silly linguistics

THE MAGAZINE FOR LANGUAGE LOVERS

THE NY ACCENT

ONE
DIALECTS
OR
MANY

L ving Language
THE MAGAZINE FOR LANGUAGE LOVERS : ISSUE #53 : OCTOBER 2022
 TABLE OF
CONTENTS
“Quality” and “popular” journals: how
03 does it work?
By Valentin Pradelou

Braille A Journey
06 By Harris Mowbray

08 The NY Accent: One Dialects or Many

By Molly O'Brien

Why Understanding Ambiguity in

13 Natural Language Processing Is A Game
Changer
By Francesca Forza

20 Loving Language
By Francesca Forza

Cover page photo by RODNAE Productions

This week's page numbers are in Korean!

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
 삼
312\ \ δώδεκα
(sam)

“Q u a l it y "
AND

“p o p u l a r ”
JOURNALS
HOW DOES IT WORK?

By Valentin Pradelou

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
4 \ 사 (sa) 12 \ δώδεκα

Iprecise
love to study how journalism works. In Issue #26, we had talked about a
genre into the journalistic field, the editorial. We find it in most
journals. Talking about most journals, how do they display the
information? Are they entering the frame of “quality” or “popular”
journals? That’s what we’re going to discuss in this article. We’ll start with
journal’s sectioning to understand why some are categorized “quality” or
“popular”. And the main idea is the following: “quality” and “popular” are
two words maybe badly chosen. We’ll see that in the second part of the
article.

Here, I’ll use some articles and books from French linguists. If you want
to know more about this subject, take a read at them. Let’s go!

“Quality” and “popular” journals through sectioning

First of all, the sectioning of a journal gives us a lot of information.

Actually, it’s a way to give pieces of information about itself. In an article
from 2008, Lethier explains that a journal “organizes the world” by
sectioning the journal. And this is a pretty interesting idea: if Politics or
Economy are put ahead, the journal won’t see the world the same way as
another putting ahead “Sports” and “People” news. Some other authours,
such as Herman (1999) call the journal’s sectioning “journal store front”.
Thus, as for a shop, you see and choose what you’re going to buy or read
looking at how the sections are used. And what's displayed in the store
front makes you understand what type of shop you have in front of you.
Well, it works more or less the same for journals.

Here we find one difference between the so-called quality and popular
journals. The first category is supposed to make you “think” (talking about
Politics, Economy, Culture, etc.), the second is supposed to make you
“feel” (talking about “sports”, “People”, “cars”, etc.). And here’s a first
problem: isn’t it possible to think about sports or cars, and feeling
emotions with Politics and Economy? Of course, it is. Let’s discuss it in
another paragraph.

Is this distinction to be taken literally?

Of course not. If taken literally, there is some judgement: a quality journal

would be stamped of some inherent “quality”, unlike popular journals. But
“popular” journals are able to be as good as “quality” journals, right?

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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\ δώδεκα
(o)

A couple of French linguists (Herman & Lugrin in 1999) follows this idea.
This distinction is not built on values. In other words, it wouldn’t be
attached to a reader’s characteristics: somebody won’t be a quality
individual because he reads articles about Politics. Still according to these
linguists, the distinction is actually closer to the way of communicating
the information, and not inherently related to a reader’s feature. The
difference is thus at the source of the information, not at the reception.
Isn’t it possible to imagine a politician reading a sports’ tabloid or an
individual fond of tabloids also reading about economics or society
issues? Of course, it is. And this lexical opposition, if taken literally, could
lead to some sort of a value judgement which would be wrong, as we just
saw.

Fortunately, recent works in Linguistics and Media studies tend to follow

this idea, and reject the opposition made between quality and popular
journals. Most of journals do talk about Politics and Sports, Culture and
People, etc. It remains very interesting to understand how a journal works
and what's its point of view on our world. But one might remain cautious
about categorizing a journal of "quality" or "popular" as researchers
already understood most journals get hold of "quality" and "popular"
characteristics.

Conclusion

This distinction is then pretty interesting. However, it has to be used

cautiously. Plus there are a lot of other journals' elements able to sharp
their characteristics, such as hyperstructures, length of articles, their
authors, etc. We'll maybe discuss that in another article.

Thanks for reading guys!

