The Film Noir Experience

You don't ask the right question, every answer feels wrong. --"Hell Yeah" by Ani DiFranco

Let's think of ideas as dominoes. You have a bunch of them. They're not particularly related, or at least, they are not related in a way that is immediately apparent. But, they are all interesting, so you set them up one by one. Once they are all set up, you hit the right one and everything falls into place. You follow each domino in the chain and the picture that you were setting up begins to emerge. And, its pretty wild. Pretty amazing. You think, "Why didn't I see it before?"

I just had that moment. You ask the right question, you get the right answer. I can still only see part of the picture, but the part that I can see is worth looking at. (Its also worth investing in some more dominoes.)

Posted by Kate at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a job interview today. I'm pretty excited about it.

So, about a month ago, I had the opportunity to first watch a referential communication task and then to participate in one. The task was adopted for use in linguistic studies from a social psychology task called the Krause task. More or less, one person describes something to the another person so that the other person can pick the right card or photograph or novel object or what have you. In the morning, I watched a psychologist describe tangrams to a linguist while a student of Communication disorders listened in and tried to identify the same tangrams. It turns out, we do better at things when we can ask questions and in general participate in the "naming" of novel things. (The linguist and the psychologist were allowed to discuss the figures.) Later in the day, I described a set of photographs to someone who had to match their set to mine. We weren't allowed to discuss this time, I just had to describe the photo in as much detail as I thought necessary so that the other participant could pick the right photograph. We got them all right. It turns out, in pretty much line with hypotheses about English speakers, that I mostly use intrinsic and relative frames of reference when I'm describing the orientation of objects. (Intrinsic in that the object is the thing that the orientation is projected from and Relative in that I was the thing that the orientation was projected from.)

Now, why would anyone want to make people play these little games? Lots of reasons. Its easier to get people to want to participate (and to do well) if your task is fun. If you want to study discourse, you need to get people to talk. If you want to look at, say, spatial frames of reference, you need to get people to talk about things that are oriented in specific ways in space. Or, if you want to study something else that can be done in the form of a matching game.

Posted by Kate at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First off, I have to begin this entry by telling you that I have no idea if any of what I'm about to share with you is right.

Why don't I know? I don't know because I'm still a student. So, we've been learning about dependency grammar in my syntax class. And, because it is good to turn in assignments that are legible, I've been experimenting with ways to do that. Today, I tried using my computer's paint program to sort out my diagrams that are due tomorrow.

I came up with this:
Pretty, right? Sure, its a little hard to read because it is so small, but you have to go with it. Here's the rub: Nothing is labeled. This is a problem. There is no point in having a diagram if nothing in it is labeled. (Also, without the label, I've not really done the assignment.) The other problem is I'm not sure if this makes it any clearer this way than if I did it by hand.

I thought I'd perhaps do one more diagram on the computer and see how that goes. If it turns out to still not be particularly clear, I'm giving up and going back to doing it by hand. Syntax isn't really my bag, but I like the idea that things are built up from relations like this. Somehow, that makes more sense to me. (Although, you shouldn't read that this is -the- way this sort of thing is done. Its more that this is what we're doing in this one class I'm taking right now.)

This sort of way of looking at syntax makes looking at languages that can have discontinuous constituents or languages in which word order is relatively free (which would make for discontinuous constituents.)

On a completely unrelated note, turkeys don't have sweat glands, so they have to pant in order to cool themselves down. Isn't that interesting?

Posted by Kate at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent the better part of the day (and I'll be spending the better part of the weekend) working on my phonetics project.

And, it makes me want to share with all of you. I don't feel right actually using my data, but I do have some recordings of myself, so I'm going to show you that.

This is a spectrogram:

It is a spectrogram showing my production of the Welsh word diolch which you may remember from my little Cymraeg lessons means "Thank You".

the "d" sound is a voiced plosive or a "stop" consonant. It is made by creating a complete closure in the mouth. There are two things I'm going to point out about it. The release of the stop:

That is where I released the closure making the "d" sound. (This is an alveolar closure, for bonus points. Its made like you'd make the "d" sound in English.)

The other thing that you can see here is the "voicing bar". That is where I continued to voice even when there was no place for the air to go. This is lighter than what you can see later in the spectrogram, but you can see it anyway.

