#syntactic islands

[pvnktimez]

On speaking

Autonomy and control over selfhood, that's the dream, baby! Isn't it? Have you ever wondered who the first person to come up with words is? Why do we use the speech patterns and vocabulary that we do? What do the subtleties of our speaking habits reveal about our underlying perspectives and attitudes towards the world, ourselves, our fellow humans, and all the other organisms and spirits who share the world with us. For example, that we differentiate between humans as people and nonhumans as animals shows a lot about how we unconsciously separate ourselves from other living creatures, justly or otherwise. 

Noam Chomsky is a well known social theorist and political commentator who got a big name first for his work in linguistics. Language is everything - it defines perception - a powerful, magically artistic and diplomatic tool to influence ourselves and the world at large. Being able to speak at all is an amazing gift our ancestors have blessed us with - to understand language and use it intentionally is, in my view, the mark of a powerful craftsman. It is intangible, yet has the capability to bend, twist, and transform reality when handled with skill, for good or bad. 

Consider gender - not only have members of the trasngender community been doing groundbreaking philosophical linguistic work for the better part of a century by developing new language to expand our collective perception and acceptance of gender diversity, many languages have already been using gender neutral pronouns since inception! I started dipping my toes into Turkish on Duolingo this year and learned that they do not use gendered pronouns - he/she/it are all wrapped up into the singular 'o' and the plural 'onlar'. Elegant, no? 

Back to animals, the capacity for symbolic speech is a uniquely human trait. While many animals have the capacity for auditory/vocal communication, none exhibit the same capacity for "hierarchical syntactic structure" as humans have. This involves traits like symbolism, abstraction, and creative grammatical construction. While it is true that some nonhuman animals, such as some birds, dogs, and monkeys can mimic language (a process called "phonological syntax"), use tools to construct basic sentences to communicate needs (like those button pads with pre-recorded words such as "treat" or "walk"), or even learn sign language effectively, they notably lack the biological faculties which would allow for the complex, creative combining of vocabulary and syntax to organically generate new sentence structures, speech or otherwise. This field of study is called Comparative Linguistics - it deals with the material, biological circumstances that result in the variety of language capacities across different species (Bolhuis, et. al.).

In an interview on the podcast "Conversations with Tyler", Chomsky describes the spectacularity of language in humans as follows: 

"The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle" (Cowan).

Communication fosters connection and empathy, so it makes sense that many people feel disconnected from animals because communication between different languages is damn hard. It seems to me that when one group of people who are already deficit in empathy (such as the white colonizers who founded the current American empire) meets another group who does not share the same language (such as the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and abroad), grounds for dehumanization are very easy to justify, particularly so within the cultural context of religious superiority. I even see that within a common language, people still manage to ignore the conversational partners, whether in casual or professional settings, by refusing to listen and using language to dominate and self-affirm, therefore separating themselves from the harmonious community. 

I would also note that I believe the chronic lack of empathy we're observing is, at least partially, on account of numerous types of trauma and repression from systems such as white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and religious extremism that modern science has barely begun to understand in the last century. We have a lot of healing to do, folks :) 

Moving onto the state and its monopoly on violence, it's well known that if someone can control the language a group of people use, they have control over that group's perception of reality and the consequent decisions made thereafter. George Orwell explores this theme in his notorious novel "1984". Even if you haven't read it, I trust the reader understands its premise primarily warns against government totalitarianism and censorship. I say this because I have not read it, but have listened to enough people talk about it that I feel like I get it. One notable comment I remember hearing went something along the lines of "1984 was not a prediction of the future, but a description of the author's present day environment", as is much of the sci-fi genre. We have to remember "1984" was published in 1949, not even a decade after WWII.

In the same interview mentioned above, Chomsky outlines more subtle ways the United States government has implemented this tactic. "Manufacturing Consent" may be one of his most well known books, written in 1988. This term was coined from Walter Lippman in the early 20th century, a member of Woodrow Wilson's propaganda committee. Despite campaigning on a platform for pacifism, Wilson decided the U.S. should enter WWI and was faced with changing public opinion from one of peace towards war to gain support for this decision. This is what the Committee of Public Information was charged with - dealing misinformation. Sound familiar?

Lippman developed the techniques to manufacture consent which “could control the public, shape opinion, completely turn them into, in this case, fanatic anti-German people who wanted to kill everything German. Can’t say frankfurter; you have to say hotdog. You have to change your name if you’re German to something else" (Cowan). This "new art in the practice of democracy" benefitted the private sector as well as the war by accusing labor unions of anti-patriotism. This rhetoric is remarkably similar to actions taken by the the House on Un-American Activities Committee, which was active from 1938 (eleven years before "1984" was published) until 1975. 

Chomsky explains that these tactics come from the liberal perspective that the public doesn't know what's good for them - we're dumby and should only be allowed to "spectate" public affairs, never to participate, so they lie to us to make think that everythings is fine <insert dog drinking coffee in a burning house meme>

Thanks, Dad. I'll just hang out underneath the bleachers doing fent while the forests burn down in the west and hurricanes ravage the east while telling myself that the economy is actually doing SO well. Here we wonder how misinformation has become such a huge issue today on the internet, the news, and media at large, but it doesn’t seem to be anything new. Rather, only recently is the public becoming increasingly aware of the nature of government deception as access to information and source checking becomes more widespread and accessible thanks to the internet itself. 