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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Braille

Journey

BY HARRIS MOWBRAY

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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P hysically inscribing language into writing has been useful to humanity for the past few
thousand years, but this medium of communication has been unavailable to the visually-
impaired until relatively recently in modern history. In the early 19th century, Louis Braille
created a compact system of tactile dots in order to accurately represent the orthography of
the French language, which was inspired by an older tactile system called Night Writing
(invented for military purposes around a decade before). This system was later improved upon
to write musical notation, mathematical symbols, and other languages around the world.
International standards were established by UNESCO in 1951 in order to make sure that Braille
was similar for every language (with a few exceptions like Korean and Japanese). For
example, the Braille glyph “⠙” refers to “d” in English, but “δ” in Greek, “д” in Russian, “‫ד‬‎” in
Hebrew, and “‫ ”د‬in Arabic, all of which make the same sound. This allows people who are
literate in Braille to pick up any new language relatively quickly. Of course, if a blind English
Braille user wanted to learn Spanish Braille for example, they would have to learn a couple
new glyphs corresponding to unique letters such as “ñ” and “ü” which do not exist in English
orthography. Basically, to summarize, every language has a system to represent every letter
(and numbers, punctuation marks, and other symbols) in Braille.

Well, as it turns out, not every language has Braille, after all there are around seven thousand
languages presently spoken in the world. There has to be some semi-important language out
there without Braille, I thought. I quickly started researching endangered languages in Europe,
such as Livonian, Kashubian, and Sorbian to see if they had Braille yet. Apparently, they didn’t,
despite having unique graphemes like “ȭ”, “ù” and “ŕ” which would necessitate such a system.

I knew that these Braille alphabets were not going to invent themselves, so I quickly developed
Braille alphabets for the orthographes of various languages (based on international
standards), and reached out to various communities, organizations, and governments around
the world to see if they would be interested. 90% of the time they are not interested or I
cannot even get a single response, but there are some communities especially in
Central/Eastern Europe who positively received my ideas for implementing Braille.
Newspapers and TV channels around the world started interviewing me to learn why I did this
and what my secret was to developing these alphabets. Well, as to why I did it, it seems like
the right thing to do and nobody else was solving the problem. I’m just vaguely altruistic,
nothing more. My secret? There is none, it’s literally just assigning patterns to a few letters
based on international standards. It takes me a few minutes and it’s so easy that I could
seriously do it in my sleep.

But if it’s so easy, why hasn’t anyone else done it? Why were there languages with over ten
million speakers that didn’t have a Braille system in the 21st century? Thinking about this
question for too long is like staring into the void and sometimes it keeps me up at night. It
makes me think about what other unsolved linguistic problems are out there, waiting for
someone to solve them.

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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The NY Accent
alects or Many
One Di

By Molly O'Brien

Photo by Jeffrey Czum

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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The New York Accent is viewed as one of

the most celebrated and notorious
accents on the globe.

People from all over seem to recognize

some of its elements, denoted by a
couple linguistically proven features.

Perhaps, one of the most famous

examples of the New York accent is
Dustin Hoffman’s “I’m walkin’ here!” from
the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy.

The famous line “I’m Walking Here” was

actually an improvisation from Dustin
Hoffman who was actually born in Los
Angeles CA.

But what makes the New York accent so

distinct?

Photo by Zach Miles on Unsplash

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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Some popular words New Yorkers say
differently than the rest of the world
include:
Water = Waw-da
Chocolate = Chaw-clet
Call = Cawl
Dog = Dawg
New Yorker = New Yawka.
Smart = Smart
Orange = Aw-range
Forty= Fawty
Linguists will say that what makes the
New York accent is two-fold: the deletion
of the “r” sound, and the fronting of the
vowel, or the pronunciation of the vowel
closer to the lips rather than the back of
the throat and the deletion of the r. These
are both more akin to British English.
William Labov is a prominent American
linguist known for founding modern
sociolinguistics, or the study of language
as it intersects with a person's social
identity and society at large.
One of his more famous discoveries was
the variation in the pronunciation of ‘r’ in
New York dialects.
In 1966, Labov conducted a study in three
department stores in New York City -
Saks, Macy's and S. Klein, each shopped
by people from different socioeconomic
backgrounds. He simply would ask
employees of each store, questions such
as, “Excuse me, what floor is this?” or
“Could you tell me where I can find men’s
ties?”
October 2022, Issue #53
They all responded the same, as Labov
anticipated: “fourth floor” – and yet there
was variation in the way in which these
words pronounced depending on the
store he was in, Labov found.
According to Labov, the upper class
world of Saks was likely to maintain the
“r” sound” in their response, “fourth
floor”, while those who worked at Macy’s
and S. Klein omitted the “r sound”. He
also found that younger folks were more
likely to delete the “r” sound in their
speech, as opposed to those who were
older.
The presence of the “r” sound, or lack
thereof as you’d find in British and New
York English, is what is known as rhoticity.
Languages can be rhotic or non-rhotic.
Whether a language is rhotic or non rhotic
is just one type of fascinating variation in
natural languages, and it is the linguist’s
job to scientifically identify the
differences in speech so as to make
discoveries just like Labov did in New
York City in the 1960s.
Of course, New York City is made of five
boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx,
Queens, and Staten Island.
Vowel fronting refers to a shift forward in
the place of articulation of a vowel in the
mouth. This is commonly found in not only
the New York accent of American English
but in the Southern accent of British
English as well.
Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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Labov found that vowels are not only

