̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - French language

“Never was so much owed by so many to so few”: Could phrases like this hold clues about universal grammar?

tdk25 — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 08:35:50 +0000

It’s safe to assume that when Winston Churchill gave one of his most famous speeches in August 1940, the possible existence of universal grammar was far from his mind.

Nevertheless, it now appears that phrases such as “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” could hold the key to understanding how humans acquire language from birth.

̽��ֱ��sentence features a remnant of something called the “Verb Second” constraint; a linguistic construction which appears in most Germanic languages, but has disappeared from Romance (Latin-based) grammars, such as Spanish or French.

In simple terms, Verb Second, or “V2” languages are, as the name suggests, defined by the fact that the verb tends to take second place in a sentence. Understanding why the principle was abandoned by one language family, but retained by the other, is the central objective of a new project which is being carried out by an international team of language scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Oslo, among others.

̽��ֱ��researchers believe that the Verb Second constraint could be used to test Noam Chomsky’s famous, but contested, idea of universal grammar. ̽��ֱ��theory, developed in the 1950s, argues that humans acquire language because we possess an innate, hard-wired ability to do so.

Sam Wolfe, from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “If we want to know whether or not universal grammar exists, we need to model what is actually going on inside our heads when we learn a language, so that we can better understand the toolbox we all make use of. ̽��ֱ��question is, how do you do that? One solution is to study language properties that might give us a clue, and the Verb Second constraint seems to be one of the best examples available – a lens to test that theory.”

Strangely, English is the one example of a Germanic language that has not formally retained Verb Second, although vestiges of it, such as Churchill’s famous phrase above, remain.

Modern V2 languages are distinguishable because the subject in a sentence - the person or thing performing the action described by a verb - will sometimes appear in a position after the verb, in order to keep the verb in second place.

Take the sentence, “Today the children are playing nicely”. Here, the subject is “the children” and “playing” is the verb. In Norwegian, which is a V2 language, this translates as I dag leker barna fint. ̽��ֱ��actual word order here reads: “Today play the children nicely”, keeping the verb, “play”, second.

While Romance languages originally used Verb Second, it started to disappear from these grammars during the medieval period. Old French, for instance, seems to have abandoned it during the 16th century. Today, Verb Second is only used by one small group of endangered Romance languages, known as “Rhaeto-Romance”, which are spoken in specific parts of the Swiss Alps and north east Italy, and which will be the focus of some of Wolfe’s research .

Old English was also a V2 language and clear traces of the Verb Second remain in English today.

These include certain sentences that begin with a negative phrase. For example, in the sentence “Under no circumstances will I agree”, the subject (I) comes after the auxiliary verb (will). This is also true of Churchill’s line in his Battle of Britain address, in which the subject “so much”, comes after the auxiliary “was”.

Verb second remnants can also be found in some phrases starting with “only”. One well-known example is the Emperor’s line to Luke Skywalker at the end of Return Of ̽��ֱ��Jedi: “Only now, at the end, do you understand”. Here the auxiliary, “do” has moved to before “you”.

Why Verb Second generally survived in Germanic languages but died out in most Romance grammars remains unclear. ̽��ֱ��researchers behind the new project believe that its retention may have hinged on other features of the language being present.

If this can be proven, it will point to the existence of universal grammar. Chomsky’s theory relies on the idea that a language hangs together in certain fundamental ways, with different linguistic properties necessarily connecting to each other in order to work. These fundamentals are, the theory goes, an expression of the hard-wiring that enables any child to acquire language and use it to express concepts.

One theory that will be tested in the project is that the Verb Second itself is just one manifestation of a linguistic mechanism that is common to all languages and has parallels even in non-V2 grammars. ̽��ֱ��researchers believe that they may have already identified complementary properties in, for example, Western Iberian languages, and in French, but further tests are needed to see if these initial hypotheses are correct.

“There are still many questions over what form our innate ability to acquire languages takes, but it seems that certain properties of language may help to reinforce one another,” Wolfe added. “ ̽��ֱ��fact that Verb Second has survived in some languages but not others makes it a useful device with which to unpick that particular puzzle.”

“Traces Of History” is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Its website, hosted by the ̽��ֱ�� of Oslo, can be found at: http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/traces-of-history/

A new research project examining a linguistic construction called the Verb Second constraint could, academics believe, help to explain how people acquire language.

If we want to know whether or not universal grammar exists, we need to model what is actually going on inside our heads. One solution is to study language properties that might give us a clue, and the Verb Second constraint seems to be one of the best examples available – a lens to test that theory.

