feels quite tricky to teach a computer.

Two different learning mechanisms come to mind, depending on a variety of factors. The first option is to teach the virtual assistant these rules, including a rough hierarchy of how they are applied (i.e. when one trumps the other), and then have it dissect a set of characters in a supervised learning paradigm. The independent variables would be the list of rules, along with a set of characters decomposed into their individual strokes (that’s a separate task for another program – let’s just assume it’s already been done). The dependent variable is the order of strokes for a given character. Humans would then need to verify the output to check whether the appropriate stroke order has been proposed for each character. This might be less time-consuming to implement, since only a handful of rules need to be fed into the model, but would require more post-hoc verification. It would also require another program that first dissects characters into an unordered list of strokes.

The second option would essentially require the model to deduce stroke order given a data set consisting of characters and their corresponding stroke orders. This would require more data preparation initially: someone would need to determine the appropriate number of characters to include in the training data (to avoid under- or overfitting the model) and ensure that these characters accurately represent the types of possible layouts in Chinese characters. That could require taking the time to do a visual analysis of the types of possible structures and their frequency. Then they would need to make sure that the set of characters shown to the model as training data is proportional.

In this case, the independent variable would be a complete character, and the dependent variable would be the way the model breaks it down into its stroke, radical, and/or smaller character components. Training data would explicitly provide the computer with examples of how characters can be segmented (e.g. 饿 = [饣, 我]).

Once you have a way to break down characters, you need another database of that links the written forms with their pronunciations. To account for things like interspeaker variation, you might even have multiple speakers of different demographics (old/young, different genders, different geographic locations, etc) saying the same thing. Diverse data helps the model ignore the red herrings (like tone of voice) and focus on what’s really important. Again, assuming you have a virtual assistant that already understands Mandarin, the capacity to segment speech and identify words should already be present, and just needs to be tweaked a bit for our specific purposes.

Understanding the Words

Most words in Modern Mandarin are polysyllabic, combining the meaning of two or more single-syllable morphemes (e.g. 电 “electricity” + 脑 “brain” → 电脑 “computer”). There are also a ton of homophones: a single syllable can actually map onto different morphemes and, therefore, characters. For instance, shì can mean “to be”  是, “thing” 事, “person” 士, or “generation” 世. If this seems unnecessarily confusing, think about bear and bare in English and how easy it is for native speakers to figure out the intended meaning in an actual sentence. Lots of languages deal with homophony to some degree or another. Just like in English, in Chinese, we can clarify which particular meaning of a homophone is meant by using it in a word, sentence, or phrase in which it frequently appears, or where only one alternative makes sense. Going back to the English example, this would be like saying “How do you spell bear, as in ‘I cannot bear it’?”

When confronted with a particular phonetic (= sound) form that could map onto multiple characters, the virtual assistant can do the exact same thing. It can prompt the user according to the most likely target, or else ask the user for clarification.

If the assistant guesses the context (e.g. “Do you mean shì as in shì rén [‘scholar’]?”), then the user simply has to answer yes or no. But how would the assistant decide which one to guess first?

Once again, we can use statistics and probability! Looking back at the list of possible meanings of shì, you might have an intuition that some are more frequently used than others. The meaning “to be,” for instance, probably comes up a lot more often than “generation.” This information could help the virtual assistant determine which meaning to target first: it can ask about the more frequently occurring words first, and then move down the list of possibilities in order of likelihood.

Astute readers may have already noticed that this presents another psycholinguistic issue: more frequently-used characters should also more likely to be remembered, therefore users are presumably less likely to need help writing them by hand. Is the solution then to start with the least frequent character? For some homophones, starting with one or the other might not make a huge difference, if there are only a couple possibilities. However, for a syllable like shì, there are probably 2 dozen possible characters, some of them very niche or archaic. If you instruct the virtual assistant to always start with the most (in)frequent possibility, it might take several minutes of dialogue to arrive at the real target – not a very user-friendly experience.

Perhaps more effective would be simply allowing the user to specify the target character right off the bat, or with prompting if necessary. Most Mandarin speakers would do this anyway when room for confusion exists (for what it’s worth, I would never just ask someone “How do you write shì?” with no other context).

If the virtual assistant either prompts the user to provide context or the user does so in the initial query, then this issue can already be solved by whatever mechanisms exist for handling homophones in other contexts. Like I said, Mandarin has a whole lot of homophones, but in most cases the intended meaning can be discerned easily from context and world knowledge. If the virtual assistant already supports Mandarin as a language, then mechanisms to handle homophones would already be in place. At a basic level, n-gram probabilities (i.e. the likelihood of a certain word appearing in a certain context), the same algorithm that is used for predictive text, could process the user’s request to determine which is the target syllable: namely, the one that most frequently appears in combination with the words around it.

These are some of the word-level considerations that would need to go into a functional character “speller” for virtual assistants. There is, however, yet another level that we have to consider when programming our robot: the syntactic and semantic level. Namely, how does the virtual assistant interpret different word orders, vocabulary choices, and syntactic dependencies?

Tune in next week to find out!

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:

1. Top before bottom
2. Left before right
3. Horizontal before vertical
4. 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.

9 Reasons Your Child Should Participate in Language Development Research

One day your child comes home from school or camp with yet another a stack of papers to be signed and returned at your earliest convenience. At the top of a sheet stamped with the local university’s logo, you see the heading: “Consent to participate in a research study.” Your child has been invited to participate in a linguistic experiment. You are instantly wary; perhaps you have watched a documentary about the Stanford Prison Experiment, read an article about MK-Ultra, or followed any of the numerous scandals relating to personal data harvesting on social media platforms. Let’s be honest, there are plenty of reasons to mistrust scientists, especially if you or your child are a member of a marginalized community.

That being said, in this day and age, language acquisition experiments are really nothing to be scared of. There are no medical procedures involved, no psychological warfare, and no abuses of data (as far as I’m aware). On the contrary, it’s often pretty fun for the children, not to mention extremely helpful for people whose careers depend on successful research projects. So, I thought that I would put some information out there to attempt to quell the general public’s fear of the word “experiment” and help caregivers make a more informed decision about when and how to allow their child to participate in language acquisition research.

1. Every child has a something unique to contribute

No two children have exactly the same language experiences, and that creates a lot of potential for variation in the way that they acquire and use their target language(s). While some differences — such as mono- versus multilingualism — are more obvious, there are plenty more subtle variations in the ways that children experience language. For instance, the way that adults speak to children (i.e. the words they use, common sentence structures, and even the rate of speech) varies wildly both across and within cultures. In some families, caregivers may engage in a constant dialogue with their children from Day 1, even if the conversation is mostly one-sided during the early years. In other families, talking to an infant who is incapable of responding might be seen as strange. Even birth order can have an effect on the way that children experience language — older siblings are often a significant source of language input for younger children, which means that they provide a lot of primary linguistic data for their younger siblings to work with. In order to obtain a well-rounded view of the ways that language develops and the limits of its variation, we have to take all of these factors into account. Your child’s unique background can contribute to that knowledge in a huge way!