So now what? What do we do when we realize that our voice is not our own? That we've been told what to care about, what to talk about, so that powerful people can do terrifying things. I'm done sitting under the bleachers. In fact, I'd like to flip them on their side. There is no carrying on like usual anymore, not when social breakdown, environmental collapse, and nuclear war are on the line. Like every Jew before me, I ask, "How do we keep going?" 

If I've learned anything in my short, stupid life, it's that big change requires small, consistent actions. And to act effectively, we must maintain awareness. Awareness is so trendy right now - awareness in the media, the news! Spread awareness! Every other month is dedicated to spreading awareness about some major issue, be it black history or pride. But this is not the kind of awareness I'm talking about right now.

No, this is a linguistics column, and hopefully you come out of it thinking about things a little bit differently than when you started. I am talking about awareness over your speech - the kinds of language you use when you're making observations, judgements or demands. Do you use different speech patterns when talking to people of different backgrounds? Do you meet other people with a lot of resistance, countering anything they offer in conversation with "No", or "uhm, actually..."? Or maybe you people please, letting folks say whatever they want, even if it's harmful? 

This column will be a recurring segment where Underground readers can join me in exploring how we can harness speech to change the world. How can we programmatically create change with the world? It all starts with us, here and now. There's a lot of fear about the future and anger in our hearts, but holdfast readers, there's a whole world worth protecting in our hands. Take care out there, and tell your friends you love them. 

[nylanguageworkshop]

Workshop Monday, November 4th: Wataru Uegaki, "Semantic triviality leads to ungrammaticality through iterated learning"

Our speaker on Monday, November 4th will be Wataru Uegaki, who is Reader in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Wataru will present joint work with Ciyang Qing called "Semantic triviality leads to ungrammaticality through iterated learning"

A major line of research in semantics concerns meaning-driven explanations of combinatorial restrictions of various operators. These include e.g. the definiteness effect (Barwise & Cooper 1981: henceforth B&C), restrictions on exceptives (von Fintel 1993), weak islands (Abrusán 2014; Schwarz & Simonenko 2018), NPI licensing (Chierchia 2013) and selectional restrictions of clause-embedding predicates (Theiler et al. 2019). Such explanations rely on a link from semantic triviality to ungrammaticality, standardly explicated in terms of LOGICALITY, according to which the grammar contains a natural deductive system that contributes to speakers’ grammaticality judgments, besides the purely syntactic combinatorial system (e.g., Gajewski 2002; Fox & Hackl 2006; Chierchia 2013).

However, this involves a non-trivial architectural assumption about the interaction between syntax and semantics, and there is no consensus on the exact specification of the natural deductive system (see e.g. Del Pinal 2019; Abrusán 2019; Pistoia-Reda & Sauerland 2021). In this paper, we provide an alternative account of the link between semantic triviality and ungrammaticality based on ITERATED LEARNING, an independently motivated model of language evolution (Kirby & Hurford 2002). Within this model, it can be shown that for certain trivial sentences, a population of speakers possessing a grammar that in principle generates them are overtaken by learners who induce a grammar that rules them out after several generations. Crucially, our account does not need to postulate an additional natural deductive system.

The workshop will take place on Monday, November 4th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

[linguistlist-blog]

Books: French subject islands: Winckel (2024)

This book examines extractions out of the subject, which is traditionally considered to be an island for extraction. There is a debate among linguists regarding whether the “subject island constraint” is a syntactic phenomenon or an illusion caused by cognitive or pragmatic factors. The book focusses on French, that provides an interesting case study because it allows certain extractions out of the subject despite not being a typical null-subject language. The book takes a discourse-based approa http://dlvr.it/TBZyG3

[yoshicolonoscopyfootageofficial]

Tummy pic will be incoming. Gotta do some reading on how syntactic control works influenced by island phenomena

[bookshopsbizarreblog]

Going further than that, it could even imply that a thing is actively negative. That the person or course of action is so unwise and blundering as to cut off the capacity for guidance, for seeing the stars and the rest of the world around them.

Even if that's going a little far and the addition of "-ing" to "blind" is more about syntactic flow than the implication of action, I still think it works so well within the framework you laid out. Because blindness doesn't just make seeing the stars (and thus, in their theological framework, the guidance of the universe) more difficult, but it also adds difficulty to interacting with the regular world too.

At the risk of reading too much into the two examples of island-up-northers that we have, it seems like having a concrete direction is incredibly important to them, to the point that it can get internalized as a "my way is the only right way" type mentality. This is most apparent in the King, whose determination to "save" Dormont by freezing it in time is unshakeable. But I'd also argue that Siffrin demonstrates it too. While I have yet to see everything the game has to offer (and so there may be counterexamples) his commitment to certain core things, like making puns at certain times or not revealing the loop to his friends, is almost absolute. It takes until he is psychologically shattered, cut off, and believes there are no other options for him to break from them.

While we can't necessarily extrapolate from those two examples to the entirety of northern island culture, it could slot in nicely with the religion. And if believing oneself divinely guided and as an actor of the universe's will is (was?) nearly as culturally relevant up there as the doctrine of change is in Dormont, then invoking blindness as a pejorative could easily be the equivalent of "damn" in English, if not stronger. To be blind could mean being theologically cut off, culturally disdained, and doomed to hopelessly fumble around in a world of clear direction.

