An Information-Theoretic Measure of Cultural Success

I develop a simple but principled method for measuring the amount of culturally-transmitted information from a written target work that is actually retained in human minds and capable of influencing behavior. Using procedures inspired by Claude Shannon’s 1951 method for estimating the entropy of written English, I estimate the entropy of samples from the target work with a treatment group (those that have read a target work) and a control group (those who are of the same culture but who have not read the target work), using human minds as encoders-decoders in the communication model. KL divergence quantifies the information that the treatment group already knows relative to the control group. This method controls for shared cultural inheritance and does not require commitments to what information from the target work is important. The general technique can be profitably extended to a variety of domains, including evolutionary theory, methods of teaching, and the study of music.

Going Down Textual Lane: Ibadan in Text and Thoughts: A Review of Under the Brown Rusted Roofs by Abimbola Adunni Adelakun. Published by Kraftgriots, Ibadan, 2008, 252pp.1

As a child born and battered (not buttered) in Lagos, my thoughts about Ibadan people are three-fold. I think of a different accent when they speak English. When you read Niyi Osundare’s article you will moderate that notion. The other stereotype that comes to the mind of this Lagos boy is that Ibadan houses do not have street addresses but you can describe where you are going or looking for by Agboole Oloolu or Agboole Alabẹni (as in Bimbo Adelakun’s Novel). The third stereotype is that people of Ibadan eat a lot of ẹ̀kọ and ọọ̀ ̀lẹ̀ (as in mó̩inmó ́ i̩ ́n-beans pudding in English). I cannot really trace where I got that last one. It will be great to read what people of Ibadan think about Lagos city, i ̀lú iná ń jó ogiri o ̀ ̀ sá - The city where fire burns be the walls remain. The place we sing its praises as aromi ́ ṣá lẹ̀gbẹ lẹ̀gbẹ -The city where water flows in abundance. Let me tell you my story of Ibadan through the eyes of writers and thinkers. My maternal grandmother was a mid-wife at Adeọyọ Hospital. My first train ride was to Ibadan and each time I hear the name Ibadan the smell of puff puff by Mama Room Two (aka Mrs. Lufadeju to adults) takes me over. Ten much later in life, the poem by J.P Clark in the West African verse 1 This is a revised and expanded version of a review originally published in TCN: The Cultural Newspaper on January 29, 2020. 332 Kole Odutola competed with the puff puff of Mama Room Two. To mention Ibadan and not recite the poem was like an academic crime.

Disaffiliation amongst academically elite students in Singapore: the role of a non-standard variety of English

This article seeks to examine whether and how a non-standard variety of English (i.e. Singlish) might contribute to (dis)affiliation amongst a multinational group of academically elite students in Singapore. Using interview data when informants expressed ideologies about Singlish and Standard English, I argue that informants tended to orient to two different social fields in interviews: a field of education where Standard English is consistently valued by them, and an informal field of socialisation where the value of Singlish is contested. Differences in valuation of Singlish suggest disaffiliation between two groups of academically elite students: (a) immigrants from China who arrived more recently and do not value Singlish; (b) localised peer groups (including immigrants and Singaporeans) who claim to value and practise Singlish in their informal interactions. There are implications for our understanding of the role of vernaculars in processes of transnational migration, and Singlish as a local marker of solidarity.

“If You Don’t Speak English, I Can’t Understand You!”: Exposure to Various Foreign Languages as a Threat

The number of non-English speaking and bilingual immigrants continues to grow in the U.S. Previous research suggests that about one third of White Americans feel threatened upon hearing a language other than English. The current research examines how exposure to a foreign language affects White Americans’ perceptions of immigrants and group-based threats. In Study 1, White Americans were randomly assigned to read one of four fictional transcripts of a conversation of an immigrant family at a restaurant, where the type of language being spoken was manipulated to be either Korean, Spanish, German, or English. In Study 2, White Americans read the same fictional transcript—minus the Spanish; however, there was an addition of two subtitles conditions in which the subtitles were provided next to the Korean and German texts. The two studies suggest that exposure to a foreign language—regardless of whether they are consistent with Anglocentric constructions of American identity—lead White Americans to form less positive impressions of the immigrant targets and their conversation, experience an uptick in group-based threats, and display greater anti-immigrant attitudes. Moreover, there is evidence that the (in)ability to understand the conversation (i.e., epistemic threat) influences participants’ perceptions of immigrants and group-based threats.

A clausal analysis of free choice demo in Japanese

It is commonly assumed that in Japanese, an indeterminate pronoun followed by demo (indet-demo) corresponds to free choice any in English (FC any). Based on a number of semantic differences between the two, I argue that indet-demo is not a nominal free choice item, but a concealed unconditional adjunct, corroborating the claim made by Nakanishi and Hiraiwa (2019) and Hiraiwa and Nakanishi (2020, to appear). Based on Rawlins’s (2008, 2013) Hamblin analysis of unconditionals in English, I propose a compositional semantics of indet-demo that captures its semantics properties.

"Macho": The singularity of a mock Spanish item

This paper scrutinizes the path of the semantic extension of the originally neutral Spanish term macho‘male animal’ to the pejorative ‘animal-like man’. Semantic pejoration belongs to one of the techniques that Hill (1995b) identifies when describing Mock Spanish, a type of racist discourse used by monolingual English speakers when using single Spanish words. My objective was to identify if the origin of this pejoration and its subsequent proliferation had some relation to Mock Spanish. Methodologically, this is conducted by means of a lexical research of diachronic corpora in Spanish and English. I trace the origin of macho as an exclusively Spanish and neutral term to an international word with a pejorative connotation. My analysis leads me to conclude that the semantic shift of macho, at least in its written form, developed in both sides of the Mexican-American border in the first half of the XX century. Macho as an ‘animal-like man’ acquires a negative meaning northwards and a positive southwards. The latter during the Nationalist uproars of the Mexican Revolution.

AUTHOR’S SELF-REPRESENTATION IN RESEARCH PAPERS IN RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH: I/ WE/ OR SOME UNIVERSAL MIND

The article deals with the comparative perspective on author’s self-representation in research papers in Russian and English. It presents both the results of studying recommendations on this issue from academic and scientific writing guides, and the analysis of the humanities (mainly, linguistic) research papers corpus. The study shows different means used for authorial self-reference in these texts. It claims that the authors’ choice in favor of an "impersonal" or "personal" text is associated not only with their local cultural and language codes, but also with the specifics of their individual style, their inclination to be more or less cautious in presenting their judgments.

British women’s roles in the standardization and study of English

This chapter traces key developments in the history and historiography of English, identifying women’s most-representative opportunities to engage with the linguistics of English and describing works that have earned their authors attention in modern scholarship. Women have shaped and studied the English language since speakers of a West Germanic language invaded Britain in the fifth century CE. Yet, given the subordinate status of women’s intellectual activities, their work was often oral, unacknowledged, or published pseudonymously or under a male’s name. While identifying individual women’s contributions to the standardization and study of English, I consider women’s educational opportunities and their stereotypical social roles. Their family’s status and (typically) male relatives’ support gave some women unusual advantages. Women’s stereotypical associations with domestic conversation and elementary pedagogy gave later women space to work and write on the vernacular, though persistently in ways that were low-prestige.