Sam Wolfe

Wikimedia Commons

Winston Churchill’s famous Battle of Britain address, adapted here for a wartime poster, is one example of a remnant of the Verb Second constraint in English, which could hint at the existence of a universal grammar.

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Cambridge and French research consortium mark a year of collaborative projects

th288 — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 11:40:06 +0000

When in May 2014 the Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, witnessed the signing of an agreement between Cambridge and the consortium of French research institutions known as Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL Research ̽��ֱ��), he celebrated an opportunity for Cambridge “to enhance its well-established connections to some of France’s elite institutions, its most interesting scholars, and its brightest students.”

Just over a year on from the formalisation of Cambridge’s partnership with PSL, many joint projects have emerged that continue to enhance research links and lay the foundation for new collaborations.

These projects have ranged from a summer placement at Chimie ParisTech for students in the Department of Chemistry, to a joint postgraduate research seminar on Ancient Philosophy held in Cambridge, and a doctoral retreat involving the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the Institut Curie.

PSL is an undergraduate and postgraduate education and research consortium formally established in 2011 as one of the French government’s Initiatives d’Excellence (IdEx).

It comprises 24 universities and research institutions, including the École Normale Supérieure, the Collège de France, ESPCI ParisTech, Chimie ParisTech, Mines ParisTech, the Observatoire de Paris, the Université Paris-Dauphine, the Institut Curie, the École Française d'Extrême-Orient, the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts.

̽��ֱ��agreement signed in May 2014, with the support of the French Embassy, aims to facilitate exchange for students and researchers, and seed collaborations between Cambridge and PSL.

A specific purpose of the partnership is to boost existing and prospective collaborative projects, enhancing researchers’ capacity to apply successfully for external funding .

As part of the student mobility element of the agreement, three PSL students were awarded scholarships by PSL to undertake Master’s degrees in Mathematics and Advanced Chemical Engineering.

In the coming academic year two PSL students will receive a PSL-Cambridge scholarship from the Cambridge Trust to carry out Master’s degrees in Public Policy and Advanced Chemical Engineering.

Collaborative projects in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences have been funded by PSL and by the Schools of Arts and Humanities, and of Humanities and Social Sciences, through a matched funding mechanism.

Additional funding for projects in the Arts and Humanities has been provided by the French Embassy’s cultural arm, the Institut Français du Royaume Uni.

Meanwhile, the French Embassy’s Science and Technology Division has provided seed funding for collaborative projects with PSL in the Physical, Biological and Clinical sciences, and in Technology.

To date, ten projects have been awarded funding under the Cambridge-PSL agreement, in disciplines as diverse as biochemistry, chemistry, classics, clinical medicine, French, history, philosophy and theoretical mathematics.

Thierry Coulhon, President of PSL Research ̽��ֱ��, said: “Thanks to the long-standing relations forged between researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and at the institutions comprising PSL Research ̽��ֱ��, our partnership has all the necessary elements to enable great joint achievements both in research and in training.

“This partnership, which has the full support of the Embassy of France in the UK, is one of PSL's priorities in the area of its international development policy.”

Dr David Savage, of the Department of Clinical Biochemistry, explained why the support of the Cambridge-PSL-French Embassy Fund has been helpful: “ ̽��ֱ��funding we received as a result of Cambridge-PSL agreement enabled Dr Abdou Rachid Tiam, an emulsion physicist from the École Normale Supérieure, to visit my lab earlier this year for a week. During this time, we undertook several joint experiments. This facilitated an invaluable exchange of practical expertise, as well as lengthy discussions on our collaborative project. As Dr Thiam and I come from very different scientific backgrounds, this face to face meeting time has been particularly valuable.”

Their project aims to understand how a particular protein (Fsp27) facilitates the transfer of lipids between growing fat droplets in fat cells, or adipocytes. Without this protein, fat cells fail to optimally store excess lipid, which then accumulates in other organs such as the liver, where it causes insulin resistance and diabetes.

“Our collaboration has progressed well. We are currently applying for a Human Frontier Science Programme (HFSP) project grant which also includes an American lab at Harvard.”

Last month the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) and the Institut Curie hosted a joint three-day retreat for young scientists at the ̽��ֱ�� of Kent. It was organised by the student and postdoc committees of the two institutes using Cambridge-PSL-French Embassy Funds in addition to support provided by CIMR, the Institut Curie, the Gurdon Institute, the MRC Cognition and Brain Science unit, GSK’s Experimental Medicine Imagining unit, and the ERC. ̽��ֱ��retreat brought together 60 young researchers from the two institutes to discuss their research through speaker presentations, poster sessions and additional skill building sessions.

“This retreat provided a unique training experience for the students and postdocs,” said Alison Schuldt, Research Project Manager at CIMR. “It served to foster new interactions, and to partner fundamental understanding of cell biology with clinical research.