It'd probably have a meaning a little less severe than all that, but that seems like a decent etymological base layer for it to build on.

hi. big fan of linguistics here. shes my fun little spinterest. so let me be real autistic for a second.

the use of "blinding" as an expletive/as profanity in hit indie game in stars and time is actually STELLAR (no pun intended) and i lose my mind whenever i think about it too hard.

listen . its sort of profanity, sort of an expletive. im gonna treat it as profanity because it falls into that category a little more (profanity is born from the violation of social taboos; hence why bastard and fuck are both profane)

WE DON'T KNOW A BUNCH ABOUT THE ISLANDS BELIEF, but we do know they followed the Universe in the way one would follow a deity.

when the King said "the universe leads, and we follow" or whatever the sentence was, i started thinking about what siffrin says when hes frustrated at himself/with something. "blinding".

with a religion about following, the way i read this expletive was "stupid blinding idiot" was as "stupid, unguided idiot".

or, in longer terms:

"this thing is not being led by the universe. this thing is blind. this thing is blundering through the world unguided, and we can all tell"

and i have NO idea if this was on purpose or not—probably not! but MAN its interesting.

(ALL of the profanity and expletives actually make perfect sense but thats a post for a different day)

[thelingspace]

Capturing Swedish Islands (Linguistically)

An interesting question found its way into our inbox recently, asking about relative clauses in Swedish, and wondering whether their unique characteristics might pose a problem for some of the linguistic theories we’ve talked about on our channel. So if you want a discussion of syntax, Swedish, and subjacency (with some eye-tracking thrown in), this is for you!

So yes, there is a hypothesis that Swedish relative clauses break one of the basic principles by which language is thought to work. In particular, it’s been claimed that one of the governing principles of language is Subjacency, which basically says that when words move around in a sentence, like when a statement gets turned into a question, those words can’t move around without limit. Instead, they have to hop around in small skips and jumps to get to their destination. To make this more concrete, consider the sentence in (1).

     (1) Where did Nick think Carol was from?

The idea goes that a sentence like this isn’t formed by moving the word “where” directly from the end to the beginning, as in (2). Instead, we suppose that it happens in steps, by moving it to the beginning of the embedded clause first, and then moving it all the way to the front of the sentence as a whole, shown in (3).

     (2a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?

     (2b) Where did Nick think Carol was from _?

     (3a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?

     (3b) Did Nick think where Carol was from _?

     (3c) Where did Nick think _ Carol was from _?

One of the advantages of supposing that this is how questions are formed is that it’s easy to explain why some questions just don’t work. The question in (4) sounds pretty weird — so weird that it’s hard to know what it’s even supposed to mean. (The asterisk marks it as unacceptable.)

     (4) *Where did Nick ask who was from _?

The explanation behind this is that the intermediate step that “where” normally would have made on its way to the front is rendered impossible because the “who” in the middle gets in its way. It’s sitting in exactly the spot inside the structure of the sentence that “where” would have used to make its pit stop.

More generally, Subjacency is used as an explanation for ‘islands,’ which are the parts of sentences where words like “where” and “when” often seem to get stranded. And one of the most robust kinds of island found across the world’s languages is the relative clause, which is why we can’t ever turn (5) into (6).

     (5) Nick is friends with a hero who lives on another planet

     (6) *Where is Nick friends with a hero who lives _?

Surprisingly, Swedish — alongside other mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian — seems to break this rule into pieces. The sentence in (7) doesn’t have a direct translation into English that sounds very natural.

    (7a) Såna blommor            såg    jag    en man som sålde på torget

    (7b) Those kinds of flowers    saw    I    a man that sold in square-the    (gloss)

    (7c) *Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold in the square

So does that mean we have to toss all our progress out the window, and start from scratch? Well, let’s not be too hasty. For one, it’s worth noting that even the English version of the sentence can be ‘rescued’ using what’s called a resumptive pronoun, filling the gap left behind by the fronted noun phrase “those kinds of flowers.”

     (8) Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold them in the square

For many speakers, the sentence in (8) actually sounds pretty good, as long as the pronoun “them” is available to plug the leak, so to speak. At the very least, these kinds of sentences do find their way into conversational speech a whole lot. So, whether a supposedly inviolable rule gets broken or not isn’t as black-and-white as it might appear. What’s maybe a more compelling line of thinking is that what look like violations of these rules on the surface can turn out not to be, once we dig a little deeper. For instance, the sentence in (9), found in Quebec French, might seem surprising. It looks like there’s a missing piece after “exploser” (“blow up”), inside of a relative clause, that corresponds directly to “l'édifice” (“the building”) — so, right where a gap shouldn’t be possible.

     (9a) V'là l'édifice qu'y a un gars qui a fait exploser _

     (9b) *This is the building that there is a man who blew up

But that embedded clause has some very strange properties that have given linguists reasons to think it’s something more exotic. For one, the sentence in (9) above only functions with what’s known as a stage-level predicate — so, a verb that describes an action that takes place over a relatively short period of time, like an explosion. This is in contrast to an individual-level predicate, which can apply over someone’s whole lifetime. When we replace one kind of predicate with another, what comes out as garbage in English now sounds equally terrible in French.

