🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2vt6vu$t7h@news.tamu.edu> hand@tam2000.tamu.edu (Michael Hand)
writes:

>Mark Israel <misrael@csi.uottawa.ca> wrote:
>  >>> "The relation between words in a language and their meanings is
>  >>> arbitrary";

>  >   I remember reading that this has been been experimentally
>  >refuted.  Subjects were given pairs of antonyms in a language
>  >unrelated to any that they knew, and were asked to match them with
>  >their English translations.  They were found to have better-than-
>  >random chances of doing so.

>**P*L*E*A*S*E** post or send the reference!  Thanks,

When I did an anthropological linguistics course as an undergraduate, there was
some discussion of an experiment of this type--after we had participated in the
experiment.  This was at least 20 years ago--spring quarter 1974 or 1975, I
don't remember which--so bear with me while I try to re-capitulate.

The problem is that I don't have the antonym list handy; that notebook is in
storage.  I'll try to get to the locker soon, but I have recently had higher
priorities in my life.

Until then, you'll have to trust me to be honest about this.  One reason that I
remember as much as I do is that I worked on the project for some time after
the class discussion, trying to work out some of the weak points.

The list consists of 21-23 (more than 20, fewer than 25) pairs of putative
antonyms.  These are read from the list to one or more listeners who have the
list of English definitions in front of them, listed pairwise but not neces-
sarily in the same pairwise order as they are read.  I'm a little fuzzy here:
The listeners indicate in some fashion their choices for each meaning, but I
don't remember whether this is done by

	a) marking which word they think came first
or	b) marking whether the English words are in the same order or not

Results are tallied, and the number of correct answers *always* comes out
significantly positive.  I don't remember the numbers, of course.

The first issue is that the list isn't purely antonymic:  Is "iron" really the
opposite of "gold"?  Other pairs like that exist in the list; unfortunately, if
we are to hold our results comparable, we have to use the same list.

The second is that the person reading the list knows the meanings of the words
on it, and may provide subtle cues as to whether they are in the same order or
not.  Most obvious is the likelihood of list-reading intonations, but even the
possibility of ESP as a cue was raised.

Third is that the person who reads the list almost always is the person who
prepared it.  Thus, even though various methods of randomizing the list have
been tried, they may have been sufficient to overcome the foreknowledge of the
expected result.

This piqued my curiosity greatly, and I worked out a few possibilities with the
professor.  Here's how far we went:

1.  I used a PL/1 program I wrote to randomize the entire list of words--not
pairwise, mind you, but each of the 40-odd items.  I had a different randomized
list for each potential reader.

2.  I obtained recordings of the lists for speakers of two languages which I
did not know (at the time), Finnish and Estonian.  They were not informed of
the purpose of the lists.

The professor and I planned to use this the next time she taught the class, in
the following fashion:

1.  She would not attend the class that day, leaving everything to her TA;

2.  the TA would be provided with a random time within the hour by another
    person who had no idea why this was desired, and start the experiment at
    that time;

3.  the professor would read a heavy novel or other item of interest--so long
    as it was not linguistics--starting well before the class time, without any
    clock available;

4.  I would not have anything to do with the experiment at that time, not even
    knowing that it was to take palce on any particular day.

Unfortunately, we never got the chance because the tapes I made were of
insufficiently low quality for the purpose, and we could not go back to the
informants as they were no longer pristine.

If the original experiment, which inspired my professor to try it in her class,
is the one Mark Israel is thinking of, it suffered all the problems we were
trying to control for.  It is thus an interesting fact about language, but it
is difficult to draw conclusions from with great amounts of certainty.

I second the call:  References!  We need references!
--
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_