2. They might learn something about the language(s) they speak

One of my favorite things to do with older children is to ask them what they think I was trying to find out after an experiment is completed. They’re almost never correct, but it does prompt them to reflect on the language that they used throughout the course of the activity, and in doing so they often make pretty astute observations. Even when they struggle to understand or produce a particular structure, the repeated exposure throughout the experiment allows them to grapple with the way that a specific meaning is mapped onto a linguistic form. It’s also not completely unusual for children’s performance to improve during the course of an experiment — there is definitely an educational function that should be more systematically studied.

3. All materials are safe and appropriate for use with children

All researchers working with human participants have to submit detailed proposals to an ethics approval board before they are allowed to collect data. For vulnerable populations such as children, the vetting process is even more extensive. All of the experimental materials (meaning the pictures that participants will see, the sentences they will hear, and anything else the child will be exposed to during an experiment) must be submitted and approved by the ethics board of the university and/or country, and these organizations don’t just give the green light to anybody. In the US and Europe (at least the countries I’ve worked in), anyone who will be in direct contact with children must undergo the same screening as public school staff, which typically involves fingerprinting and a background check. Institutions put a lot of effort into making sure that research studies are conducted ethically, and those who violate ethics policies can be subject to extensive disciplinary measures, including legal action.

4. Your data is protected

When your child participates in an experiment, some personal information might be collected in order to be used in the analysis later on, in addition to any of the results from the experiment itself. All of this information must be stored in a manner compliant with data protection laws (i.e. the GDPR in EU countries) to ensure that it is not misused. In practical terms, this means that information like what language(s) your child speaks, their age, and other relevant demographics might be collected and stored on a server at the university, but they are not linked to your child’s name. Instead, each participant in an experiment is assigned a random identifier, like a sequence of numbers, a pseudonym, or some other code. The only document that contains any real name is usually the consent form (since you have to sign it), which is stored as a physical copy in a file cabinet somewhere, or else on a separate, encrypted hard drive. Institutions have strict guidelines about how experimental data can be stored, and the specifics should be outlined on the information sheet that you receive before consenting.

Researchers also cannot use your data for any purpose other than what they told you it would be used for: for example, if the consent form says that the data will be used for publications relating to XYZ Research Project, they can’t then give it to a colleague to use for ABC Project, even if that colleague is in the same department. If it says that the data will be used in scientific publications, then they can’t post excerpts on social media to show their friends how cool their job is. And of course, they can’t sell it to Big Tech to supplement the egregiously low wages that the university pays them. Furthermore, you are allowed to withdraw consent at any point before or after the experiment, in which case the researchers are legally required to promptly delete all your data. All you have to do is email the primary investigator (PI), whose contact information is listed on the information sheet.

5. You might earn some money

Lots of labs have a budget for reimbursing participants, even if they do not complete the entire study. Of course, we aren’t allowed to give children actual money, but we will often give them a small toy or some stickers to thank them for their time. Alternatively, caregivers might receive monetary compensation or a gift card.

6. You can do many of the studies online

Thanks to the pandemic, online studies are more common than ever before. There are numerous websites where you can sign up to participate in developmental research from the comfort of your own home, such as MIT Lookit. That’s a great way to keep the kids occupied for a few minutes during school vacations.

7. It’s fun!

Acquisition researchers spend a lot of time making their experiments as fun and engaging as possible — after all, you aren’t going to get good data if the kids are just trying to finish the activity as quickly as possible. Most experiments nowadays are basically games with an underlying purpose. I always find that when I collect data at schools or summer camps, only a handful of families initially consent before I start coming in regularly. Inevitably, the number of willing participants increases exponentially as I spend more time with the kids, through no conscious effort on my part. Once the children discover that the experiment is basically just a language game, they tell their friends about it, and suddenly half the class is going home and begging their parents to let them participate. I’ve had plenty of kids ask me if they can play the games again (and occasionally I oblige, if I have time). They genuinely enjoy figuring out the “word puzzles” and winning the games that we have in store for them (spoiler alert: the games are rigged so they always win).

8. Findings from language development studies can have huge implications for educational materials

Lots of findings from acquisition research can be used to improve the language and materials that are used in education. Have you ever wondered whether your child really understands the explanations in their schoolbooks? Or how children learn to label abstract grammatical categories like “noun” or “adjective”? Linguistics research can help answer that question and indicate better ways to formulate explanations and teach lessons on grammar, reading, and writing. There are entire conferences dedicated to this exact topic, such as LiDi.

9. Findings from language development studies can have huge implications for diagnosis of language disorders

Did you know that multilingual children are at risk of being incorrectly diagnosed with a language delay? This is because most of the tests and screening materials for language delays are based on the “normal” developmental trajectory of white, upper-middle class, monolingual children. For a long time, it was assumed that bilingual children had weaker linguistic knowledge than same-age monolinguals in each of their respective languages. This was actually because researchers had only accounted for their knowledge of one language, not both. When you consider the words and structures a bilingual child knows in both their languages, oftentimes they come out ahead of their monolingual peers. This trend of misdiagnosis is a big problem for lots of reasons: first, it means that many (misinformed) pediatricians and teachers continue to encourage parents not to teach their child their native language because they believe that it is somehow damaging to their development. Second, it means that resources are misallocated to help children who don’t actually need any help! On the other hand, without adequate understanding of how multilingual children may differ from monolinguals, we might also miss out on some other signs of disordered language that don’t typically present (or present differently) in one population or the other.

Suffice it to say that if caregivers hadn’t consented to let their bilingual children participate in research, we might never have made that critical discovery about bilingual development. If only certain demographics of children are participating in linguistic research (like monolinguals, only children, or professors’ kids), we aren’t obtaining a sample that truly represents the population as a whole, and all of the conclusions we draw might be biased against other demographics.

Bonus: You might help someone get a degree

It may seem obvious, but it is worth noting that lots of language acquisition research is conducted by students, for whom completion of the project is a requisite for their degree. That means if they don’t have participants, they don’t get a degree (or they have to go back to the drawing board and waste potentially years of work). Finding willing participants is one of the hardest parts of conducting acquisition research, and it has only gotten harder in these post-pandemic times. If you have the time and resources, and you think your child would enjoy it, you might consider helping out your friendly neighborhood acquisition researcher.

Proposing the Research

Hello world! Long time no see. You might not be surprised to know that this whole “getting a PhD” thing has been relatively time-consuming, and has left me with minimal energy reserves for frivolous blogging.

Nevertheless, I am back and ready to use this platform for more self-reflection and discovery. Maybe it will also help me see where exactly I need to be doing some more review, and it will help you to find out what I’ve been doing for the past seven months. Yay!

So, what have I been doing with all my time, if not trying to come up with phonetic analyses of ventriloquism or explaining the historical development of homophony to my father? The answer, in short, is that I’ve been writing and refining my research proposal. If you tuned in but actually don’t care to read the full essay, that’s all you really need to know. Otherwise, read on to find out more about what that means, and what it is I’m proposing.