     (10a) *V’là l'édifice qu'y a un employé qui connaît _

     (10b) *This is the building that there is an employee who knows

Interestingly, stage-level predicates seem to fundamentally change the underlying structures of these sentences, so that other apparently inviolable rules completely break down. For instance, with a stage-level predicate, we can now fit a proper name in there, which is something that English (and many other languages) simply forbid.

     (11a) Y a Jean qui est venu

     (11b) *There is John who came    (cannot say out-of-the-blue to mean “John came”)

For this reason, along with some other unusual syntactic properties that come hand-in-hand, it’s supposed that these aren’t really relative clauses at all. And not being relative clauses, the “who” in (9) isn’t actually occupying a spot that any other words have to pass through on their way up the tree. That is, movement isn’t blocked like how it normally would be in a genuine relative clause.

Still, Swedish has famously resisted any good analysis. Some researchers have tried to explain the problem away by claiming that what look like relative clauses are actually small clauses — the “Carol a friend” part of the sentence below — since small clauses are happy to have words move out of them.

     (12a) Nick considers Carol a friend

     (12b) Who does Nick consider _ a friend?

But the structures that words can move out of in Swedish clearly have more in common with noun phrases containing relative clauses, than clauses in and of themselves. In (13), it just doesn’t make sense to think of the verb “träffat” (“meet”) as being followed by a clause, in the same way it did for “consider.”

     (13a) Det    har    jag    inte träffat    någon som gjort

     (13b) that    have    I    not met    someone that done

     (13c) *That, I haven’t met anyone who has done

So what’s next? Here, it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees. Languages show amazing variation, but given all the ways it could have been, language as a whole also shows incredible uniformity. It’s truly remarkable that almost all the languages we’ve studied carefully so far, regardless of how distant they are from each other in time and space, show similar island effects. Even if Swedish turns out to be a true exception after all is said and done, there’s such an overwhelming tendency in the opposite direction, it begs for some kind of explanation. If our theory is wrong, it means we need to build an even better one, not that we need no theory at all.

And yet the situation isn’t so dire. A recent eye tracking study — the first of its kind to address this specific question — suggests a more nuanced set of facts. Generally, when experimental subjects read through sentences, looking for open spots where a dislocated word might have come from as they process what they’re seeing, they spend relatively less time fixated on the parts of sentences that are syntactic islands, vs. those that aren’t. In other words, by default, readers in these experiments tend to ignore the possibility of finding gaps inside syntactic islands, since our linguistic knowledge rules that out. And in this study, it was found that sentences like the ones in (7) and (13), which seem to show that Swedish can move words out from inside a relative clause, tend to fall somewhere between full-on syntactic islands and structures that typically allow for movement, in terms of where readers look, and for how long. This suggests that Swedish relative clauses are what you might call ‘weak islands,’ letting you move words out of them in some circumstances, but not in others. And this is in line with the fact that not all kinds of constituents (in this case, “why”) can be moved out of these relative clauses, as the unacceptability of the sentence in (14) shows. (In English, the sentence cannot be used to ask why people were late.)

     (14a) *Varföri    känner    du    många som blev sena till festeni?

     (14b) Why        know        you    many who were late to party-the

     (14c) *Why do you know many people who were late to the party?

For reasons we don’t yet fully understand, relative clauses in Swedish don’t obviously pattern with relative clauses in English. At the same time, the variation between them isn’t so deep that we’re forced to throw out everything we know about how language works. The search for understanding is an ongoing process, and sometimes the challenges can seem impossible, but sooner or later we usually find a way to puzzle out the problem. And that can only ever serve to shed more light on what we already know!

[sagebrush-and-sadness]

･✻･ What sharing a bed with them is like ･✻･

• ══─━━── ⫷⫸ ──══─━━ •

I've decided to break my silence and finally share my opinions on Zhongli and Childe as your partners because I love them a healthy amount. It's pretty vanilla and romantic, but still NSFW, so be mindful.

These are simply my headcanons and thoughts based on my view on the characters. Hope you enjoy!

P.S. please, note that English is not my native language, so perhaps some phrases may sound unusual. If there are any grammatical/syntactic/spelling mistakes, you may let me know, I'd really appreciate that!

CW: AFAB reader, soft dom!Zhongli (praising and pet names), switch!Tartaglia (inexperienced partner)

• ══─━━── ⫷⫸ ──══─━━ •

Now, we all know that ultimately Zhongli and Childe are two very different men.

One will become your personal island of peace and serenity, his calming presence grounding you, his strong arms never letting you fall and his gentle gaze being your guiding light in the darkness.

Whilst the other is a fierce wildfire only you can tame. And instead of biting, burning your flesh and spitting sparkles in your eyes, it warms your hands, it pumps your blood and crackles comfortably within your chest.

But no matter how different these men are, there is one thing that unites them and makes them oh so similar in their love – they have a soft spot for you.

• ══─━━── ⫷⫸ ──══─━━ •

Zhongli is your wall of stone raised to guard and protect you, but never to keep you in, should you decide to leave. You won't, though. This feeling of being watched so carefully and tenderly is your comfort and you know that this wall of his is warm, stones caressed by the sun. Why would you even want to escape?

Zhongli is soft with you, his every touch a measured tenderness on the border with animalistic fervor and lust. Even in bed he will guide you, will lead you – will hide you among the sheets of silk, behind closed doors and heavy curtains. He's not possesive by nature, this wise gentle dragon, and he doesn't fall into the pit of jealousy quite as easily as humans do. Yet he is a genteel man, a quiet lover that would fight for your honour and shield your dignity. You are his and nobody else's for as long as he is yours.

