̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - English language

Northerners, Scots and Irish excel at detecting fake accents to guard against outsiders, study suggests

ta385 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:00:00 +0000

People from Belfast proved most able to detect someone faking their accent, while people from London, Essex and Bristol were least accurate.

̽��ֱ��study, published today in Evolutionary Human Sciences found that the ability of participants from Scotland, the north-east of England, Ireland and Northern Ireland to tell whether short recordings of their native accent were real or fake ranged from approximately 65% – 85%. By contrast, for Essex, London and Bristol, success ranged from just over 50%, barely better than chance, to 65% –75%.

In the biggest study of its kind, drawing on 12,000 responses, the researchers found that participants across all groups were better than chance at detecting fake accents, succeeding just over 60% of the time. Unsurprisingly, participants who spoke naturally in the test accent tended to detect more accurately than non-native listener groups – some of which performed worse than chance – but success varied between regions.

“We found a pretty pronounced difference in accent cheater detection between these areas,” said corresponding author Dr Jonathan R Goodman, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, and Cambridge Public Health.

“We think that the ability to detect fake accents is linked to an area’s cultural homogeneity, the degree to which its people hold similar cultural values.”

̽��ֱ��researchers argue that the accents of speakers from Belfast, Glasgow, Dublin, and north-east England have culturally evolved over the past several centuries, during which there have been multiple cases of between-group cultural tension, particularly involving the cultural group making up southeast England, above all London.

This, they suggest, probably caused individuals from areas in Ireland and the northern regions of the United Kingdom to place emphasis on their accents as signals of social identity.

̽��ֱ��study argues that greater social cohesion in Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow and the north-east may have resulted in a more prominent fear of cultural dilution by outsiders, which would have encouraged the development of improved accent recognition and mimicry detection.

People from London and Essex proved least able to spot fake accents because, the study suggests, these areas have less strong ‘cultural group boundaries’ and people are more used to hearing different kinds of accents, which could make them less attuned to accent fakery.

̽��ֱ��study points out that many speakers of the Essex accent only moved to the area over the past 25 years from London, whereas the accents of people living in Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin have ‘evolved over centuries of cultural tension and violence.’

Some might have expected Bristolians to authenticate recordings of their accent more accurately, but Goodman points out that “cultural heterogeneity has been increasing significantly in the city”. ̽��ֱ��researchers would also like to obtain more data for Bristol.

An evolved ability

Previous research has shown that when people want to demarcate themselves for cultural reasons, their accents become stronger. In human evolution, the ability to recognise and thwart ‘free riders’ is also thought to have been pivotal in the development of large-scale societies.

Dr Goodman said: “Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity. Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect.

“I'm interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms. One of the first judgments a person will make about another person, and when deciding whether to trust them, is how they speak. How humans learn to trust another person who may be an interloper has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history and it remains critical today.”

Overall, the study found that participants were better than chance at detecting fake accents but is it surprising that so many people failed 40–50% of the time?

̽��ֱ��authors point out that participants were only given 2-3 second clips so the fact that some authenticated with 70–85% accuracy is very impressive. If participants had heard a longer clip or been able to interact with someone face-to-face, the researchers would expect success rates to rise but continue to vary by region.

How the tests worked

̽��ֱ��researchers constructed a series of sentences designed to elicit phonetic variables distinguishing between 7 accents of interest: north-east England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex, and Received Pronunciation (RP), commonly understood as standard British English. ̽��ֱ��researchers chose these accents to ensure a high number of contrasting phonemes between sentences.

Test sentences included: ‘Hold up those two cooked tea bags’; ‘She kicked the goose hard with her foot’; ‘He thought a bath would make him happy’; ‘Jenny told him to face up to his weight’; and ‘Kit strutted across the room’.

̽��ֱ��team initially recruited around 50 participants who spoke in these accents and asked them to record themselves reading the sentences in their natural accent. ̽��ֱ��same participants were then asked to mimic sentences in the other six accents in which they did not naturally speak, chosen randomly. Females mimicked females, males mimicked males. ̽��ֱ��researchers selected recordings which they judged came closest to the accents in question based on the reproduction of key phonetic variables.

Finally, the same participants were asked to listen to recordings made by other participants of their own accents, of both genders. Therefore, Belfast accent speakers heard and judged recordings made by native Belfast speakers as well as recordings of fake Belfast accents made by non-native speakers.