For those of you outside academia, the research proposal is exactly what it sounds like: a 20-30 page paper in which I outline what my dissertation will be about and why it’s a topic worth researching. “Here’s what we know,” “here’s what we don’t know,” and “here’s how I plan to find out,” in other words. In my particular program, there is no deadline to complete the proposal, but we’re strongly advised to get it done within the first year, because it helps you establish a trajectory and also helps your supervisor/other professors to see that you’re on the right track. Seeing as I officially started in November last year, I’m more or less right on time.

For the most part, I’ve just been whittling away at my various ideas and cobbling together a coherent roadmap for the remainder of my studies. Back in June, I gave a presentation at my department’s research colloquium to get feedback on the initial ideas for my proposal, and then in July I started drafting. Now I’m finished with the first draft and waiting for feedback from my supervisor, and then I’ll rework it and submit it to the university.

What I’m Actually Proposing

As you may recall, my dissertation topic deals with recursion, which in linguistics, is the idea of embedding a syntactic structure inside itself. For example, in an utterance like Wendy’s boyfriend’s ship’s captain, each instance of [noun]’s is embedded in another; thus, you have to figure out what/who Wendy’s boyfriend refers to before you can figure out what Wendy’s boyfriend’s ship refers to, and so on. The types of structures that allow recursion vary across languages, and are relatively challenging for children/foreign language learners to acquire.

People have looked at the acquisition of recursion in a number of languages including English, Mandarin, Tamil, Japanese, Spanish, and German, and have proposed a number of different explanations for why it’s so difficult for children and language learners. One interesting aspect of this prior work is that the age of acquisition – that is, the age at which most children can reliably interpret recursion like an adult – varies pretty extensively, from as young as four to as old as seven. This variation is not only seen across languages, but also within languages. I would hazard a guess that this has to do with the experimental methods and differing definitions of “acquisition,” but there could also be some important differences between the structures and languages themselves. These potential differences are one thing that I am interested in, and that I want to look at for my doctoral work.

The other major question that my research deals with is the potential impact of acquiring two languages at once on acquiring recursion, particularly when those two languages differ structurally. This taps into a major focus of contemporary bilingual research, which is the degree to which a bilingual child’s two languages interact with one another throughout the course of development. In the past 2-3 decades, we have found that bilingual children’s development does tend to differ from monolingual children both qualitatively and quantitatively, but the extent of and the contexts in which these differences occur have yet to be determined.

There have been three prior studies on bilingual children’s acquisition of recursion compared to monolinguals, each with a different result: one study (Leandro and Amaral, 2014) showed that the bilingual children did better on a comprehension task compared with monolinguals of the same age. Another study (Avram et al., 2021) found that seven-year-old bilinguals performed less accurately than seven-year-old monolinguals in a different comprehension test. And finally, Pérez-Leroux et al. (2017) found no difference in the frequency with which bilingual and monolingual children used recursive phrases to describe pictures. In other words, being bilingual could accelerate, delay, or have no effect at all on the acquisition of recursion. 🤷‍♀️

Of course, a few things that may have impacted the outcomes of previous work, which I hope to control for in my own experiments. Perhaps most important is that each of the aforementioned studies looked at a different language pair: the first one looked at English and Wapichana, the second at Romanian and Hungarian, and the third at English and Spanish. Therefore, characteristics specific to those languages may have influenced the way that bilingual kids interpret or produce recursion. One possibility that was mentioned in the L+A and the Avram studies is whether the target languages differed in terms of branching direction. In the L+A study, where the bilinguals seemed to outperform monolinguals, both languages had left-branching possessives. On the other hand, in the Avram study, where the bilinguals did not do as well as the monolinguals, the children’s two languages had conflicting branching directions for the target structure. This led the authors of both studies to propose that structural similarities could either accelerate or delay bilingual children’s acquisition of recursion.

This proposal regarding recursion taps into a more general hypothesis by Hulk and Müller (2000), who suggest two criteria for determining whether a particular structure will be vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence in bilingual development:

1. The structure is not “purely” syntactic, but involves a connection between syntax and some other module of grammar;
2. There is a (perceived) degree of overlap between the two languages

If a particular phenomenon in language meets both of these requirements, they argue, then it is likely that the bilingual child will show evidence of one language influencing the other. Setting aside the first criterion, #2 predicts that, if a bilingual child encounters a recursive structure such as Wendy’s boyfriend’s ship’s captain in both their languages, they might use evidence from one language to support their development in the other.

Alternatively, the child might speak a language where the branching directions differ: imagine that in Language A, the “head” of Wendy’s boyfriend’s ship’s captain is “captain,” like in English. But in Language B, the head of the phrase is actually “Wendy,” and everything else is a modifier! This is confusing, and may cause the child to incorrectly analyze the structure in one or both languages. They might decide to go with the “head = last” approach, as in Language A, and therefore misinterpret the meaning of the phrase in Language B, or vice versa. They could also decide to just try both interpretations in both languages, resulting in a lower success rate in both. Of course, ultimately, they will sort it all out, but the path they take to get there is what interests me.

I’m working on the design for an experiment now that will address the comprehension of two types of recursion by children acquiring English and Mandarin Chinese at the same time. The two types of recursion differ in terms of branching direction: possessive structures, such as Wendy’s boyfriend’s ship’s captain, are left-branching in both English and Mandarin, with the head of the phrase at the end. Locative structures, on the other hand, are left-branching in Mandarin, but right-branching in English. For example, an expression like the cinema next to the post office next to the bank in English is a mirror image in Mandarin: 银行旁边的邮局旁边的电影院 bank next-to post office next-to cinema. This might constitute confusing evidence for a child, who might prefer to assume that all structures in both languages are left-branching, and therefore may have more trouble acquiring recursive locatives in English.

Thus, if there is an impact of branching direction on the acquisition of recursion specifically, then we would expect the children to perform similarly on possessives (which have the same branching direction in both English and Mandarin) but not on locatives (which are right-branching in English but left-branching in Mandarin). This is what I hope to figure out using a comprehension “game.”

That’s the bare-bones sketch of my current plan and related activities. Last week, I’ve spent most of my time reading up on theories of bilingualism and cross-linguistic influence, and will continue doing so this week. After I have re-worked my proposal and gotten the approval from my supervisor, then I will start ironing out the details of the experiment, which is a fun but time-consuming process that probably warrants its own blog post(s). And then, at some point after that, I will be ready to start recruiting participants.

The good news is that I feel like I know what I’m doing more each day. Stay tuned to see what happens next!

Deciphering German Compounds pt. 2: Phonology

For a quick recap, one thing that has irked me since I began my foray into learning German is that there doesn’t appear to be much rhyme or reason to the way that compound words employ (or don’t employ) linking elements between the constituents. Sometimes, as in a word like Abendessen (“evening” + “meal” AKA “dinner”), you simply squish two nouns together and there you have it: a compound. In other cases, like Geburtstag (“birth” + s + “day”), you have to add one of several linking elements, which are essentially meaningless phonemes or strings of phonemes that – somehow – make the compound well-formed. There are a number of linking elements in modern German, some more productive than others, that occur in different morphological and phonological contexts, none of which are particularly easy to deduce as a non-native speaker.

