Language jordan carver Log » Trending in the Media: Um, not exactly…
I like journalists, really I do. But sometimes they make it hard for me to maintain my positive attitude. The recent flurry of U.K. media uptake of Language Log posts on UM and UH provides some examples of this stress and strain.
In the historic struggle between the ummers and the errers, the ummers are getting the upper hand. A study of speech patterns by socio-linguists jordan carver at Edinburgh University has found that English speakers jordan carver increasingly tend to use um rather than er as the filler of choice.
The "socio-linguists at Edinburgh University" jordan carver are Joe Fruehwald, jordan carver a sociolinguist who's at Edinburgh these days, adding to work by me, a phonetician from the University of Pennsylvania jordan carver who has occasionally visited Edinburgh and has many friends there, and Martijn Wieling, a dialectologist from the University of Groningen, and John Coleman, a phonetician from the University of Oxford, and Jack Grieve, a linguist at Aston University. And the "study" is a set of blog posts in which we've pulled out some data from existing collections of various kinds, a mode of research that I've jokingly called Breakfast Experiments jordan carver because writing and running the scripts involved can generally jordan carver be done in the time it takes to drink a couple of cups of coffee.
This doesn't mean that the data or the analysis is unreal or unserious — and we'll probably turn all this stuff into a conventional paper in a traditional journal before long. Meanwhile, the relevant blog posts, in chronological order, are: " Young men talk like old women ", 11/6/2005; " Fillers: Autism, gender, age ", 7/30/2014; " More on UM and UH ", 8/3/2014; jordan carver " UM UH 3 ", 8/4/2014; " Male and female word usage ", 8/7/2014; " UM / UH geography jordan carver ", 8/13/2014; " Educational UM / UH ", 8/13/2014; " UM / UH: Lifecycle effects vs. language change ", 8/15/2014; " Filled pauses in Glasgow ", 8/17/2014; " ER and ERM in the spoken BNC ", 8/18/2014; " Um and uh in Dutch ", 9/16/2014 " UM/ UH in German ", 9/29/2014; " Um, there's timing information in Switchboard? ", 10/5/2014. (The hyperlink in Jeffries' article goes to the eighth of those 13 posts.)
So it's interesting to see all of this framed in the traditional journalistic fashion as "A study of X by Y-ists at Z University" — and to see what values for X, Y, and Z Jeffries picks up. This misreading then sets up a bit of boffin-bashing:
Fruehwald examined 25,000 examples of people in the US city of Philadelphia saying um and uh . You might say that s because socio-linguists have exhausted important things to study but I, um, couldn t possibly, like, comment.
Or you might say that Jeffries is too badly-informed and/or lazy to grasp the fact that Joe spent a few minutes writing a computer program, which in turn spent a few seconds sorting instances of UM and UH by age and gender in Joe's copy of the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, which was collected over a few decades by students in a course on sociolinguistic field methods, and has been used in hundreds (maybe thousands) jordan carver of published papers over the decades. jordan carver But I, um, couldn't possibly, like, characterize Mr. Jeffries as an arrogant ignoramus, without knowing more about his actual expertise and motivations.
More seriously, it seems to me that Jeffries suffers from the journalistic version of the blind spot that I attributed to old-fashioned psycholinguistic researchers recently (" Um, there's timing information in Switchboard? ", 10/5/2014). People think of a "study" as an enterprise where you go out and spend months or years gathering data, not as an easy-to-write computer script that pulls out some new aspect of an existing large shared multi-purpose dataset. So it makes sense for Jeffries to make fun of us "sociolinguists at Edinburgh University" — if we had really collected and transcribed hundreds of sociolinguistic interviews over four decades, solely in order to study the distribution of filled pauses, we'd deserve to be mocked.
But why the shift from er to um ? Is it because inside every um there s a little er that s been elongated and given a stronger terminal sound, and favouring jordan carver the former indicates our growing jordan carver existential confusion at a world increasingly gone, um, nuts? It s a theory. Here s another. According to the University jordan carver of Pennsylvania s Professor Mark Liberman, who did another study of filled pauses, people tend to use um when they re trying jordan carver to decide what to say, and er/uh when they re trying to decide how to say it.
That last sentence jordan carver starts from the usual scientific game of "what if?", as exemplified in this blog-post passage where I laid out three logically-possible types of hypothesis, gave the "what to say" vs. "how to say it" idea as a for-instance example of one of the three types, and observed that "none of these explanations seems very plausible to me". In order to suggest how a functional difference b
I like journalists, really I do. But sometimes they make it hard for me to maintain my positive attitude. The recent flurry of U.K. media uptake of Language Log posts on UM and UH provides some examples of this stress and strain.