Zhongli is a dominant one, his every word a soft spoken command you wouldn't dare to disobey, you wouldn't even think to do so, you wouldn't want it in the first place. The way he treasures you, the way he talks to you, the way he touches you, looks at you, smiles at you, even the very way he breathes when you gaze at him from under your trembling lashes – everything is to ensure that you feel safe and sound in his arms, that you are ready for him, need him, want him, that you are ready to serve him. So don't let him down now.

Zhongli is always oh so generous. His voice is a river of sweet, sweet honey, praises dripping from his lips like ambrosia, and you drink it up, lap at it, lick it away from his mouth, feeling it in your belly warming your insides, the very core of your being.

"Good girl", when you drop to your knees, your breath leaving your lungs at the sight of the God you're ready to worship.

"You're doing so well, my darling", when you take him to the base, his cock a heavy pulsing heat burning you from the inside, every thrust sending starts dancing in the darkness before your eyes, every low growl making you wetter and wetter. Just for him, only for him, now and forever.

"Ah, my love, my pearl, my precious little priest, I'm so proud of you", when you whisper his name to the skies above in hopes it will reach the Gods of Celestia herself and make them turn their heads away in shame. Only Zhongli will make you feel this good, only he can make you feel this good, Morax, The Lord of Stone, the God of your heart, the Dragon of your soul.

Zhongli is here to take care of you, always.

• ══─━━── ⫷⫸ ──══─━━ •

Childe, oh sweet Childe. He never ceases to amaze you. You know his heart is loyal to the Tsaritsa, not you, just like his hands are loyal to his blades and not lovers, yet when it comes to you he's the softest he can be. This form of tenderness only a wild fierce beast can muster. He's very careful at first, almost timidly so, his touch a lingering warmth on your skin, his deep dark eyes watching every movement, every change on your face, catching the very breath leaving your chest in steady calm streams, his fingers caressing you down there so lightly it almost feels like a wind's touch, his lips pink and boyishly plump, unused to kisses and bites. You smile and reach out your welcoming arms towards him.

Childe is inexperienced and this fear that he may hurt you sticks to his face, hiding in the crease between his eyebrows, in the trembling corners of his lips, in the warm air that slips between you two in places where Childe is too afraid to touch you. He wants to please you, wants to make love to you so intensely, so passionately, wants to mark you as his even if you will never truly belong to him, wants to hide your heart in his big rough hands and steal your breath away. But he cannot do that, not yet.

Childe respects you. No matter how many times you fall in bed together, how long you look each other in the eyes and how often you share the secret words of love, you will always remain a person he values as a friend as much as a lover. You're his comrade, almost his family, and he will never disrespect you. Neither with his hands, nor with his words. As young and unskilled in love and sex as Childe is, he is ready to learn and accept your wants, your desires, your needs, he's ready to obey your rules and be a good boy for you, ready to serve and worship you – but he will never be ready to use a dirty word to address you, will never be ready to land a hand on you. You are way too precious for him, a stolen sun shining for a murderer with blood on his hands.

Sometimes Childe doesn't know what he wants, but with your careful guidance and gentle coaxing, he'll understand eventually. He wants to trust you, wants to put himself into your loving hands, and let you know better. Strip him of his control, tie him up and chain him down, love him in the way he deserves – in the way nobody loved him before, make him forget about names other than your own, about colors other than the color of your eyes, about sounds other than the sound of his own broken voice. Take care of him so thoroughly it leaves him falling into pieces. Take him apart and then put him back together again.

Childe is here to be better for you, always.

• ══─━━── ⫷⫸ ──══─━━ •

[loving-n0t-heyting]

also obviously a significant portion of ML "anti imperialist" defensiveness around the argentine claim to the falklands stems from the fact that china recognises the islands as argentinas. ofc, this is a transparently unprincipled bit of international realpolitik responding in kind to argentinas acknowledgement of chinas (equally specious and considerably more geopolitically significant) claim on taiwan, so theres not really a good reason to stake much on this if you are not yrself engaged in international diplomacy. but it is a reason beyond pure syntactic sugar

"Son Malvinas Son Argentinas" is the funniest shit. All the talking points of imperialism backed by nothing more than "the Spanish out a flag on these empty, uninhabited rocks before conquering South America" and "Look they're right over there, right there, why should they have them, we should have them!"

The language of counter-imperialism dressing up two arguments used in actual historical imperialism. Prime example of how you can get people to support any political view so long as it's got the syntactic sugar of familiar political lingo.

[betweentheleavesblr]

Book Review: The End of Summer and The Summer Book

Tove Jansson’s novella, The Summer Book, is a perfect read for the month of August and the end of summer! Known for her delightful children’s book series centered around the “Moomintrolls,” Jansson’s adult fiction is likewise filled with light, beauty, and humor. Even so, along with their topics of youth and summer, Jansson’s adult works (including The Summer Book) are also concerned with aging, the fall season (the end of summer), and death.

The Summer Book, considered a modern classic, is largely focused around the daily summer activities of a little girl and her grandmother on a remote island. The most recent publication of the book in 2008, 34 years after its initial publication in English in 1974, testifies to the power and beauty of this work. While the language of the book is syntactically simple and the subject matter is deceivingly light, its pages are filled with moments of suggestive wisdom and penetrating clarity.

