Talking to real people

Today I gave a talk to some real people. Actual non-academic real people. Normally, we only ever have to explain our research to people who already have a good specialist (or at least basic) knowledge of our topic and the background and framework that underpin it all. Everyone understands the technical terms you use, and you can make certain assumptions and everyone will go along with them.

But it does one good sometimes to step outside the warm bath of academia and see what impression you can make on people who don't have a rigorous grounding in the niceties of Minimalist syntax (for example). How are you going to explain what the Final-Over-Final Constraint is to an audience if they don't know what a head is? Or a VP? Or what 'final' means?

I was participating in the Explore programme run by the Centre for Lifelong Learning. They ran a training day for postgraduates at universities in the region aimed at helping us to present our research to a public audience. This is something that I'm interested in, because linguistics is so hopelessly unknown and misunderstood in the popular media, and yet everyone is interested in it. Programmes and newspaper articles about language go down an absolute storm, but the only linguist anyone's heard of is David Crystal. Yes, they've heard of Chomsky too, but not for his linguistics. Your average person knows more about how the Large Hadron Collider works than their own language.

The interest that people have in language was illustrated today, after my talk, when the audience had a chance to ask questions and make comments. They all had something to say, offering interesting facts about other languages, or making observations about the way language is used now or might be at some other time. From their feedback it seems that they found my topic interesting. Wow. Some readers of this blog will be wondering how on earth I made my dry, dull, theoretical syntax PhD into a talk that didn't send them to sleep. It is of course all due to my captivating speaking persona.

But seriously, these are people that learn for fun, so they're willing to put a bit of effort in (although they don't want to feel like they're back at school). However, I knew that for an audience with zero assumed knowledge of syntax, I had to lose a lot of the technicalities but not lose the quality. From the practice run we did at the training day, I found that some people panic at the sight of anything vaguely technical-looking. They pretty much switched off when they saw trees and abbreviations, even though I did try to explain them clearly. For that reason, I did away completely with tree diagrams and replaced them with an analogy of a mobile. I've used that analogy for years, after pinching it from a lecturer, and it works well. Then I entirely removed labels like VP and TP and just did without them. It's convenient for linguists to use them but it turns out you don't need them. Then I filled the talk with cats. People like cats.

I followed the principle we'd learnt at the training day, that rather than start with the general background, it's good to dive straight in to the interesting fact and show some kind of visual (or otherwise memorable) prop. I showed maps from WALS illustrating different patterns of word orders, and how question particles don't look the way they're meant to. It's not the most fascinating graphic in the world, but it's better than a lot of text. I also tried to end on something that they could engage with, and compared my analysis to spurious claims about languages lacking some characteristic or other. I thought that was something they would likely have read about, and have thoughts about, and they did - that sparked some nice discussion. I wish I'd thought to use the Hopi example that came up in the questions, though.

Marcus du Sautoy looking all mathsy

I think that in the middle, some people still got a bit lost. Maybe I didn't explain everything as fully as I should have, or maybe I tried to cover too much and could have sloughed off a bit more syntax. But overall, I was pleased with how it went. I'll work on those things for next time someone's fool enough to put me in front of humans again, and this time next year I'll be the Marcus du Sautoy of linguistics.

Just nobody, not ever, suggest I host this gameshow (I would derail it with anti-prescriptivism):

Chocolate bar gives evidence for syntactic constraint

I bought myself a Cadbury's Boost (other chocolate bars are available, though none are as good if you want to ingest maximum calories). It describes itself thus:

2 x milk chocolate with caramel and biscuit filling bars

(It was a Boost Duo, OK? Don't judge me.)

Does that sound at all odd to you? Grammatically, I mean; it obviously sounds perfect in terms of content, though it does sell itself short, in my opinion. It's so much more than just 'caramel and biscuit'. But syntactically, it's really awkward.

Happily, the reason for its awkwardness can be attributed to the constraint that I work on. It's called the Final-Over-Final Constraint (FOFC), and it's about what phrases can be combined in what order. It specifically states that one order is not allowed, and it's the one instantiated in the description of my delicious chocolatey snack (although it's so many calories, it might have to be my delicious chocolatey tea).

This is the (partial) structure, as far as I can work it out:

[[milk chocolate [with caramel and biscuit filling]] bars]

Bars is the head of the phrase. It's at the end, as you can see. This means that it's a head-final phrase. FOFC states (basically) that a head-final phrase should not immediately 'dominate' (i.e. have as its immediate constituent) a head-initial phrase (that would be one where the head is at the start). The phrase milk chocolate with caramel and biscuit filling is just such a head-initial phrase, with chocolate as its head (we're not going to talk about milk now - it doesn't affect the argument). So we have precisely the relationship that FOFC doesn't like.

This type of construction is sometimes found: the quick-off-the-mark athlete, his out-of-the-blue question. These are marginal, for most people, and it's not a very productive construction: *a happy in his job employee is not good at all. The ones that are accepted are often taken to contain a lexicalised or Spelt-Out element - that is, the first part is not interpreted as having any internal structure, so any structural constraints don't apply to its parts, only to it as a whole, as if it was one word. The Boost description, I think we can agree, is definitely compositional (that is, it's built by the syntax, not interpreted as a single unit), so that explanation doesn't hold and we get a decidedly dodgy bundle of words.

In fact, this is such a mangled piece of syntax that there are at least two other reasons why this is bad. It leaves us hanging a long time before we get to the head, which we English speakers are none too keen on, and furthermore, the PP with caramel and biscuit filling modifies bars, not milk chocolate, so it should follow bars. Why it's where it is at all is beyond me. So we don't need FOFC to write this off as a bad job. But as we have FOFC for other reasons anyway, we can add it to the long list of Things Cadbury's Has Bungled.

(P.S. You may have noticed that Final-Over-Final Constraint violates itself. Its originators are quite proud of this, although it was accidental - the observation is attributed to Gertjan Postma. They note that all the best generalisations do so.)