Participants were then asked to determine whether the recordings were authentic. All participants were asked to determine whether the speaker was an accent-mimic for each of 12 recordings (six mimics and six genuine speakers, presented in random order). ̽��ֱ��researchers obtained 618 responses.

In a second phase, the researchers recruited over 900 participants from the United Kingdom and Ireland, regardless of which accent they spoke naturally. This created a control group for comparison and increased the native speaker sample sizes. In the second phase, the researchers collected 11,672 responses.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK is a really interesting place to study,” Dr Goodman said. “ ̽��ֱ��linguistic diversity and cultural history is so rich and you have so many cultural groups that have been roughly in the same location for a really long time. Very specific differences in language, dialect and accents have emerged over time, and that's a fascinating side of language evolution.”

Reference

JR Goodman et al., ‘Evidence that cultural groups differ in their abilities to detect fake accents’, Evolutionary Human Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1017/ehs.2024.36

People from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the north-east of England are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and Essex, new research has found.

Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion

Jonathan Goodman

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Crowds on Newcastle Quayside for the Great North Run in 2013

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Underdogs, curses and ‘Neymaresque’ histrionics: Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press reveals what’s been getting us talking this World Cup

sjr81 — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 14:58:19 +0000

There has been no shortage of surprises during this year’s competition, and this shines through in the language data. Expressions such as premature exit reflect that several of the predicted favourites haven’t fared as well as expected, with the odd unforgivable blunder making an appearance, too.

Building on similar research conducted during the 2014 World Cup, the Press has mined over 12 million words of media coverage, to analyse the language used when discussing the various teams over the course of this year’s tournament.

Comparison with the language collected in 2014 shows that, whilst traditionally successful teams such as Brazil have gone from stylish to nervous and Argentina from having flair to struggling, World Cup 2018 underdogs such as England have gone from being inexperienced to confident.

̽��ֱ��data reflects that several teams have defied expectations – the word underdogs features frequently in media reports, along with related language like plucky, determined, and punch above their weight also making an appearance.

As fans root for their home teams, the verb overcome is commonly found alongside words such as obstacles, hurdles and adversity. Even England’s long-standing penalty curse has been overcome, whereas previous champions Germany fell victim to the curse of the holders.

̽��ֱ��introduction of Video Assisted Referee (VAR) technology has seemingly been met with mixed feelings, as it is commonly associated with words such as controversy, overturn and incident.

Despite the introduction of VAR, however, bad behaviour still abounds; the word histrionics is prominent in the data – often found alongside adjectives such as ridiculous, headline-grabbing, and amateurish. A new term has even been coined this year: neymaresque.

As well as analysing the language used by journalists and media commentators, ̽��ֱ��Press has also been asking fans to submit the words they would use to describe their national teams.

Laura Grimes, senior ELT research manager at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, said: “It’s been great to see the correlation between the language used by the media and the descriptive words submitted by football fans. We’ve combined these two datasets to select the three words most strongly associated with each team.

“ ̽��ֱ��huge amount of language data we’ve collected and analysed gives us fascinating insight into the mood surrounding the World Cup. It’s been a dramatic and surprising tournament and this is certainly reflected by the language used in the media, as well as by football fans.”

̽��ֱ��Press is still inviting submissions for the public’s top three words to describe each national team. To contribute, simply visit www.cambridge.org/word-cup, click on any country and enter the three words you feel best describes this team.

Once submitted, you’ll be taken to a page that is updated in real time and shows the most popular words that have been submitted in a word cloud.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press has revealed the results of its global study into the language used around the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

̽��ֱ��huge amount of language data we’ve collected and analysed gives us fascinating insight into the mood surrounding the World Cup.

Laura Grimes

Photo by Tom Grimbert on Unsplash

Argentina fans at the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

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'Populism' revealed as 2017 Word of the Year by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press

sjr81 — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 14:02:21 +0000

Choosing a winner required looking at not only the most searched-for words but also spikes – occasions when a word is suddenly looked up many more times than usual on or around a particular date.

As Donald Trump, a polarizing candidate was being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on January 22, 2017, searches for the word 'inauguration' on the online Cambridge Dictionary spiked. But so did searches for the word 'populism' because, on that same day, Pope Francis warned against a rising tide of populism in a widely reported interview with El Pais newspaper. In mid-March, after another high-profile interview with the pontiff – this time with the German newspaper Die Zeit – searches for populism spiked again.