In my last post, I looked at these linking elements from a morphological perspective, citing authors like Nübling and Szczepaniak whose analyses of German linking elements look at the way they have evolved alongside the rest of the language. Such analyses demonstrate how rules and formulations that once “made sense” to the average speaker have been skewed due to the natural forces of language change, so that now it is much less obvious when certain elements should be used. Their conclusion that the most productive linking element in contemporary German is the –s– morpheme, which serves a few different functional purposes in the language as it is currently spoken. Other elements such as -(e)n-, -e-, -(e)ns- and –es- are far more limited in their applicability, and for the most part cannot be applied to newly-created compound words.

This, for me, cleared a lot of things up. However, historical morphology only tells half the story when it comes to these linking elements. The other half can be accounted for by phonological considerations – that is, the way that the words actually sound. In their 2008 paper, Nübling and Szczepaniak argue that phonology, particularly prosody, also significantly influences the distribution and use of the linking element –s– in modern German.

The requisite background knowledge for their explanation is as follows: in any language, certain syllables receive more stress than others. In the word* “English,” for instance, the first syllable (Eng-) is louder than the second syllable (-lish). In phonology, the syllables that receive stress are known as feet, and languages tend to show preferences for having their feet in consistent places. A trochee is a word whose foot is the first, rather than the last, syllable – so in the previous example, the word “English” is considered a trochee. German, in its modern form, is a language that strongly prefers trochees, i.e. it prefers words whose foot is the first, rather than the second, syllable.

In their phonological analysis, Nübling and Szczepaniak assert that the linking elements -es-, -er-, -e-, and –(e)ns– pair only with monosyllabic words – like Hund (“dog”) – to create trochees and therefore improve the phonological status of the word when it appears in a compound. Basically, adding one of these elements make the word more phonologically “normal.” However, the remaining linking element, –s-, cannot serve this purpose (i.e. create an unstressed syllable) because syllables must contain a vowel, therefore adding –s– alone to a word doesn’t do anything as far as its number of syllables is concerned. What, then, is –s– doing, and why is it so heavily distributed in modern German compound words?

In the course of its evolution, German has taken a number of steps to optimize the structures of its words, both by reducing their size (ideally to one foot per word) and their form (by making the boundaries between words more clear). One of the changes brought about by this optimization has been to increase the number and quality of consonants at the beginning and end (the “edges”) of a word, while deleting or reducing them in the middle. This allows users to more easily discern where the edges of a word most likely are, even if they haven’t actually heard it before, and creates more noticeable contrasts between individual words in a phrase or sentence. However, not all pre-existing words can be optimized to the same extent, which causes certain structures to defy the phonological “ideal” for German words.

This brings us to linking –s-, and its distribution in contemporary compounds. Nübling and Szczepaniak point out that you don’t see this element added to words like Auto, which end in a vowel. Rather, it seems to apply only to words that already end in a consonant, making them more complex from a phonetic perspective. The authors thus propose that linking -s- is more likely to occur in words that stray from the “ideal” structure of a word in German, i.e. those that are not trochees or those than contain multiple feet. So, words like Beruf (with stress on the second syllable) will take an -s- when they appear in a compound (e.g. Berufsfahrer = Beruf [“job”] + s + Fahrer [“driver”]), but Anruf (with stress on the first syllable) will remain bare. The addition of the –s– at the edge of the first constituent in a compound serves to further emphasize the right edge of the word, a task usually accomplished by consistent stress patterns.

This analysis is supported by a corpus search, revealing that 85% of words containing an unstressed prefix (such as be-, ver-, ent-, and ge-) are followed by a linking –s– when used in a compound, whereas this was the case for only 36% of words containing a stressed prefix (e.g. an-, um-, and über-). In other words, if the first constituent is a trochee, it is far less likely to need a linking element. So, while it is not a hard and fast rule, the generalization that –s– indicates phonologically ill-formed words does appear to be a pretty solid way to predict whether a new compound will contain a linking -s– or not.

So, I suppose what I’ve learned from this exercise is that there is, in fact, some degree of consistency in the way linking elements are used in German. I reckon I’ll be considering the stress patterns a lot more carefully now when I try to guess how a particular compound is formed, and maybe I’ll be right more often than I previously have been. Maybe this will help other German learners, or maybe it won’t, but even if it doesn’t I hope that you at least found it interesting.

*For the sake of full transparency, the type of “word” I am actually referring to in the second half of this post is a phonological word, which is not always the same as a morphological word. If you’re a linguist/phonetician, then you probably already know what the difference is, and if you’re not but you want to know anyway, check out this article for a general overview.

Sources

Ewen, Colin J., and Harry Van Der Hulst. The Phonological Structure of Words: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

Nübling, Damaris, Szczepaniak, Renata. 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

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:

1. Complex compounds: Hof (“courtyard”) + Mauer (“wall”) = Hofmauer (“courtyard wall”), vs. Friede (“peace”) + Hof (“courtyard”) + Mauer (“wall”) = Friedhofsmauer (“graveyard wall”)
2. Phrase -> compound: Richtung (“direction/trend”) + weisen (“to point”) = Richtungsweisend (“trendsetting”)
3. 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

Let’s learn about Singlish!

Lately I’ve become more aware of just how little I know about the dialects of English spoken by non-white communities, which is especially ridiculous considering I grew up surrounded by so many people from different countries. In my undergrad linguistics classes, we only ever really focused on varieties of English spoken in the first diaspora countries, also known as the Inner Circle – these are predominantly white countries colonized by the British in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. However, there is an entire additional layer to the ever-expanding circle of English-speaking communities made up primarily of non-white populations in Asia and Africa, to whom English was introduced by colonizers in the past ~200 years or so. Just like in the US, Australia, and Canada, once English was introduced to these new communities, it began to change – this is an inevitable result when speakers of a common language become spread out across a large area. This is a natural part of linguistic change, and is in fact the reason that everyone from Europe doesn’t speak a common language today – English, Italian, German, Romanian, Swedish, and all the other languages spoken in continental Europe (minus Basque and Finnish) all evolved from a common ancestor known as Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE). Such is life.

The reason I bring this up is to demonstrate how ridiculous it is that many of us are so staunchly opposed to varieties of English that differ from our own. In school, we are taught that there is a “right” way to speak and write English, and that not following these rules will result in horrendous miscommunication at best, and absolute anarchy at worst. However, as anyone who has ever used “who” instead of “whom” can tell you, this is in fact not the case – the goal of language is to understand and be understood, so it stands to reason that we wouldn’t make changes to our language that inhibit this goal. As any linguist can tell you, variation – especially in a language as widely spoken as English – is both normal and fascinating to study, since understanding the processes that contribute to language change is essential for understanding the entity of language as a whole, and how humans came to be so good at it.