The Summer Book is almost relentlessly focused on the present moment. The marching of time is continuously hinted at, but any deep concerns about the past or future are dealt with by the book with wry subtlety. “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment,” Jansson’s Sophia proclaims upon composing the final lines of her book, A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart. While the little girl muses over the physical and intellectual life of worms, her grandmother is tasked with the book’s transcription. Sophia narrates, “The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don’t know how much it hurts.” What starts out as a potentially cute activity becomes a meditation on death and dying and growing up. Both Grandmother and Sophia are “growing up” and moving towards the end of the phase of life that they are currently living. This experience proves to be as painful and uncertain for them as it is for the worm. After narrating this line, Sophia, who is prone to outbursts of energy and petulance, suddenly stands up and shouts, “Say this: say I hate everything that dies slow! Say I hate everything that won’t let you help!” Apparently, Sophia harbors anxiety and pent-up frustration about her grandmother’s old age and her own inability to do anything about the passing of time. Meanwhile, “the wind blew and blew. The wind was always blowing on this island, from one direction to another. A sanctuary for someone with work to do, a wild garden for someone growing up, but otherwise just days on top of days, and passing time.”

As the book goes on the island becomes a metaphor for time. Grandmother thinks to herself, “an island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place… Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”

The island is terrible to outsiders because those on the island have seemingly lost any real sense of time and of the world outside of the island. The grandmother and Sophia take refuge in this. For the most part, they ignore or make light of both past and future. That is, until it comes time to leave the island. The grandmother and grandchild act as care-takers for the island and have trouble letting go at the end of the season. But, when the little family leaves the island at the end of the summer, the island is indifferent to their leaving.

In the final pages of the book Grandmother goes outside in the cool night and finds her way in the dark to sit on a stump. She watches a boat pass by and listens to the thump of her heart and “for a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She guessed she would stay for a while.” At the end of the book, summer is coming to an end. Grandmother is approaching death and Sophia is approaching the end of childhood. But for now, in the book’s final pages, we are left with a moment of stillness in the present. Each character faces the path that Jansson leaves open for readers-- a path that gestures towards the terrors and delights of Being.

The great pleasure of reading The Summer Book is the way it combines the dark with the light. In the climax of the novella in terms of action, a massive storm wracks the island and causes extensive damage. Sophia thinks she caused the storm because earlier that day whenever she was desperately bored, she prayed to God to “let something happen.” During the storm, Sophia climbs up into a tower room and “she [sees] that the island had shrunk and grown terribly small, nothing but an insignificant patch of rocks and colorless earth. But the sea was immense… There was only this one island, surrounded by water… forgotten by everyone but God, who granted prayers. ‘Oh God,’ said Sophia solemnly, ‘I didn’t realize I was so very important. It was awfully nice of You.’”

[opheliasweeps]

Blog Post #5: Music & Rhythm

Music is important to poetry as using the principles of music, such as repetition, alliteration, rhyme, etc. all allow for a poem to be read well. It gives it a good mouth feel, for lack of a better phrasing. Songs and poems are very similar, and both rely on music in addition to rhythm to carry their message well to the reader. The only thing is that due to the nature of both mediums, poetry relies even more heavily upon rhetorical and syntactical devices/structure to do well. 

Let’s take for example the first line verse of Queen’s song, “Good Old-Fashioned Boy” and the last 5 lines of “How to Locate Water on a Desert Island” by Karen Skolfield:

“I can dim the lights and sing you songs full of sad things We can do the tango just for two I can serenade and gently play on your heart strings Be your Valentino just for you” —Queen

“...An art form and our bodies bend to fit in the shapes laid out for us. Rest for a moment my love, my comma in the dark. The air around us explodes in plumage. Watch where the birds go.” —Skolfield

If you look closely at the words that are in blue, you’ll see that both poems use constanance for musicality purposes, but to avoid making the poem too sing-songy, Skolfield doesn’t place them too close together. They are, however, still close enough for the reader to see the connection between all the words.

While rhythm is closely tied to music, rhythm more so is particular about how the words are said. Songs and their rhythm rely on the instruments in the background. Having heard the audio of Queen’s song is how you’ll know how to sing it. In order to understand how to read Skolfield’s poem, you must find the pattern within her poetry and especially look at the meter and punctuation of her poem.

I want to particularly draw your focus to the punctuation in Skolfield’s poem. If you look at the first 5 lines of her poem and the last 5 lines of the poem, you’ll notice, each line has a pause in it (whether it’s momentary or definite). The middle 10 or so lines all have alternating pauses, meaning that there is a punctual pause every other line. That not only tells you how to read the poem, but also places emphasis on those parts of the poem. That is one of the most important reasons be particular about rhythm in your poetry—emphasis.