Wendalyn Nichols, Publishing Manager at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, said: 'Spikes can reveal what is on our users’ minds and, in what’s been another eventful year, plenty of spikes can be directly connected to news items about politics in the US (nepotism, recuse, bigotry, megalomania) and the UK (shambles, untenable, extradite). ̽��ֱ��much-anticipated Taylor Review of working practices in the UK caused the term 'gig economy' to spike in July, and of course the spectacular solar eclipse is reflected in the spike for eclipse on 21 August.

'What sets populism apart from all these other words is that it represents a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent.'

Populism is described by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want’. It includes the usage label ‘mainly disapproving’.

Populism has a taint of disapproval because the -ism ending often indicates a philosophy or ideology that is being approached either uncritically (liberalism, conservatism, jingoism) or cynically (tokenism).

Evidence from the Cambridge English Corpus – a 1.5-billion-word database of language – reveals that people tend to use the term populism when they think it’s a political ploy instead of genuine. Both aspects of -ism are evident in the use of populism in 2017: the implied lack of critical thinking on the part of the populace, and the implied cynicism on the part of the leaders who exploit it.

̽��ֱ��word 'populism' has been announced as the Cambridge Dictionary 2017 Word of the Year.

What sets populism apart from all these other words is that it represents a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent.

Wendalyn Nichols

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President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at Yokota Air Base | November 5, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

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Aesthetics over athletics when it comes to women in sport

sjr81 — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 09:00:24 +0000

̽��ֱ��research draws on the Cambridge English Corpus and the Sports Corpus – multi-billion word databases of written and spoken English from a huge range of media sources – which also highlight a pronounced gender divide when it comes to the way sporting men and women are discussed.

Academics found that in the Cambridge English Corpus ‘men’ or ‘man’ is referenced twice as much as ‘woman’ or ‘women’, but in the Sports Corpus (a sub-section of words in relation to sport) men are mentioned almost three times more often than women.

Meanwhile, language around women in sport focuses disproportionately on the appearance, clothes and personal lives of women, highlighting a greater emphasis on aesthetics over athletics.

While returning female athletes like Jessica Ennis-Hill look to defend their Olympic titles in Rio, more is being made in the media of recent births and marriages than their medal hopes in the 2016 Olympics. Notable word associations or combinations for women in sport (but not men) include ‘aged’, ‘older’, ‘pregnant’ and ‘married’ or ‘unmarried’. ̽��ֱ��top word combinations for men in sport, by contrast, are more likely to be adjectives like ‘fastest’, ‘strong’, ‘big’, ‘real’ and ‘great’ – all words regularly heard to describe male Olympians such as Usain Bolt.

When it comes to performance, it seems as though men also have the competitive edge: interrogation of the databases sees ‘men’ or ‘man’ associated with verbs such as ‘mastermind’, ‘beat’, ‘win’, ‘dominate’ and ‘battle’, whereas ‘woman’ or ‘women’ is associated with verbs such as ‘compete’, ‘participate’ and ‘strive’.

Sarah Grieves, Language Researcher at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, said: “It’s perhaps unsurprising to see that women get far less airtime than men and that their physical appearance and personal lives are frequently mentioned. ̽��ֱ��breadth of sources we’ve analysed means we're able to give a unique insight into the language used to describe women and men within the context of sport.”

̽��ֱ��only context where women are mentioned more is to mark their sports as ‘other’. Overt gender marking is much more common for women's participation in sport, both in terms of the sport itself (ladies’ singles) and the athletes participating (woman golfer). Men’s sport is often considered the default – for example, we are more inclined to refer to women’s football, whereas men’s football is just called football. According to the Sports Corpus, the sports where this is most likely to happen are athletics, golf, horse-riding, sprinting, football and cycling.

̽��ֱ��research also showed higher levels of infantilising or traditionalist language for women in sport, who are more likely to be referred to as ‘girls’ than men are called ‘boys’. Women are twice as likely to be referred to as ‘ladies’, compared to ‘gentlemen’ who are frequently referred to by the neutral term ‘men’.

“It will be interesting to see if this trend is also reflected in our upcoming research on language used at the Rio Olympics,” added Grieves.

̽��ֱ��study by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press looked at over 160 million words within the domain of sport using the Cambridge English Corpus, and aimed to examine how the language we use could indicate our gendered attitudes to sport. ̽��ֱ��Corpus is a huge collection of data, taken from a variety of different sources, including news articles, social media and internet forums.