Nevertheless, there are a number of social and political reasons that we continue to perpetuate the idea that there is a “right” way to use language. Because it is so closely tied to identity and culture, language is often one of the first things targeted by hostile forces to weaken and disenfranchise their victims. Think about it: without a common language, how are oppressed peoples going to organize and resist their oppressors? If new generations lose out on access to previous generations’ knowledge because they lack a way to communicate, then many of the traditions, philosophies, and values that define a culture can be effectively wiped out. This is exactly what European colonizers did in North and South America by kidnapping indigenous children, teaching them English (or Spanish or Portuguese), and preventing them from learning their ancestors’ language. New generations were raised to both think and speak like Europeans, so that they had neither the desire nor the tools to effectively resist invasion.

The same thing happened in countries like India, Hong Kong, Nigeria, the Philippines, and dozens more countries in Asia and Africa, but slightly more recently than in the Americas. Although all of these countries already had rich cultures and their own linguistic history, invaders from Europe, especially England, forced them to learn a new language in order to adapt to the new social order and communicate with the people in charge. As new generations began to be educated in English and it became increasingly difficult to function in society without knowledge of this once-foreign language, the English used in day-to-day life in these places began to change for a number of reasons, all of them natural and expected.

That was a very brief overview of linguistic imperialism and some of the political motivations for repressing certain languages but not others. By demonizing a particular language and the people who speak it, it becomes far easier to sell the idea that users of a minority language are inferior to users of a majority language. It allows us to only be confronted with ideas from people who are similar to us – because again, language and culture are closely intertwined – and to dismiss opposing opinions by attacking the way they are communicated, rather than what is communicated. And that’s just not right.

I’m going to be teaching myself about a number of different English dialects spoken by communities in the Outer Circle and beyond, and want to invite you on this journey with me. I’m going to read and summarize a number of academic articles, as well as those written for a general audience, both as a way to reinforce my own knowledge and to share it with others. I want non-linguists to come away from this and future posts with an appreciation for the way that language naturally varies across the globe, and to understand that linguistic diversity is not something we should condemn or attempt to snuff out. Language in all its forms is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated. No language is “better” than another. We politicized them by choice, and we can depoliticize them by choice as well.

So, I wanted to start off learning about the variety of English spoken in Singapore, commonly known as Singlish. I chose Singlish because of my personal connection to Singapore, and because my knowledge of Mandarin and Sinitic languages puts me in a good place to explain the relationships between the languages spoken in Southeast Asia and how they impact the evolution of English in these places.

Many of the unique characteristics of Singlish result from extended contact between British English and local languages including Malay, Hokkien, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Because of this, some syntactic (= grammatical) and phonological (= sound-based) aspects of Singlish are linked directly to similar features in one or more of the contact languages. Singlish speakers may also engage in a practice known as codemixing, whereby words and structures from several languages are used by the same speaker in the course of a single conversation. Codemixing is incredibly common in multilingual communities and allows its users to express themselves extremely effectively. It also helps to bridge cultural or knowledge gaps between different communities, which is extremely important in societies where several different cultural and ethnic groups coexist, like they do in Singapore.

For example, many Chinese languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, use syllables at the end of a sentence to express information about the speaker’s attitude. The syllable le了 (pronounced “luh” in Mandarin) expresses a change in state, and is most often used for the past perfect tense i.e. when an action has been completed. The sentence 我吃饱了 wo chi bao le lit. ‘I eat-full LE’ implies that although it was not previously the case, the speaker is now full – their status has changed. Some scholars have compared Mandarin le with English already, but in reality, there is no English equivalent that performs exactly the same linguistic role as le. Thus, Singlish has adopted words like le (known as ‘particles’ in academic terms) from Cantonese, Mandarin, and other local languages to serve the same purpose as they do in their original language, but using their rough English translations. A Singlish speaker, then, might say ‘I [am] full already’, effectively using already as a substitute for Mandarin le, indicating that their status has changed.

Note that the above is an example of a non-standard English dialect incorporating characteristics of another language because British English lacks it – the users are adding an additional way of expressing meaning to the grammar, not detracting from it.

A number of English words have taken on new meanings and applications due to contact with other Asian languages in Singapore, including can, also, already, and only, all of which can appear at the end of a Singlish sentence to somehow alter its meaning in the same way that a particle would in other local languages. Can attaches to the end of a sentence to make it a yes/no question – performing a similar linguistic role as ma 吗 in Mandarin. Only replaces Mandarin sentence-final er yi 而已. This actually adds to the expressive abilities of its users, most of whom are also native speakers of a Chinese language, and may therefore feel more natural expressing certain meanings this way, rather than through other methods like intonation.

Another neat feature of Singlish is its way of expressing passive sentences, e.g. something like The ball was hit by Jacinda, where the object of the sentence (the ball) effectively switches places with the subject (Jacinda). This is contrary to the “default” word order in English, which goes Subject-Verb-Object (e.g. Jacinda hit the ball). Other languages may express passive relationships in different ways, sometimes by changing the word order and sometimes by doing something else, like adding a suffix. Mandarin does it by changing the word order and adding the suffix bei 被, e.g. 我被他打了 wo bei ta da le lit. ‘I BEI him hit LE’ (I was hit by him). Singlish uses constructions derived from both Malay and Mandarin to express passive relationships. Kena, borrowed from a Malay word meaning ‘to come into contact with’, may replace was in the aforementioned example in Singlish: I kena hit [by him]. According to Bao and Wee (1999), kena implies victimization or generally negative undertones when used in Singlish, so it is used in contexts where the object/person is negatively affected by the action. On the other hand, give can be used in place of bei in sentences with a Mandarin-like word order, e.g. I give him hit, where the meaning is the same as before (I am the victim, he is the hitter). In this case, give has taken on a new meaning that is distinct from how it is used by American and British English speakers. While this may seem confusing, it makes more sense if you speak Mandarin: the underlying grammatical structure is the same as Mandarin, but with English words filled in.

The word got has also evolved in Singlish, and now serves additional grammatical purposes in a sentence as well as the standard “to have/to receive” meaning found in most English varieties. It can be used as a habitual marker, indicating that an action was done regularly in the past, e.g. Got volunteer at the animal shelter? meaning “Did you used to volunteer at the animal shelter?” It can also indicate that an event is definitely going to occur, e.g. I got go to Bali sometime meaning “I will go to Bali sometime” (as in, the trip is already booked and paid for). Again, this likely can be attributed to influence from other local languages like Mandarin, which uses the word you 有 in the same way.

Some other features of Chinese can be observed in Singlish grammar, such as copula (= “to be” verb) deletion (e.g. I __ going home now), lack of plural marking (e.g. We bought many potato), and topicalization (e.g. This place, I don’t like). All of these are standard characteristics of Chinese, and they actually don’t detract from the meaning of the sentence at all.

The phonology of Singlish is also influenced by its neighboring languages. For instance, the vowels found in the words bit and beat, which are produced very close together in your mouth, have merged into one vowel, /i/, which is more common in many Asian languages. Unlike standard American English, which has approximately 14 vowel sounds, Singlish has condensed down to around six by losing the distinction between similar sounds. Thus, words like loose and put are pronounced with the same vowel instead of two different ones, as are caught and cot (although depending on your dialect of English, these vowels might already be the same). This isn’t particularly shocking – plenty of languages make due with as few as three vowel distinctions, and in fact having as many vowels as standard American English is rather uncommon in the grand scheme of things.