[linguistlist-blog]

Books: Optimal Linking Grammar

Supported by data from linguistic fieldwork conducted in the Faroe Islands and Iceland, this book presents a pioneering approach to syntactic analysis, 'Optimal Linking Grammar' (OLG), which brings together two existing models, Linking Theory and Optimality Theory (OT). OT, which assumes spoken language to be based on the highest-ranking outcome from a number of competing underlying constraints, has been central mainly to phonology; however its application to syntax has also gained ground in rec http://dlvr.it/SyFxqF

[gwendolynlerman]

Languages of the world

Central Siberian Yup’ik (Юпик)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 1,200

Official language: Alaska (United States)

Language of diaspora: Russia

Script: Cyrillic, 45 letters

Grammatical cases: 7

Linguistic typology: polysynthetic, SVO, ergative-absolutive

Language family: Eskimo-Aleut, Eskimo, Yupik

Number of dialects: 2

History

1962 - first grammar

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: а б в г ґ ҕ д е ё ж з и й к к’ л љ м н нъ н’ ң о п р с т у ў ф х х’ ҳ ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я ’.

The letter -щ- is only used in Russian loanwords. There is no fixed stress.

Grammar

Nouns have seven cases (absolutive, relative, ablative, localis, terminalis, vialis, and aequalis) and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural). Possessed nouns agree with their possessor.

Genitive complements precede nouns, but demonstratives follow them.

Verbs are conjugated for mood (indicative, interrogative, optative, and participial), person, and number.

Dialects

There are two dialects: Chaplino and St. Lawrence Island. There are only minor phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical differences between them.

[moodboardinthecloud]

Gathering Council: World of Witnesses

by Sophie Strand 

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10226588198557848&set=a.1499832382446

Scarlet Tanager. Woodcock. Yellow-throated Vireo. Thimbleweed. St. John’s Wort.Black locust. Honey locust. King Bolete. Cayuga Soil. Schist. Bluestone. Turkeytail. Mountain lion. Coy Wolf. Trillium. Columbine. Mountain Laurel. The Shawangunk Mountain Range. The Esopus Creek. The Millstream. Sturgeon. Purple Loosestrife. Wolf spider. Chanterelle. Osha. Phlox….The litany lasts about an hour, or as long as it takes for me to boil the water for my pour over of coffee and watch streamers of clementine dawn stripe across my living room. Lately, it’s spilled into my early morning run. But by the time I’m done summoning and sending thanks to every being I know in a twenty-mile radius of my home, I’m surrounded by a world of witnesses. The day begins within a more-than-human community. And my decisions henceforth– practical, creative, and spiritual – will be made with the knowledge that I exist in relationship. Everything I do is ecological. When I used the word ecological, I root back to the original etymology: Greek oikos for household. I am not a noun on an empty page. I do nothing alone. I am a syntactical being, strung together by my metabolism and needs and desires, to thousands of other beings. Together we are all a household, and every choice we make, mundane or explosive, takes place within the networked household of relationships. I did not arrive at this practice intellectually. It was not an exercise or a molded habit. It was a lifeline. Anyone who has been seriously ill, or has had a near death experience, will know that it cuts the metaphysical chaff. Illness and injury act like a bottleneck. You are squeezed through, pressurized and simplified. Only the most intrinsic beliefs, prayers, and ideas travel with you through to the other side. I was raised by spiritual parents who wrote about and researched religion and mantric prayer. I was given beads and taught Tibetan Buddhist, Zen, and Catholic prayers from a very young age. I found these repetitive vocalizations to be steadying. But I often struggled with the abstraction of the Christian prayers and the language barrier between me and the Buddhist mantras. Drawn to study, understand, and reinterpret the words, I was increasingly cognitive about prayer, rather than embodied. But after my first-time experiencing anaphylaxis, one of the charming bouquet of symptoms that arrived with the onset of my genetic condition at sixteen, I realized the prayers evaporated with oxygen. As my throat narrowed and my blood pressure dropped, as I watched the people around me reflect my own panic, I realized the only thing that stayed were the animals, and the fungi, and the trees, and the mountains. In those moments I found myself growing as small as a sunflower seed, planting myself on the sandy banks of a river island, halfway down the Battenkill River. I could see a sapphire splash of a kingfisher in the water. Smell sunlight baking the ryegrass into sweetness. Feel the drifting lick of a dragonfly darting across my shoulder blades. I was suspended between life and death. But I was held, not by a prayer or a god or an idea, but by a landscape. By the aliveness that was me, and was also much deeper than me. I didn’t learn this lesson immediately. Not the second, not the seventh, not even the fifteenth time I came through the bottleneck. But each narrow passage winnowed me down to essentials. And what I kept coming back to, in hospital beds, on the bathroom floor, in the ambulance, in my own arms, late at night, trying to assess whether or not to drive myself to the hospital, was that while very little of human civilization stayed with me or offered comfort, an entire universe of life exploded on the other side of these experiences, welcoming me into a greater sense of community. I found myself remembering the mountain lion eyes I once stared into, the marble head of the bald eagle somehow distinct against the similarly white haze of a blizzard. The glittering scent of the lilac grove overtaking the old bluestone quarries on Lewis Hollow. Soon, when I went to pray, I found myself summoning my counsel, in gratitude and also in a petition for their help and their instructive audience. How best may I act? How may I act knowing you are watching tenderly and attentively? What stories do I need to notice? What stories want to be told? Who needs my help today? And whose help can I receive? The potent thing about creating a counsel of beings you live alongside, is that, unlike an abstracted god, they actually show up. The heron does, in fact, dissect the sky, providing a symbol of incisiveness just at the moment when you need to make a decision. The ground really does provide a soil womb for the food that you will eat and metabolize into music, laughter, dance, heated breath on a windowpane, lovemaking. The fungi really do hold the forest together and provide a medicine that heals your brain and rewires your immune system. These are the guardian angels that have roots instead of wings. They are attached to place, and the more you summon them, the more they will show you that there is a miracle in every footstep, a deep abiding embrace in every biome-laced breath of fresh air. This is not a taxonomical exercise. Any name will do. Any way of tracking that invisible and intimate line of connection between you and another being. You exist, not as one end of that thread, but vibrating along its connection. Anything you do to harm yourself, harms other animals and trees and insects. Anything that nourishes other beings, may ultimately nourish you. And when you are suffering, when you are very scared, you do not need to remember a single prayer, or say a holy word. Your body, a doorway poured through with matter, a spider-webbing of relatedness, is prayer enough. Every second you stay present with your connectivity to your ecosystem is sacred, somatic, lived epiphany. If you pray, ask yourself, does your prayer have roots? Does your god sometimes grow fur? Do your holy words grow leaves? Does your spirituality connect you into your situated ecosystem? If you want, it is a lovely thing to slowly name all those beings that make up your environment. And to seek out new relationships to further flesh out this relational prayer. Gather counsel as you would wildflowers. Pick the ones that show up brightly, insistently, and show you they notice you, just as much as you notice them. Gather counsel as you would pick up a few flat stones to skip across the river. Gather counsel as you would stars, without your hands, held only as a flash of light, in the prismatic blink of an open eye.