fronted, but they’re made longer by New
Yorkers as well.

Brian Donohue of New Jersey’s Star

Ledger conducted a study on the regional
accents of the neighboring state New
Jersey based on research by Daniel E.
Coye of Thomas Edison State College. In
his televised expose, Donohue asks, "Do
we have our own accent or do we speak
like New York or Philadelphia do?"

He examines work by Coye which states

the “fronted-O” found in Northern New
Jersey can also be found in many
Southern parts of the State. However,
pronunciations of words like, chocolate,
were split more evenly. Those Chaw-
colate. Sub vs Hoagie. Daniel Coye from
Thomas Edison State College

Donohue found that the New York accent

extends as far south as about Cherry Hill.
He also determined that what causes all
of the variation in New Hersey is migration
patterns. For example he says, Staten
Islanders moving to New Jersey.

Politically, New Jersey is the Southern

most state that identifies as the North. For
example, while most agree the Mason
Dixon Line ran just south of New Jersey,
through Delaware, the first black self-
governed community for was in New
Jersey.

Could a political unity explain the reason

New Jersey accents sound more like New
York than the South?

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
12 \ 십이 (sibi)
Another discovery was made by Bruce
Morén, a linguist from University of
Tromso, Norway, on the Staten Island
dialect specifically. ​Professor Morén
found so many exceptions to Labov’s
rule of New York accents that he
concluded that it does not apply to
Staten Island native speakers and that
their accents were even closer to
Chicaco. For example, he found that
Staten Islanders pronounce words with
even longer vowels than the average
New Yorker, and Staten Islanders tend to
put the emphasis on the first syllable of a
word.
What’s also surprisngly true is that
Staten Islanders will go so far as to add
an “r” sound at the end of syllables with
elongated a’s. For example, “law”
becomes “lawr” and “strawberry”
because “strawrberry.”
Migration, also, has certainly played a
key role in shaping the New York accent
at large.
Some argue, including William Labov, that
the New York accent extends as far east
as Long Island, NY, as far north as
Upstate New York, as far south as New
Jersey and as far east as Chicago.
Nishad Datta, an activist from Queens,
says “I’m from Hollis, but went to school
in Jamaica in Queens and also lived in
Flushing and Jackson Heights over the
October 2022, Issue #53
years, but I was born in Chicago. I’ve
noticed that New York accents seem to
be closer to other, newer forms of
English speaking accents, with Rs and
other consonants being omitted in
everyday use.”
Gloria Mattera, a second generation
Italian American from Brooklym and
Green Party political organizer says she
thinks Brooklyn has the strongest accent.
Mattera states, “I think there is some
variation even within the boroughs.”
Rory Lutz, comedian and phone
repairman was born in NYC, says the
city’s accents are changing due to
migration.
“The city is different now,” Lutz tells Silly
Linguistics. “It seems that most people
here are from other areas. So yeah they
don't speak like we do. There's less
aggression in the tones. NYC has always
gotten a bad rep for being mean. But the
truth is we're very considerate. Just very
busy.
He also says, “NYC has different slang
for every boro. It's always changing. I low
key love it.”
Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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Why Understanding
Ambiguity in Natural
Language Processing Is A
Game Changer
By Francesca Forza

Last night I shot an elephant in my

pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll
never know.

Why do we smile at Groucho Marx's joke? Because it offers up the absurdly

comical image of a half-ton animal wearing Groucho's night clothes, a
consequence of the fact that language is an ambiguous system.

