Mythbustin'

So the lecture has come and gone, and the students handled the 'true or false' statements pretty well. Instead of making them 'fess up their responses to the statements straight up (shame job!), I got them to discuss them in groups, then I gave an introductory lecture which addressed many of the propositions of the 'true or false' statements. Later on, with everyone now *knowing* the answers, we went through the statements again. I asked them to reflect on their initial thought processes, so I could get a sense of how much knowledge they had about Aboriginal languages coming into the class.

Here are the statements I gave them:

1. Aboriginal languages are primitive, and have no grammar.
2. Aboriginal languages are really dialects of the one language.
3. There were about 20 distinct languages in Australia upon first European contact, and now there are 8 which are still spoken.
4. There are two main groupings, or ‘families’, of Australian languages.
5. Aboriginal languages are harder to learn than English or Japanese, and that's one reason they have largely disappeared.
6. Aboriginal languages are still spoken today in every state and territory.
7. Kriol and Aboriginal English are spoken by more Aboriginal people than any traditional Aboriginal languages.
8. Aboriginal languages aren’t written languages, (and this has contributed many of them no longer being spoken).
9. Bilingual education in Aboriginal communities has failed because learning a traditional language prevents Aboriginal children from learning English.
10. Many Aboriginal languages are no longer spoken because they don’t have the vocabulary to cope with modern-world technology.
11. Aboriginal languages have no word for money.
12. Kriol is a ‘bastardised’ form of English, and is easily understood by an English speaker.

As expected, these 2nd/3rd year linguistics students were able to dismiss the 'Aboriginal languages have no grammar/are hard to learn' statements pretty quickly, as well as others for which I gave counter-evidence in the lecture (e.g. Dalabon has two words for money bad 'rock; money (coins)' and marlaworr-no 'leaves, money (notes)').

They found the statements about numbers of languages spoken, and degree and spread of 'still-spoken-ness' difficult before the lecture. We also had some good discussions about some of the double-proposition statements - like the influence of a writing system on language loss, and whether this is more relevant to language revitalisation than language shift/loss.

I also asked them to name as many Aboriginal languages as they could, and despite expecting that this would prove a near-impossible task, I was still surprised that only Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte made the grade.

If you're interested in trying your own hand at some mythbustin', try this site.

Back to (neo-)basics

I've been struggling with the terms entail, implicate and infer lately. There's good empirical reason for this, and I hope to post on this at some stage. But for now, I'm going to go back to undergraduate semantics briefly, and try to re-learn a few basics. Please feel free to participate in my on-going education!

Despite remembering these terms from earlier study, I realised that my understanding of them was really pretty shaky when it came to actually needing to apply them, and distinguish between them.

With the trusty help of philosopher extraordinaire Bulanjdjan Maïa, I got to the point of:

An implicature is stronger than an inference. An implicature necessarily follows on logical grounds, while an inference can be derived by reasoning.

Which left me wondering, 'well, what's the difference between implicature and entailment?'

And in looking around for some clarity on the matter (= going back to old textbooks), I didn't find much illuminating material. For example, one textbook says:

Sometimes knowing the truth of one sentence entails or necessarily implies the truth of another sentence.

So, entailment = implicature?? Some further thinking on this got me to:

Perhaps implicature operates at the level of pragmatics, while entailment operates at the level of semantics?

Fortunately some good old Gricean know-how kicked in, courtesy of Michael Haugh's paper on The Intuitive Basis of Implicature. According to Grice (1967, 1989), there is conventional implicature, and conversational implicature. Conventional implicature operates at the semantic level, and entailment is a kind of conventional implicature. Conversational implicature operates at the pragmatic level, and can be defeased.

So that is where I rest my investigation of these terms (for my purposes) for now. However, I was struck by the use if the prefix neo- in Haugh's paper:

Most neo-Griceans have essentially retained this definition of implicature in subsequent developments of Gricean theory, so implicature has continued to be defined as what is communicated less what is said. The problem for the Gricean (and neo-Gricean) definition of implicature is that it encompasses far too large and diverse a range of phenomena.

I've never really understood the semantics of neo-, and perhaps because I'm all about semantic reflection at the moment, I gave it some deductive thought. Perhaps many of you are well comfortable with this little prefix and its denotations and connotations. It seems to be used by social commentators a lot, e.g. neo-christians, neo-conservatives etc. I've always had the impression that those particular examples referred to particularly fundamentalist versions of christianity or conservatism.

It seemed to me, from Haugh's use of the term, that it refers to a 'back-to-basics' approach or philosophy, perhaps after some considerable 'straying' over time from the origins of a movement or philosophy.

So I looked it up in the OED, and lo and behold, neo- is used when:

Forming compounds referring to a new, revived, or modified form of some doctrine, belief, practice, language, artistic style, etc., or designating those who advocate, adopt, or use it.

I think the use of revived is key in this definition, and are evident in some of the examples given in the entry:

The extracts we have given serve to show the dogmatic assertiveness of the Neo-Buddhist philosophy.

And just to tie it all back in to liguistics, this derived form was also listed:

neography n. a new system or method of writing or spelling.

Myths about Aboriginal Languages

*Hypothetical* scenario:

You find yourself thrust in front of an undergraduate class on Aboriginal Languages. It's the first week of semester, so you take some time to go through the introductions and housekeeping, an overview of the course and some introductory content. But this won't cover the full two hours.

You'd like to run a class discussion exercise where the students are presented with a set of 'facts or myths?' on Aboriginal languages, and they have to decide which is true and which is false. What would you include??