Image by @tinorodrigriguezartist and @virgoparaiso

[the1918]

idk if it's something you've experienced, but I was wondering if you had any advice on how to get over feeling like I'll never be as good as other writers. I'm okay, I'm not great, and sometimes reading really good fics and books makes me want to get better! and do it more! but most of the time I get really discouraged because how will I ever put words together like that, you know? idk. anyway thanks for reading this, hope your day is swell

What you’re feeling is a 100% universal experience for all writers. It’s tough. It can feel disheartening at times. There are some writers and artists that will tell you to not focus on what other people are doing and writing, to look inward at yourself only and to write your truth and blah blah blah. In my opinion, that’s bullshit. 

Anon, you’re stopping one step short of success when you look at other works and get discouraged about your own. Steal from those works until your own product is something you’re proud of!

“Wait-- what? What does she mean by ‘steal’? That’s plagiarism!” -- No. 

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.” - Jim Jarmusch 

As a writer, I write what I want to read and what I like to read. There is not a single thing I can do (plot-wise, character-wise, prose-wise) that will be truly original. What I CAN do is steal the ideas of other authors and bunch them together until I come up with something that’s uniquely my own.

If it still sounds like I’m telling you to rip off other works, keep reading. Let’s work through an example in an actual fic I’m writing.

My biggest struggle is that my writing and language is repetitive, most days. I use the same words and the same sentence structure over and over when left to my own devices. I don’t like that about my first-draft writing. So what do I do to overcome that? I steal the ideas of others and patchwork my stolen goods until I have something I like that is mine and mine alone.

Here is the first draft of a short paragraph from Bespoke. This draft was written solely to get action down on paper:

Steve pushed his forearms under Bucky’s knees, and he lifted his legs and body off the bed in an almost gratuitous display of super soldier strength. He pulled the legs back tightly, and Bucky was left bent in half with his back pressed into Steve’s front.

Now I go back and re-read it, and I identify things I don’t like. 

First, I’ve used the same compound sentence structure twice in a row. I know I want to try and avoid this because the tempo will become repetitive to the reader (I’m trying to write prose, not poetry.) So what do I do? I open up my copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451...

“Once the bomb release was yanked, it was over. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible.”

... and I start by stealing his syntax (second draft):

Steve pushed his forearms under Bucky’s knees, pulling them apart. With an almost gratuitous display of power, of super-soldier strength, Steve lifted him off the bed, pulling Bucky’s thighs back, stopping when Bucky was bent in half with his back pressed into Steve’s front.

I like that a lot better but there’s too many commas for my taste. I look to one of my many browser tabs, where I happen to have The Sex Therapist by @whendoestheshipsail​​ open on Ao3 (a syntactical masterpiece). I read one paragraph and am immediately reminded of the power of short, stabbing sentences. So I steal that idea and add variety (third draft):

Steve pushed his forearms under Bucky’s knees, pulling them apart. With an almost gratuitous display of power, of super-soldier strength, Steve lifted Bucky off the bed and pulled his thighs back. He stopped when Bucky was bent in half. His back was pressed into Steve’s front. 

Almost there! I’m feeling that my diction is repetitive and boring, and maybe a little cold. Good thing I was reading some older works by @howdoyousleep3​​ earlier, who is the Queen of writing closecloseclose smut, so I’m feeling inspired to add/change things to communicate the intimacy of the position (final draft):

Steve roughly pushed his forearms under Bucky’s knees, pulling them apart. With an almost gratuitous display of power, of super-soldier strength, Steve lifted Bucky off the bed and held his thighs back tight. He stopped when Bucky was bent in half. His back was plastered to Steve’s sweaty chest.

And voila-- I start with something I don’t love and-- after creative thievery of three separate writers-- I end up with something that I like and that feels authentic to my story and my writing style. I don’t feel like someone other than me could have written this. Along the way, I have left love and comments on the fanfics that inspired me, and have let those authors know many times over how much I love their work. Art inspires art; let it.