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), we are confronted every day with words
and sentences that occupy multiple regions in the meaning space. How does
NLP deal with an expression having two or more distinct denotations? In what
respect is sentiment analysis connected to the efficacy of a grammar in
recognizing, and resolving, ambiguous patterns?

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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Using Context to Parse Plausible Interpretations

Ambiguity is a type of meaning uncertainty giving rise to more than one plausible
interpretation. Being ambiguous is therefore a semantic attribute of a form (a word, an
idea, a sentence, even a picture) whose meaning cannot be resolved according to a rule
or process with a finite number of steps. Context, however, plays a role, because
something can be ambiguous in one context but not in another. For example, consider
this Italian sentence:

1) Mi piace il cane “I like the dog” OR “I like the gun hammer”

Cane, in Italian, means both “dog” and “hammer of firearms.” It is a case of lexical
ambiguity, in particular, of homophony. If we see this sentence in isolation, we do not
know if the positive sentiment refers to the animal or the weapon.

But imagine that you hear this sentence on an Italian beach where a merry family is
playing with a Labrador puppy. A child points at the animal and says, “Mi piace il cane!.”
No doubt remaining, right? As a matter of fact, context helps disambiguation. If
computers were people, therefore, NLP solutions would be easier (but not easy, as we
will see).

Types of Ambiguity

Ambiguity goes beyond the lexical form and can affect units even smaller than words.
Morphemes can also display a special kind of meaning uncertainty known as
syncretism. This occurs when two or more morphological features have the same form,
such as the English [s]. In addition to the possessive (Mike’s), an “s” denotes both plural
nouns (sheets), the third-person singular in verbs (eats). And then there are other kinds
of ambiguity, made of bigger stuff: semantic and syntactic/structural ambiguity. One
instance of the first is, again, provided by Groucho Marx:

2) Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

This kind of ambiguity differs from the lexical, as the set of interpretations is less
constrained and agreed upon. Here is another example of this:

3) I liked your picture.

Does this sentence mean that the person appreciated the picture, or that they pressed
“like” on Facebook? Although this shows the increasing effect of social media on our
meaning spaces, it is syntactic ambiguity that interests us more--how we parse natural
language. The elephant wearing a pajama sentence contains some NPs (noun phrases),

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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including an elephant and a pajama. An NP is a grammatical constituent with a

noun as its head that can become part of something bigger: for instance, see
how my pajama, being introduced by a preposition, turns into a PP
(prepositional phrase). The uncertainty arises from the fact that the PP in my
pajamas could, in turn, find a head in either the NP an elephant (Groucho’s
interpretation) or in the verb (shot). We have no way of ruling out one of the
options on the basis of the syntactic features alone. It is a notorious issue
among linguists, one of PP-attachment.

The Nature of Ambiguity

Different types of ambiguity can be combined. I would not add the “effect”
part, as we are for large part unaware of language mechanisms. A famous
example by N. Chomsky involves both syncretism (the -ing suffix can be both
verb and derived adjective) and subject/object ambiguity:

4) Flying planes can be dangerous. 1

Actually, the very possibility of alternative interpretations comes from how

grammar is designed. To put it trivially, one can think of our thoughts and ideas
as a huge web, a web that can put the Internet to shame.

The human mind consists of a tremendous number of semantic networks,

where concepts and representation are interconnected.

Now, humans need to talk, or sign, about such ideas. We need a device that
translates, so to speak, associations and networks into hierarchical constituent
structures that allow us to put one word after another. This device is syntax,
which maps ideas onto forms, such as phrases. How these phrases are
organized, then, determines the linear set of the words we speak (or write on
Facebook) every day.
1
Chomsky, N. (1957), Syntactic Structures, The Hague/Paris: Mouton

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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Ambiguity and Sentiment