There are two vowels in "diolch". Vowels are distinguished by dark bands called formants. The first formant inversely correlates with "height" and the second formant correlates with "backness". Vowels are thought of "high" or "low", "front" or "back". This sort of, if you really think about it and make it work corresponds with what is going on in your mouth (how wide your jaw is, if there is lip rounding, whether your tongue is close to the roof of the mouth or near the bottom of the mouth.) Sort of.

So, that is the vowel. Lets look at the first part, "i". As I said, inversely correlates for height. The lower the first formant, the higher the vowel. The higher the second formant, the fronter the vowel:

So, its high because the first dark band is low and its front because the second dark band is high. The second vowel is what is normally transcribed as symbol called "open o". Now, whether or not I actually make that and not and "a" is anyone's guess as I don't tend to make "open o" when I'm speaking English. Its just not really in my dialect. (Although, in "a" the first two formants get really close and become hard to distinguish. So, if this isn't "open o" its just "o". But, that's a discussion for another day.)

so that's the "o" sound in diolch. Neat, right?

The last sound is the "ch" sound, which in the Southern Welsh dialect I was taught is a velar fricative. It is a sound made by bringing the back of your tongue close to the sound palate (but not so close that you'd make a complete closure.) You can see that dark gray band, it looks a little like white noise would look like. (I'm thinking that my recording isn't the best. I'm not sure that it should be gray all the way to the bottom.)

The last thing I want to show you is something known as a "velar pinch". Sounds that are made at the soft palate often make the second and third formants come together, as if they've been pinched. The "ch" sound is no exception.

Color me geeky, but I think that is so neat. We use our vocal cords and our mouths and teeth and tongue and cheeks and nose to make these sounds, that can be explained by physics and that create a signal that we can break down and interpret. How freaking awesome is that? I know, you're amazed, too.

Posted by Kate at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe you're curious about what it is that I actually do in school. And, if you asked me my answer would be is that I learn about awesome linguistic phenomena. My particular interests are in the direction of sounds and words (mostly, the lexicon.) Which means this week's lessons have been heavy on the physics. This means I get to look at awesome things like spectrograms and waveforms, like this one

That is a (super noisy) recording of me saying "Curiosities". Guess where I got that. I was trying to make a cleaner recording so that I could put up a spectrogram, but I had an issue with my microphone (which is annoying). Things that I've learned this week include that the fundamental frequency is the first harmonic and is controlled by the vocal cords. All of the other harmonics are integer multiples above that. These harmonics are then manipulated by the resonance properties of the vocal tract. Why is this important? Well, because of this manipulation we can look at things like waveforms and spectrograms and speculate about sounds in an educated way. For example, vowels have specific dark regions called formants. They indicate where the energy (because of the resonance properties) is more intense.

And, as fun and interesting as that sounds (and it is, at least to me) that isn't what I want to bring to your attention.

This is what I wanted to bring to your attention. Go have a listen. The pure (in a non-technical sense) tones, the whistling you hear about the humming in that recording are made by a human voice. It is called harmonic singing or throat singing. The singer manipulates their vocal tract so that all of the energy is focused on one (or two, I suppose) harmonics. So, if there were formants in the "vowel", now there aren't because everything has been pushed together. Isn't that cool?

Posted by Kate at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, my friend Preston has suggested that the definition: "Adult female human being." I like this definition, and I don't see anything particularly wrong with this. However, it is on the biological side of things and biology isn't particularly interesting to me. (Unless, of course, we are talking about the brain and how it works. And, really, not so much the brain, just the bits of the brain required for speech production and reception.)

What I am curious about are sociological definitions. Particularly, people's working definitions. How do we define the big things that end up acting as frames. I'm curious. So, very, very curious.

So, seriously...how do you define "woman"?

Posted by Kate at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, seriously. Define the concept: woman. I am truly curious.

Posted by Kate at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Non sono più dove sbaterre la testa.

You use this phrase how you would use the English phrase "I'm on the end of my rope." Except, it literally means, "I don't know where to bang my head."

Mi piace molto!

Posted by Kate at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's Italian Phrase: (actually, March 22nd's phrase from my page-a-day calendar.)