Singlish consonants are relatively similar to other dialects of English, with the exception of the interdental fricatives /θ/ (as in thick) and /ð/ (as in there), which may sometimes be replaced by [t] and [d] respectively at the beginning/middle of a word, and possibly with [f] at the end of a word. Therefore healthy can become [hɛlti] and health can become [hɛlf] (though not all speakers make these substitutions). Again, this is not particularly surprising, as interdental fricatives are relatively uncommon sounds in the world’s languages.

Despite its widespread use, Singlish has been targeted by a number of discriminatory policies and social movements promoting the use of “proper” (read: white) British English among Singaporeans. The Speak Good English Campaign is a government-sponsored movement to force Singlish speakers to assimilate to outdated, prescriptivist standards of English that even white RP speakers don’t consistently use. Again, it is no coincidence that the variety targeted by the Speak Good English Campaign is the one used by non-white communities; the idea that all non-white versions of English are “bastardized” lingers from the days of colonialism. It reinforces the idea that victims of colonization must reject their native culture, including their language, in favor of the culture of their oppressor, and that not doing so makes them barbaric or uncivilized. Even though Singapore is now a sovereign nation, the notion of a superior variety of English (i.e. the variety spoken by white people) still penetrates deeply into social and political ideologies. Denouncing the use of Singlish and other varieties of English furthers the narrative that speakers of these languages are somehow “less than.”

That marks the end of my first exploration of English dialectology. If you found this interesting, try checking out some of the Singlish articles and YouTube videos linked below. As far as I’ve seen, there aren’t many linguists or native speakers blogging about Singlish for general audiences, but let me know if I’ve missed anything and I’ll happily add it to the list.

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To learn more about Singlish:

• Leimgruber, J. (2011). Teaching and Learning Guide for: Singapore English. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00285.x (overview)
• Deterding, D. (2007). Singapore English. ISBN: 0748625453
• Mair, V. (2018). Singlish: Alive and Well. Language Log. University of Pennsylvania.
• Sui, G.L. (2016). Do You Speak Singlish? Op-ed. The New York Times.
• Wee, L. (2018). The Singlish Controversy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781316855331
• Hiramoto, M. and Y. Sato. (2012). “Got-interrogatives and answers in Colloquial Singapore English.” World Englishes, vol.31(2). doi:10.1111/j.1467-971X.2012.01750.x (use of ‘got’)
• Hiramoto, M. (2012). “Pragmatics of the sentence-final uses of can in Colloquial Singapore English.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol.44(6-7). (use of ‘can’)
• Hiramoto, M. (2015). “Sentence-final adverbs in Singapore English and Hong Kong English.” World Englishes, vol.34(4). doi:10.1111/weng.12157
• Chong, A. (2012). “A preliminary model of Singapore English intonational phonology.” UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, vol.111. ISSN: 1067-9030 (intonation in Singlish)
• Rihadatul, S. (2020). Blog: “What Singlish is? What the Syntactical Characteristics of Singlish are?” WordPress.com
• Yohanezer. (2020). Blog: “SINGLISH (Singaporean English).” WordPress.com

Singlish Videos

• Singlish Frozen by Singlish Dubs (YouTube)
• Singaporean English (Singlish) Explained by SHYillustrates (YouTube)
• Learning Singlish (Singaporean English) – Xiaxue’s Guide to Life by Clicknetwork (YouTube) (NB the woman in this video makes several references to Singlish speakers being ‘lazy’ i.e. they omit sounds from the end of words – this is a completely normal linguistic phenomenon that every speaker of every dialect does, and shouldn’t be attributed to laziness so much as ‘ease of articulation’)

Linguistics for Language Learners: Null Subjects

At its core, foreign language learning is a two-step process involving a) uncovering rules that don’t exist in your native language, and b) deciding where and how to apply those rules in your target language. This is the case at both a grammatical and a phonological level – just as you must develop a sense of what sounds and sound sequences are permissible in your target language, you must also learn what words “belong” in a particular order. English speakers know, for example, that mleg isn’t a possible word in their language, while glat is. They also know that Green van the is is a terrible sentence, while The van is green works just fine. This sort of instinctual knowledge doesn’t transfer effortlessly into your second/third/fourth language; rather, it has to be built up with time and exposure to a variety of speakers and contexts. This can be particularly tricky when the grammar of your target language requires you to blatantly disregard the rules of your native language.

Although some generalizations about grammar, such as every sentence should have a predicate, can be easily taught and explained, others are rife with exceptions that can only be fully grasped with time and exposure. Today I’m going to introduce a typological aspect of human language that linguists have spent years attempting to quantify, and beginning language learners tend to struggle with: the concept of Null Subjects. Although it may not seem obvious, many grammatical characteristics of language interact with one another, so that mastering one feature oftentimes cascades into mastering others in your target language. Over the past seventy years or so, a number of trends have been identified in the distribution of null subject languages. Although this isn’t typically taught in many language courses, I think that considering these correlations may be beneficial for students who, like me, want to understand the logic behind different grammatical constructions. It is also helpful to see how seemingly unrelated phenomena in language can interrelate and create the surface features that we become familiar with as we learn a new language. I’m hoping that by introducing some of these less accessible, theoretical concepts from contemporary linguistics, I can help some fellow language learners gain a deeper understanding of their target language and maybe even start to look for other syntactic patterns.

Feature	Consistent Null Subject Languages (Es, It, EPt…)	Partial Null Subject Languages (Fi, BPt…)	Radical Null Subject Languages (Jp, Ko, Th…)	Non-NSL (En, Fr, De…)
Person restrictions	No	Yes – 3rd person (he/she/it/they) only	No	N/A
Verb inflections	Many	Some	None	Some
Include subject for emphasis	Yes	No	No	N/A
“Dummy” pronouns (e.g. it or there)	No	No	No	Yes
Arbitrary pronouns (e.g. one or you)	Yes (e.g. se or si)	No	No	Yes
Null objects	No	No	Yes	No

A tabular summary of everything you’re about to learn – isn’t it fabulous?!

What are null subjects?

First, we need to establish some definitions. If you were raised in an Anglophone country, you might recall being taught things in grammar school like every sentence must have a subject. The subject of a sentence is the person/thing/place/idea that performs the action, e.g. Jane threw the ball to Rahim. Jane is the one throwing, so she is the subject. On the other hand, the ball is the object of the sentence, because it is being directly affected by Jane’s action. If we were to omit the subject of the sentence and just say Threw the ball, your listener would immediately ask “who?”, and your English teacher would die a little inside. Similarly, you also have to specify the object, if there is one: Jane threw to Rahim would prompt your listener to ask “threw what?” because as language users, we expect others’ contributions to contain all the information needed to describe an event. It simply isn’t good conversational practice to exclude key bits of information like who or what was involved.