Ambiguity by Design
Analysis
Syntax builds the structure where the So, whether we are confronted with
PP in my pajama depends either on the natural or invented languages,
NP elephant or on the verb shot. “ambiguity is a practical problem”
3
Structural ambiguity emerges because (Church and Patil, 1982: 139) . Manning
4
the reader cannot determine which kind and Schütze (1999, 18) interestingly
of projection from thoughts to language named a section of their book “The
the syntax is expressing. Ambiguity of Language: Why NLP Is
Difficult”:
Note that ambiguity is present in
natural languages, but not in formal “An NLP system needs to determine
languages, unambiguous by design. something of the structure of the text –
Interestingly, it exists also in naturalistic normally at least enough that it can
conlangs (constructed languages, answer “Who did what to whom?” …
aiming at reproducing all the Therefore, a practical NLP system must
characteristics of natural languages). be good at making disambiguation
Dothraki, for example, the language of decisions of word sense, word category,
the Horse Lords in the TV show Game syntactic structure, and semantic
of Thrones and from the book series A scope.”
Song of Ice and Fire, displays
2
syncretism : Our system creates a series of
dependency structures to capture the
5) mapping from semantic networks of
a. Anha lajak. “I am a warrior” OR “I concepts to syntactic elements. As a
fight” consequence, our parsing algorithms
b. Kisha lajaki. “We are warriors” OR must disambiguate the string of
“We fight” symbols represented by Groucho's and
Dothraki sentences.
The agentive suffix is identical to the
first person singular present tense suffix, Under this light, here is an example of
and Dothraki has no copula. Moreover, how NetBase treats a specific kind of
this conlang has cases like: syntactic ambiguity. What follows are
real-life sound bites in Italian.
6) Anha laj mahrazhes m’arakhoon. “I
fought the man with a sword” 7) ho mangiato la crepe alla Nutella. “I
ate the crepe with Nutella”
As you see, Khal Drogo's language also 3
Church, K. and R. Patil (1982), Coping with syntactic ambiguity or how to put
has structural ambiguity. the block in the box on the table. American Journal of Computational
Linguistics, 8; 139-149, July-December.
2 4
All Dothraki examples here are personal communication of Dothraki creator Manning, C. D. and H. Schütze (1999), Foundations of Statistical Natural
David J. Peterson. Language Processing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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Now, compare it with the following:

8) ho mangiato la crepe al sole. “I ate the crepe in the sun”

We want to extract a positive sentiment frame for Nutella, the product eaten in
the crepe, and definitely not for sole, representing only an adjunct PP.
Considering that sentiment frames are built on the top of dependency structures,
how the parse looks determines whether only Nutella or both Nutella and sole are
extracted as “objects” of the positive behavior. Extracting sole would obviously be
wrong and lower our precision.

What needs to happen in the Italian rules is that the PP con la Nutella depends on
the NP la crepe. On the contrary, we want the PP al sole to depend on the VP
(verbal phrase) ho mangiato. To disambiguate this sentence, three main things
are needed: knowledge about grammar, knowledge about the world, and a way to
combine them. The task is to provide the system with these three fundamental
“skills.”

Solving the Nutella puzzle

Which steps did we take at NetBase to solve the Nutella puzzle? First, Italian
chunking and linking rules contribute to the knowledge that the system has about
grammar. Namely, we tell the system what the constituents are, what depends on
what, which grammatical categories are in play, and so on. Second, we make use
of lexical resources (lexicons) for the second kind of knowledge, the one about
the world (in a shallow sense). Finally, we adopt a probabilistic approach to find a
way to combine them. Let us see how we predict how likely it is for Nutella to
modify crepe, while al sole should become adjunct of the verb.

Here is the structure where the PP is complement of the noun:

7) [[[ho mangiato]VP [[la crepe]NP [alla Nutella] PP ] NP ] VP ] “I ate the crepe with
Nutella”

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The dependencies look like this:

8)

And here is where the PP modifies the verb:

9) [[[ho mangiato]VP [la crepe]NP ] VP [al sole] PP ] “I ate the crepe in the sun”

The dependency structure looks different from (8):

(10)

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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We decided to not only take into consideration the syntactic rules, but to predict
that, given a verbal group, if a PP is something that can be eaten, and is adjacent
to an NP, which, in turn, has to do with food, it will probably modify it. Conversely,
if such PP does not have these features, in the same kind of construction, it will
directly modify the verb. We provided the system with food knowledge by
assigning an edible feature to a big set of words, which include crepe and Nutella.
As a result, the relevant sentiment frame picks up the brand Nutella, but not the
sun.

This case is a simple example of how NetBase NLP functions in cases of syntactic
ambiguity. Of course, one can object that there will always be a missing piece of
lexical knowledge, an over-estimated probability rate, a wrong link that will
“misunderstand” the uncertainty. Yes, computers sometimes get ambiguity
wrong. After all, it is complicated to deal with something without a human mind!

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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ng
i guage
lan By Francesca Forza

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
 23 \ 이십삼 (isipsam)

October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
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October 2022, Issue #53 Silly Linguistics: The Magazine for Language Lovers
 thanks
FOR READING SILLY
LINGISTICS ISSUE #53
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