“It will be of particular benefit given the closely aligned research strategies of the two institutes.”

According to Dr Nicholas White of the Department of French, the Cambridge-PSL connection has not only forged closer links to PSL but “has allowed the ̽��ֱ�� to underline its commitment to the study of French culture itself”.

Later this summer, he and his collaborator at the ENS, Professor Alain Pagès, will be hosting twin conferences in Paris and Cambridge on the work of Émile Zola, bringing together early and mid-career scholars for a critical reappraisal of the French writer’s work.

Among the expected outcomes is a special issue of Les cahiers naturalistes the world-leading French journal in the field of Zola studies.

̽��ֱ��conferences, held under the title “Zola au pluriel”, will be partly funded through the Cambridge-PSL matched-funding mechanism.

“Bridging the gap in scientific cooperation across the channel, and strengthening partnerships between French and UK universities, are the two priorities of the Science and Technology Department of the French Embassy in the United Kingdom,” said Cyrille van Effenterre, Science and Technology Counsellor at the French Embassy.

“We therefore fully support this partnership between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Paris Sciences et Lettres, flagships for the best science in our two countries. We strongly hope this agreement will continue to foster relationships among academics, and will be the corner stone for institutional and strategic partnerships.”

Speaking about the projects supported by the Institut Français under the Cambridge-PSL agreement, Dr Catherine Robert, the French Embassy’s Higher Education Attaché added: “This agreement will also help build and strengthen Franco-British networks involving the best young researchers in the arts and humanities in both countries, as they will be the leaders of the future.”

Picture: Doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from CIMR and the Institut Curie meet during a three-day retreat at the ̽��ֱ�� of Kent, co-funded by the French Embassy, Cambridge and PSL”

Photo Credit: Sudarshan Gadadhar

A year of collaborative projects involving Cambridge and a consortium of Paris-based universities proves the potential of international partnerships.

This partnership, which has the full support of the Embassy of France in the UK, is one of PSL's priorities in the area of its international development policy.

Thierry Coulhon

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Conquering a continent: how the French language circulated in Britain and medieval Europe

sjr81 — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:36:40 +0000

An important manuscript of the Lancelot-Grail, it lay forgotten and unopened for five centuries until its rediscovery in North Yorkshire and its sale in 1944. Detailing the search for the Holy Grail, it goes on public display for the first time alongside the only existing fragment of an episode from the earliest-known version of the Tristan and Isolde legend. Also on display is an early example of the kind of guide familiar to thousands of today’s holiday-makers: a French phrasebook.

A free exhibition, ̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge, looks at the enormous cultural and historic impact of the French language upon life in England, Europe, the Middle East and beyond at a time when French – like Latin before it and English today – was the global language of culture, commerce and politics.

̽��ֱ��exhibition, curated by Bill Burgwinkle and Nicola Morato, is part of a wider AHRC-funded research project looking at the question of how knowledge travelled in manuscript form through the continent and into the Eastern Mediterranean world, freely crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries at a time when France was a much smaller political entity than it is today.

Burgwinkle, Professor of Medieval French and Occitan Literature at Cambridge, said: “French may have been brought to England by the Normans in 1066 but it was already here well before then as a language of knowledge and commerce. It served as the mother tongue of every English king for almost 400 years, from William the Conqueror to Richard II, and it was still in use as a language of royalty, politics and literature until the Tudor period, when we see Henry VIII writing love letters in French to Anne Boleyn.

“Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is home to one of the world’s finest collections of medieval manuscripts of this kind. This exhibition not only gives us a chance to display the Library’s treasures, but also reminds us how the French language has enriched our cultural past and left us with a legacy that continues to be felt in 21st century Britain.

“Medieval texts like the ones we have on display became the basis of European literature. ̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition. People may not realise it, but many of the earliest and most beautiful versions of the legends of Arthur, Lancelot and the Round Table were written in French; ̽��ֱ��Moving Word is a celebration of a period sometimes unfairly written out of literary history.”

̽��ֱ��early phrasebook, a guide to French conversation for travellers, is the Manières de language (1396). Composed in Bury St Edmunds and one of four in existence, it provides a series of dialogues for those travelling in France that inform readers how to trade with merchants, haggle over prices, secure an inn for the night, stop a child crying, speak endearingly to your lover or insult them. It also has instructions for singing the ‘most gracious and amorous’ love song in the world.

Elsewhere, perhaps some of the most impressive exhibits on display are huge medieval manuscripts that acted as compendiums of knowledge. One such example is a multilingual encyclopaedia from the 1300s featuring more than fifty texts of historical, cosmographical, literary and devotional interest. A heavily decorated volume, it is unusual for its thickness, and deals with, among other subjects, the roundness of the Earth and the force of gravity – centuries before Newton defined its laws.