More information can be found here

Men are two to three times more likely than women to be mentioned when it comes to discussing sport and sporting achievement, according to new research by language experts at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Women get far less airtime than men and their physical appearance and personal lives are frequently mentioned.

Sarah Grieves

Al King via Flickr

Jessica Ennis

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Cambridge app maps decline in regional diversity of English dialects

sjr81 — Thu, 26 May 2016 09:26:27 +0000

̽��ֱ��English Dialects App (free for Android and iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. A new, updated version of the app – which attempts to guess where you’re from at the end of the quiz – is available for download from this week.

Based on the huge new dataset of results, researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s.

One of the major findings is that some features of regional accents, such as pronouncing the 'r' in words like 'arm' – a very noticeable pronunciation feature which was once normal throughout the West Country and along much of the south coast – are disappearing in favour of the pronunciations found in London and the South-East (see map slideshow).

Lead researcher Dr Adrian Leemann, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east; more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Professor David Britain from the ̽��ֱ�� of Bern added: “People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did fifty years ago. Regional differences are disappearing, some quite quickly. However, while many pockets of resistance to this levelling are shrinking, there is still a stark north-south divide in the pronunciation of certain key words.”

Dialect words are even more likely to have disappeared than regional accents, according to this research. Once, the word ‘backend’ instead of ‘autumn’ was common in much of England, but today very few people report using this word (see map slideshow).

However, the research has shown some areas of resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from those areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For example, many people in the North-East still use a traditional dialect word for 'a small piece of wood stuck under the skin', 'spelk' instead of Standard English 'splinter'.

Other dialect words, like ‘shiver’ for ‘splinter’, are still reported in exactly the same area they were found historically—although they are far less common than they once were (see map slideshow).

̽��ֱ��data collected to date shows that one northern pronunciation has proved especially robust: saying words like 'last' with a short vowel instead of a long one. In this case, the northern form actually appears to have spread southwards in the Midlands and the West Country compared with the historical survey.

In other cases, new pronunciations were found to be spreading. Pronouncing words like 'three' with an 'f' was only found in a tiny region in the south east in the 1950s, but the data from today show this pronunciation is much more widespread – 15% of respondents reported saying 'free' for 'three', up from just 2% in the old Atlas.

Cambridge PhD student Tam Blaxter, who worked alongside Dr Leemann to map the 30,000 responses supplied by the public, suggests that greater geographical mobility is behind the changes when compared to the first systematic nationwide investigation of regional speech, the Survey of English Dialects from the 1950s.

“There has been much greater geographical mobility in the last half century,” said Blaxter. “Many people move around much more for education, work and lifestyle and there has been a significant shift of population out of the cities and into the countryside.

“Many of the results have confirmed what language experts might predict – but until now we just didn’t have the geographical breadth of data to back up our predictions. If we were to do the survey in another 60-70 years we might well see this dialect levelling expanding further, although some places like the north-east seem to have been especially good at preserving certain colloquialisms and pronunciations.”

When the app was originally launched in January, users were quizzed about the way they spoke 26 different words or phrases. ̽��ֱ��academics behind the app wanted to see how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out since the Survey of English Dialects. ̽��ֱ��1950s project took eleven years to complete and captured the accents and dialects of mainly farm labourers.

Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the data provided so far is how the use of ‘scone’ (to rhyme with ‘gone’ rather than ‘cone’) is much more common in the north of England that many might imagine (see map slideshow).

Adrian Leemann said: “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where. Our data shows that for the North and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.”

̽��ֱ��launch of the English Dialects App in January has also allowed language use in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be compared with language use in England (the original 1950s survey was limited to England and similar surveys of the other parts of the UK were not undertaken at the same time or using the same methods).

̽��ֱ��huge levels of feedback have also meant the team have improved the prediction of where users might be from. ̽��ֱ��app now correctly places 25 per cent of respondents within 20 miles, compared with 37 miles for the old method.

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the south-east, according to the first results from a free app developed by Cambridge researchers.

More and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Adrian Leemann

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Do you say splinter, spool, spile or spell? English Dialects app tries to guess your regional accent

sjr81 — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:06:31 +0000

Along with colleagues from the universities of Zurich and Bern, Cambridge’s Adrian Leemann has developed the free app English Dialects (available on iOS and Android), which asks you to choose your pronunciation of 26 different words before guessing where in England you’re from.