Fast forward to Spanish class, though, and suddenly that rule is turned on its head: in Spanish, it is perfectly fine to just say Threw the ball! What gives? How do you know who is doing the throwing? Miraculously, if you were to say Tiró la pelota to another Spanish speaker, they wouldn’t have to ask “who” or wonder if they perhaps misheard you, because Spanish is a Null Subject Language. This means that native speakers of Spanish don’t have a rule that requires them to include a subject in every sentence; nobody would think it sounds strange to say Threw the ball, or Is empty, or Am tired. A subject that doesn’t get pronounced in a sentence is called a null subject, and the languages that allow you to use null subjects are known as Null Subject Languages, or NSLs. English is a non-NSL, while Spanish is known as a consistent NSL (more on that momentarily).

If you aren’t yet proficient in a null subject language, this might be a difficult concept to wrap your head around. How can speakers of a language be okay with omitting such a crucial piece of information? Well, the thing is, it’s not omitted – it’s just represented differently. The exact theoretical explanation isn’t important, but to illustrate what I mean, let’s again consider the English rule I mentioned above: every sentence must have a subject. You may recall learning shortly thereafter that certain types of sentences – like commands – do, in fact, allow you to drop the subject without sacrificing meaning. For instance, if someone were to look at you and say “Go,” you would know it was a command and that the implied subject of the sentence is you. They wouldn’t need to specify it because other, non-linguistic aspects of the dialogue (i.e. eye contact, tone of voice, facial expression) did that for them. I was taught that this is called a “‘you’ understood,” because although it isn’t explicit, both speaker and hearer understand that you is the subject of a command.

This isn’t the only situation, though, in which English speakers would accept a null subject: think about how often you omit I in text messages (“Just got home!”), or when it would otherwise sound redundant (“Where’s Jonah?” “Sick.”). In all likelihood, you’ve omitted hundreds of subjects in your lifetime even if you are a monolingual English speaker, and English is technically not a NSL. When you imagine these scenarios, it becomes easier to see how other languages might permit you to drop the subject on the regular, not just in some very specific contexts: often, the subject of a single sentence might also be the subject of the whole conversation, so it’s unnecessary to state it over and over again. In these situations, context simply fills in the blanks.

Rich Inflection = Null Subjects?

If you ever learned Spanish, you may have heard that this is because the information about who was involved can be conveyed elsewhere in the sentence. For a long time, linguists believed that there was a direct relationship between whether a language allowed null subjects and whether its verbs were “richly inflected.” This means that you change part of the verb depending on who actually did the action: I threw (tiré in Spanish), you threw (tiraste), he threw (tiró), we threw (tiramos), etc. It doesn’t matter whether the subject is expressly stated in the sentence, because that same information is contained elsewhere, namely on the main verb. On the other hand, non-NSL such as English and French have what are called “impoverished” inflectional systems – we use the same form of the verb no matter who is performing the action, so that information can only be gleaned by looking at the subject (notice how all the forms of threw in English are the same in the above example). Because many of the European null subject languages also have rich inflection, this generalization, known as the Taraldsen Generalization, prevailed for years in the linguistics community, and remains a popular explanation of NSL tendencies in foreign language classrooms. The Taraldsen Generalization succinctly explains our observations about one of the most prevalent syntactic differences between the Indoeuropean languages, and scientists love simplicity.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as rich inflection = null subject typology. When you expand your sample size beyond Indoeuropean languages, the correlation begins to break down. Thus more recently, comparative syntacticians Ian Roberts and Anders Holmberg have proposed a more specific characterization of the world’s languages based on several other trends they and other authors have observed across more robust samples of the world’s languages. They noticed that certain other syntactic features and rules correlated with the availability of null subjects in different languages. Based on these findings, they separated NSL into three additional subcategories: consistent null subject languages, partial null subject languages, and radical null subject languages. Now we’re going to take a closer look at what each of these subtypes looks like grammatically.

Consistent Null Subject Languages (Spanish, Italian, European Portuguese, etc.)

Many of the Romance languages fall into this category, with French being a notable exception. These are the languages that drove many analyses of null subjects before linguists were confronted with evidence from non-European languages. These languages consistently omit the subject from most types of sentences, including statements, questions, and commands. Because they do not require an overt (= non-null) subject, consistent NSL don’t have “placeholder” pronouns like English it (e.g. It is raining); since subjects aren’t required in the first place, there is no point in including a “dummy” subject that doesn’t actually refer to anything. Another side effect is that, because null subjects in these languages are so common, overt subjects slightly change the meaning of a sentence. This means that you should only include the subject explicitly to emphasize or disambiguate the people involved. To clarify, let’s look at some examples from Spanish below:

Ya estamos llegando. ‘[We] are already arriving.’ Notice that there is no overt subject in this sentence, yet thanks to the conjugation of estar, it is perfectly clear who is involved in the action. This is the typical structure for many sentence types in Spanish (and other CNSLs).

Va a llover mañana. ‘[It] is going to rain tomorrow.’ In the English version of this sentence, it doesn’t actually refer to a person or thing – but because English requires every sentence to have a subject, we have to use a sort of “placeholder” in instances like this, when the sentence describes a state of affairs with no discernible cause (who/what is going to rain tomorrow? The sky? God? The clouds? There is no clear answer based on the sentence alone). These are sometimes called expletive pronouns, and their only job is to fill in the subject space when nothing else can. Other examples of this type of pronoun include It is Saturday, There is no more rice, or It is cold. Unlike English and other non-NSL, CNSL do not require any sort of dummy pronoun in such contexts.

Tienen que despedirse, pero ella se puede quedar. ‘[They] have to say goodbye, but she can stay.’ In this sentence, the subject of the first clause (‘they’) is null, while the subject of the second clause (‘she’) is made explicit. Here, you are emphasizing that she is able to stay as opposed to the rest of her group. Depending on the wider context, you may also be introducing ‘her’ for the first time as a topic of conversation – i.e. you are shifting the focus to her as an individual, whereas previously the focus of the discussion was the group as a whole. In cases like this, the subject is made explicit to highlight a change of topic and keep everyone on the same page.

No se puede fumar aquí. ‘[You] cannot smoke here.’ The se in this sentence is an instance of what is known as an arbitrary pronoun – it is the rough equivalent of English ‘one’ (formal) or ‘you’ (informal), as in One mustn’t go to bed without supper. CNSL have a unique pronoun used for these situations, and you must use this pronoun if you are trying to express a generalization or rule: if you were to simply say No puede fumar aquí, that can only mean ‘[He/she] cannot smoke here’ – it is limited to an individual, not society in general. In instances where you might use one in English, in CNSL you would use the special arbitrary pronoun (se in Spanish and Portuguese, si in Italian).

If you’re learning a consistent null subject language, it may be enough to simply be aware of the different distribution of overt subjects between this and your native language. It is fairly safe to assume that you don’t need to include a subject in most sentences, especially if you are speaking extensively about the same person/thing. When you immerse yourself in the media of your target language, try to pay attention to when native speakers do make the subject explicit in a sentence, and consider what about the context required them to do so. As a rule of thumb, at least for simple and compound sentences, you can leave the subject out unless that would create excessive confusion (like if you’re trying to talk about multiple people at the same time).