In contrast, the fragment of Thomas d’Angleterre’s Roman de Tristan (Tristan and Iseut) may appear small in comparison, but its size belies its importance to the Cambridge collections. Thomas’s Tristan romance is the oldest known surviving version of the tragic love story. His work formed the basis of Gottfried von Strassburg’s German Tristan romance of the 13th century, which in turn provided the chief source for Wagner’s famous opera Tristan und Isolde. ̽��ֱ��fragment on display, detailing King Marc’s discovery of his wife Iseut and nephew Tristan sleeping together in a wood, is the sole witness of this scene from Thomas’s text to survive into the present.

̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge runs from January 22 to April 17, 2014, in the Milstein Exhibition Centre, Monday–Friday 09.00–18.00, Saturday 09.00–16.30 Sunday closed. Admission free. For further information, see https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk.

Inset images: Top, detail from a multilingual compendium of knowledge (UK, first half of 14th century). Bottom, detail from the breviary of Marie de Saint-Pol, Paris 1330-1340

A 13th-century manuscript of Arthurian legend once owned by the Knights Templar is one of the star attractions of a new exhibition opening today at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition.

Bill Burgwinkle

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Image from a 14th century manuscript of the Romance of the rose, one of the best-known texts of the Middle Ages

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Le bon usage: using French correctly

bjb42 — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In these globalised times, when international communication has taken some endangered languages to the point of extinction, it is fascinating to consider how one nation has resisted the encroachment of other languages in the interests of keeping its language pure.

̽��ֱ��French have long been keen advocates of linguistic correctness or ‘good usage’. Indeed, it is often said that France provides the most extreme example of a prescriptive, interventionist and purist attitude to use of language. Even today, ministerial commissions recommend acceptable terminology for fields as diverse as IT and nuclear energy, and the Académie française (the French language academy), advises on proper usage of French vocabulary and spelling, as it has done since the 17th century.

In a major research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett is directing a collaborative project researching the origins of this concern for linguistic correctness and the broader symbolic values associated with it.

Remarks and observations

̽��ֱ��French preoccupation with language purity is reflected in the founding of the Académie française in 1635 and, perhaps above all, in the publication of a particular type of metalinguistic work. In 1647, Academy member Claude Favre de Vaugelas published hisRemarques sur la langue française, a collection of short, randomly ordered remarks and observations intended to resolve points of doubtful usage and provide clear guidance on the good use of French.

Vaugelas’s book quickly became a bestseller and was highly influential. We know, for instance, that in 1660 the great playwright Pierre Corneille reworked the language of his plays to take account of Vaugelas’s judgements and that Jean Racine, author of some of France’s finest tragedies, is said to have taken a copy of the work with him to the south of France so as not to become ‘contaminated’ by regional speech.

To understand the appeal and influence of such works in their day and beyond is to examine the social and cultural history of France. In a period of great social mobility, when nobility could be purchased by the newly rich, the volumes acted as a kind of linguistic courtesy book. Someone arriving new to the King’s court would need to know not only how to dress and eat properly, but perhaps above all how to speak correctly, so as not to offend polite society.

A rich resource

Many volumes of remarks and observations have been published by various authors down the centuries. All are typically intended not for foreigners but for competent native speakers who wish to perfect their usage of French.

These volumes provide the focus of the research project, which brings together scholars from North America, France and other parts of Europe to address key questions about the genre and to create a corpus of the principal texts, to be published online and as critical editions. This valuable research tool will provide those working on contemporary French with a historical perspective to their research: many of the most troublesome rules of French grammar used today, including past participle agreement, date from these early remarks on the French language. Moreover, one of the most fascinating aspects of the research is that the volumes of remarks provide unique data on how people actually wrote and spoke in the period.

̽��ֱ��writers of remarks continually strived to define what is French and to exclude the unwanted ‘other’, whether this is regional, low-register or foreign usage. Notions of language, nation and identity are thus closely intertwined. In short, to research the history of standardisation and linguistic correctness in France involves consideration of what it is to be French.

For more information, please contact the author Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett (wmb1001@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Linguistics.

̽��ֱ��purity and linguistic correctness of the French language has been closely guarded by the French for centuries. Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett is exploring the reasons behind this national preoccupation.

Someone arriving new to the King’s court would need to know not only how to dress and eat properly, but perhaps above all how to speak correctly, so as not to offend polite society.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett

Frontispace of Vaugelas's Remarques sur la langue française (1647)

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