̽��ֱ��app also encourages you to make your own recordings in order to help researchers determine how dialects have changed over the past 60 years. ̽��ֱ��English language app follows the team’s hugely successful apps for German-speaking Europe, which accumulated more than one million hits in 4 days on Germany’s Der Spiegel website, and more than 80,000 downloads of the app by German speakers in Switzerland.

“We want to document how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out,” said Dr Leemann, a researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. “ ̽��ֱ��first large-scale documentation of English dialects dates back 60-70 years, when researchers were sent out into the field – sometimes literally – to record the public. It was called the ‘Survey of English Dialects’. In 313 localities across England, they documented accents and dialects over a decade, mainly of farm labourers.”

̽��ֱ��researchers used this historical material for the dialect guessing app, which allows them to track how dialects have evolved into the 21st century.

“We hope that people in their tens of thousands will download the app and let us know their results – which means our future attempts at mapping dialect and language change should be much more precise,” added Leemann. “Users can also interact with us by recording their own dialect terms and this will let us see how the English language is evolving and moving from place to place.”

̽��ֱ��app asks users how they pronounce certain words or which dialect term they most associate with commonly-used expressions; then produces a heat map for the likely location of your dialect based on your answers.

For example, the app asks how you might say the word ‘last’ or ‘shelf’, giving you various pronunciations to listen to before choosing which one most closely matches your own. Likewise, it asks questions such as: ‘A small piece of wood stuck under the skin is a…’ then gives answers including: spool, spile, speel, spell, spelk, shiver, spill, sliver, splinter or splint. ̽��ֱ��app then allows you to view which areas of the country use which variations at the end of the quiz.

It also asks the endlessly contentious English question of whether ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’ or ‘cone’.

“Everyone has strong views about the pronunciation of this word, but, perhaps surprisingly, we know rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where,” said Professor David Britain, a dialectologist and member of the app team based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bern in Switzerland.

“Much of our understanding of the regional distribution of different accent and dialect features is still based on the wonderful but now outdated Survey of English Dialects – we haven’t had a truly country-wide survey since. We hope the app will harness people’s fascination with dialect to enable us to paint a more up-to-date picture of how dialect features are spread across the country.”

At the end of the 26 questions, the app gives its best 3 guesses as to the geography of your accent based on your dialect choices. However, while the Swiss version of the app proved to be highly accurate, Leemann and his colleagues have sounded a more cautious note on the accuracy of the English dialect app.

Dr Leemann said: “English accents and dialects are likely to have changed over the past decades. This may be due to geographical and social mobility, the spread of the mass media and other factors. If the app guesses where you are from correctly, then the accent or dialect of your region has not changed much in the last century. If the app does not guess correctly, it is probably because the dialect spoken in your region has changed quite a lot over time.”

At the end of the quiz, users are invited to share with researchers their location, age, gender, education, ethnicity and how many times they have moved in the last decade. This anonymous data will help academics understand the spread, evolution or decline of certain dialects and dialect terms, and provide answers as to how language changes over time.

“ ̽��ֱ��more people participate and share this information with us, the more accurately we can track how English dialects have changed over the past 60 years,” added Dr Leemann.

After taking part in the quiz, users can also listen to both historic and contemporary pronunciations, taking the public on an auditory journey through England and allowing them to hear how dialects have altered in the 21st century. ̽��ֱ��old recordings are now held by the British Library and were made available for use in the app. One of these recordings features a speaker from Devon who discusses haymaking and reflects on working conditions in his younger days.

Dr Leemann added: “Our research on dialect data collected through smartphone apps has opened up a new paradigm for analyses of language change. For the Swiss version nearly 80,000 speakers participated. Results revealed that phonetic variables (eg if you say ‘sheuf’ or ‘shelf’) tended to remain relatively stable over time, while lexical variables (eg if you say ‘splinter’, ‘spelk’, ‘spill’ etc.) changed more over time. ̽��ֱ��recordings from the Swiss users also showed clear geographical patterns; for example people spoke consistently faster in some regions than others. We hope to do such further analyses with the English data in the near future.”

̽��ֱ��findings of the German-speaking experiments were published last week in PLOS ONE.

An app that tries to guess your regional accent based on your pronunciation of 26 words and colloquialisms will help Cambridge academics track the movement and changes to English dialects in the modern era.

We hope that people in their tens of thousands will download the app and let us know their results.

Adrian Leemann

Screen grab of one of the app's questions

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“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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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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