Sono più vecchio, ma non necessariamente più saggio.

I'm older, but not necessarily wiser.

Ya, that about sums up this week.

Posted by Kate at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just wanted to let everyone know that the word of the day from dictionary.com today is Salient. I found that it be a particularly good word, its fun to say (all those vowels), plus its useful. You can use it in sentences like, "One of his more salient features was his ability to light up a room." to mean, "Its pretty noticeable, I mean, you've met him, right? When the man walks into a room, it lights up. I don't know, there's something wrong with his internal chemistry or whatever that makes him crazily electrical."

Or, maybe you wouldn't say that, but still, you get the picture. According to dictionary.com its synonyms with "important", "striking", "remarkable". And, I might even add "particularly relevant".

Oh, and it has some secondary meanings, too. One about heraldry and one about angles.

This might actually be a word ramble in the future. Hmm.

Posted by Kate at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My friend Preston once told me this joke:

There are two penguins up at the North Pole. They are sitting down to dinner and one of the penguins says to the other penguin, "Can you please pass me the salt?" to which the second penguin replied, "I AM NOT A TYPEWRITER!"

I was lying in bed this morning and this joke popped into my head. When I first heard it my response was, "But, there are no penguins at the North Pole. There is only one penguin in the Northern Hemisphere, and its equatorial." I think Preston at the time told me not be such a jerk, which was immediately followed by, "THAT is the one thing about the whole joke that bothered you? That there are no penguins in the Northern Hemisphere? It didn't bother you that the penguins were sitting down to a meal or that they speaking English or that they even knew what a typewriter was?" Of course, if I thought about it, these things would bother me. But, the first thing that bothered me, the thing that made everything else that was to follow bizarre yet irrelevant, is that the penguins wouldn't have been at the North Pole in the first place.

This joke didn't pop into my head because of the original discussion, it popped into my head because that's how I've been feeling the past few days...like a penguin at the North Pole making a simple request for some salt and being told in a raised voice that my interlocutor was not a typewriter. I've made a lot of references to the pragmatics of things lately, whether at the pub or just in general and I am left wondering, am I, by going about things the way I've always done them (which would mean in an American style) that I am doing wrong? Or, have I recently come into contact with a number of people who either have no social skills or who are being intentionally obtuse?

I like pragmatics. Not just because people don't say what they mean, but because when we use language in generally has some intent or purpose...something that we want to get done beyond the simple passing on of information. Pragmatics textbooks are full of examples of ways that we can use language to do things. There are classic examples of how, just by speaking the words we make something happen (For example: a wedding. " I now pronounce the husband and wife." when said after an exchange of vows signifies a marriage.) But, more often than not we get things done not by using the literal meanings of words, but through some sort of metaphorical or extended meanings of words. "Can I sit down?" isn't a request for you to verify whether an individual has the capacity to sit. Its something you say in order to get invited into a longer conversation. Its also something you say when you want someone to move their coat off of a seat so that you can sit down.

I'm not quite sure of the pragmatic intent behind, "Please pass the salt." aside from wanting the salt, but I have to figure it out, because I'm tired of hearing, "I AM NOT A TYPEWRITER!"

Posted by Kate at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of my favorite films is the Princess Bride. Its funny. Its quotable. It has call-backs. These things make it great. One of my favorite bits is The Scillian with his, "Inconceivable!"; particularly when Inigo Montoya says, "I don't think that means what you think that means."

This happens alot in the world, by the way, at least to me. Frequently, someone will jump into a conversation, or someone will misspeak, or it will turn out that Americans just don't use that word that way and bam! Miscommunication. I don't think that means what you think that means. Or, in the context of a conversation, I don't think I mean what you think I mean.

So, In honor of this hiccup of communication, I have found an online quiz about "doublespeak". Or, in the case, intentionally deceptive or ambiguous language used by businesses or government officials. Its an interesting little quiz, I recommend that you go and take it and then report back and let me know how you did. (If you don't want me to publish your score, just leave a note in the comment and I will screen it out.)

I missed one, who would have guessed that meant death? I think this is a good topic to become aware of, especially now in the run up the beginning of the American Election cycle.

Posted by Kate at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)