Partial Null Subject Languages (Finnish, Brazilian Portuguese, etc.)

These languages are considered “partial” because null subjects are not quite as common as in consistent null subject languages, and are limited as far as what contexts they can appear in. Generally, partial null subject languages require an overt subject when speaking in first or second person (‘I’ and ‘you’), but you can drop the subject in many third-person (‘he/she/it’) constructions. You might notice that Brazilian Portuguese falls into this category, while European Portuguese remains a consistent NSL. This is due to natural processes of language change: although the language of the European colonizers was indeed a CNSL, over time and likely as a result of extended contact with other languages in Brazil, the local variety of Portuguese began to require the subject more often than not. A similar thing may have happened in the history of French: although nowadays, it is a non-NSL like English and German, the French of yesteryear may have been a CNSL just like Italian and Spanish. Sometimes languages just do that.

Anyway, partial null subject languages differ from CNSL in several key respects. First, whether or not you include a subject does not affect the interpretation of the sentence – in other words, including the subject doesn’t emphasize it in any way. These languages typically have less rich agreement systems than consistent NSL, which makes sense according to the Taraldsen Generalization. In Brazilian Portuguese, for example, if you were to omit você ‘you’ from a sentence like Gosta de estudar português? ‘Do [you/he/she] like to study Portuguese?’, it isn’t immediately clear who you are asking about – the other person or some third party. Partial NSL do allow you to use a null subject in sentences expressing generalizations; there is no special word for it like se in Spanish. This means that Não pode fumar aqui could be interpreted as either ‘[He/she] cannot smoke here’ or ‘[You/one] cannot smoke here’, and you would need to specify ele/ela if you are referring to a particular individual.

Like CNSL, these languages don’t have a “dummy” pronoun like English – to express ‘it’s raining’ in Brazilian Portuguese, you can simply say Está chovendo ‘[It] is raining’, omitting the subject just like you would in Spanish. However, if you’re talking to someone else or about yourself, it is more common to include a subject e.g. Eu estudo português ‘I study Portuguese’ (whereas in European Portuguese you could drop the eu ‘I’).

In terms of language learning for PNSLs, for beginners the best generalization is to include subjects for all of your sentences until you develop more of an instinct for which ones can be omitted in which contexts. Nobody will misunderstand you if you always include a subject in your sentences, whereas they might be confused if you omit the subject where it is not warranted.

Radical Null Subject Languages (Japanese, Korean, Thai, Mandarin?, etc)

As the name may suggest, radical null subject languages are, in a way, more extreme than the others I’ve discussed so far. Why do we consider them extreme? Well, unlike CNSL and PNSL, these languages lack any sort of inflection on their verbs, meaning that information about the subject of a sentence isn’t expressed elsewhere – it’s just inferred from context. Not only that, but these languages allow another type of information to be omitted from a sentence as well: the direct object. This is why, in Mandarin, it is perfectly understandable when you say 看完了 kàn wán le ‘[I] finished reading [it]’ – even though neither the subject nor the object of kàn was directly expressed, and can change depending on the context in which the sentence is spoken. RNSL are the languages that threw a wrench in the oldschool null subject typology: if the ability to omit subjects relates directly to whether a language has rich agreement or not, then how can languages like Japanese and Korean be even more liberal than CNSL?

Radical null subject languages share some structural features with both CNSL and PNSL. Like CNSL, languages such as Japanese do not limit the contexts in which a null subject can appear, but explicitly including the subject of a sentence doesn’t imply emphasis or any sort of difference in meaning. Also like CNSL, these languages do not have “placeholder” pronouns – to express that it is raining, you can simply say 下雨 xià yǔ ‘[It] is raining’, no subject needed. On the other hand, like PNSL, radical null subject languages do allow you to express generalizations like You can’t smoke here using a null subject: 这里不可以抽烟 zhè li bù kě yǐ chōu yān literally ‘Here not allowed smoke’. They also do not allow indefinite interpretations of an omitted subject: if you are speaking about a boy, you must make that explicit, whereas the boy can be dropped.

Learning a RNSL as a native English speaker may be challenging at first, because many sentences require you to infer much more from context than you would in English. Context plays a huge role in discerning what is meant by an utterance lacking both a subject and an object, and this is something that requires practice to become automatic. It might be helpful to remember that, if new information or topics are being introduced, they will be explicitly stated – as I said in the introduction, it’s simply bad etiquette to not include pertinent information in a conversation. In other words, if items are missing from a sentence, you can assume that the information was made available in a previous sentence or by the context in which the interaction takes place.

The question comparative syntacticians have spent decades trying to resolve

Theories of language must somehow account for the massive variation in rules and structures in a relatively straightforward manner – otherwise children would never be able to learn the grammar of their language. Those who subscribe to the theory of generative grammar believe that sentences are organized hierarchically, with different segments dominating one another. This is what allows us to understand that Stacey’s mom’s boyfriend’s cat is a cat owned by one person – not shared by Stacey, her mom, and her mom’s boyfriend.

A popular proposal was the abstract idea of pro (read as “little pro”), which is basically a silent pronoun. The idea was that pro could be inserted into the subject position of a sentence instead of other alternatives such as she, he, I etc. NSL speakers have pro as an additional word in their mental repertoire, while non-NSL speakers do not. However, recently the idea of pro has become increasingly abstract for a variety of theoretical reasons, one of which is that it seems to function quite differently in RNSL than it does in CNSL and PNSL. The availability of null objects in particular has caused considerable debate as to whether pro can adequately account for all the variations we see cross-linguistically: in Mandarin, for instance, the rules governing null objects are almost the complete opposite of those governing null subjects. However, if the two are both attributable to pro, we would expect them to behave similarly.

There are a number of other theories regarding null subject typology, but for the sake of brevity I’ll end my spiel there. The takeaway is that plenty of linguists are sitting in their offices tearing their hair out over this issue likely as I write, and if/when they converge on an explanation, I’ll let you know. Thanks for tuning in.

Further reading:

Barbosa, P., Duarte, M. E. L., & Kato, M. A. (2005). Null Subjects in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 4(2), 11–52. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.158

Barbosa, P. (2011). Pro‐drop and Theories of pro in the Minimalist Program Part 1: Consistent Null Subject Languages and the Pronominal‐Agr Hypothesis. In Languages and Linguistics Compass. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00293.x

Camacho, J. A. (2013). Null/overt subject contrasts. In Null Subjects. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524407

Camacho, J. A. (2013). The nature of the Extended Projection Principle and the Null Subject Parameter. In Null Subjects. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524407

Frascarelli, M., & Casentini, M. (2019). The Interpretation of Null Subjects in a Radical Pro-drop Language: Topic Chains and Discourse-semantic Requirements in Chinese. Studies in Chinese Linguistics, 40(1), 1–45. https://doi.org/10.2478/scl-2019-0001

Roberts, I. (2019). Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar, chapter 3. Oxford University Press.

Sato, Y. (2019). Comparative syntax of argument ellipsis in languages without agreement: A case study with Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Linguistics, 55(3), 643–669. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226718000403