In the historic struggle between the ummers and the errers, the ummers are getting the upper hand. A study of speech patterns by socio-linguists jordan carver at Edinburgh University has found that English speakers jordan carver increasingly tend to use um rather than er as the filler of choice.
The "socio-linguists at Edinburgh University" jordan carver are Joe Fruehwald, jordan carver a sociolinguist who's at Edinburgh these days, adding to work by me, a phonetician from the University of Pennsylvania jordan carver who has occasionally visited Edinburgh and has many friends there, and Martijn Wieling, a dialectologist from the University of Groningen, and John Coleman, a phonetician from the University of Oxford, and Jack Grieve, a linguist at Aston University. And the "study" is a set of blog posts in which we've pulled out some data from existing collections of various kinds, a mode of research that I've jokingly called Breakfast Experiments jordan carver because writing and running the scripts involved can generally jordan carver be done in the time it takes to drink a couple of cups of coffee.
This doesn't mean that the data or the analysis is unreal or unserious — and we'll probably turn all this stuff into a conventional paper in a traditional journal before long. Meanwhile, the relevant blog posts, in chronological order, are: " Young men talk like old women ", 11/6/2005; " Fillers: Autism, gender, age ", 7/30/2014; " More on UM and UH ", 8/3/2014; jordan carver " UM UH 3 ", 8/4/2014; " Male and female word usage ", 8/7/2014; " UM / UH geography jordan carver ", 8/13/2014; " Educational UM / UH ", 8/13/2014; " UM / UH: Lifecycle effects vs. language change ", 8/15/2014; " Filled pauses in Glasgow ", 8/17/2014; " ER and ERM in the spoken BNC ", 8/18/2014; " Um and uh in Dutch ", 9/16/2014 " UM/ UH in German ", 9/29/2014; " Um, there's timing information in Switchboard? ", 10/5/2014. (The hyperlink in Jeffries' article goes to the eighth of those 13 posts.)
So it's interesting to see all of this framed in the traditional journalistic fashion as "A study of X by Y-ists at Z University" — and to see what values for X, Y, and Z Jeffries picks up. This misreading then sets up a bit of boffin-bashing:
Fruehwald examined 25,000 examples of people in the US city of Philadelphia saying um and uh . You might say that s because socio-linguists have exhausted important things to study but I, um, couldn t possibly, like, comment.
Or you might say that Jeffries is too badly-informed and/or lazy to grasp the fact that Joe spent a few minutes writing a computer program, which in turn spent a few seconds sorting instances of UM and UH by age and gender in Joe's copy of the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, which was collected over a few decades by students in a course on sociolinguistic field methods, and has been used in hundreds (maybe thousands) jordan carver of published papers over the decades. jordan carver But I, um, couldn't possibly, like, characterize Mr. Jeffries as an arrogant ignoramus, without knowing more about his actual expertise and motivations.
More seriously, it seems to me that Jeffries suffers from the journalistic version of the blind spot that I attributed to old-fashioned psycholinguistic researchers recently (" Um, there's timing information in Switchboard? ", 10/5/2014). People think of a "study" as an enterprise where you go out and spend months or years gathering data, not as an easy-to-write computer script that pulls out some new aspect of an existing large shared multi-purpose dataset. So it makes sense for Jeffries to make fun of us "sociolinguists at Edinburgh University" — if we had really collected and transcribed hundreds of sociolinguistic interviews over four decades, solely in order to study the distribution of filled pauses, we'd deserve to be mocked.
But why the shift from er to um ? Is it because inside every um there s a little er that s been elongated and given a stronger terminal sound, and favouring jordan carver the former indicates our growing jordan carver existential confusion at a world increasingly gone, um, nuts? It s a theory. Here s another. According to the University jordan carver of Pennsylvania s Professor Mark Liberman, who did another study of filled pauses, people tend to use um when they re trying jordan carver to decide what to say, and er/uh when they re trying to decide how to say it.
That last sentence jordan carver starts from the usual scientific game of "what if?", as exemplified in this blog-post passage where I laid out three logically-possible types of hypothesis, gave the "what to say" vs. "how to say it" idea as a for-instance example of one of the three types, and observed that "none of these explanations seems very plausible to me". In order to suggest how a functional difference b
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