The following is my personal statement for one of my grad school applications, essentially responding to the question of what obstacles to education I have overcome, and how my graduate studies will increase student diversity or serve disadvantaged groups. You may recognize some sentences from other things I have posted here, but perhaps this repackaging is of interest.

I have not personally experienced much financial hardship nor particularly challenging cultural barriers, and the truth is, my pursuit of an advanced degree is an admission that I am unsuited to more direct interaction with world problems. If I were completely committed to serving the less fortunate, I would be working in a favela in Recife or in a refugee camp in Afghanistan. The most pressing problems in the world today have little or nothing to do with linguistic research. But the most pressing problems are also the most overwhelming, and any improvement on these issues is difficult to notice. I don’t believe I am optimistic enough to deal directly with the most serious problems, and I need measurable signs of progress. Because of that, and because I am probably incorrigibly intellectual, I need to find a place for myself in academia, where I can do some public good without having to measure my life’s work against an insurmountable problem.

On the other hand, I have perhaps lived an unusual life thus far, and I do indeed feel a responsibility to serve the public good. I grew up on the Colombia center of SIL International, in a rural region near the border between the Amazon and Orinoco river valleys. It was a small community of people from all over, and I had frequent contact with indigenous and mestizo cultures. My family is deeply religious, but highly values critical thinking. My own thinking eventually led me to reject the faith I grew up with, but I was left with a sense of personal responsibility to serve the less fortunate. We felt quite poor when we periodically returned to the States, but we were wealthy compared to the people of the neighboring communities. I saw true poverty there, which I have since seen in other countries, but never in the US. With that beginning, I have never felt quite at home in American culture, though after so many years in school I am beginning to feel that academia is a home culture. I speak Spanish fluently, Portuguese okay, and Mandarin not too poorly, and I know something of quite a few countries, but that is not so abnormal in a linguistics graduate program.

My motivations for research arise primarily from curiosity about how mind and society work. Language is a subset of human behavior that helps us understand how our brains work and how our interpersonal relationships are built. This is a long way from solving any world problems, but I do hope my research will help us build in that direction.

This is a generalized version of the statement of purpose I used in my grad school applications.

I believe language science has suffered from a wealth of theories and a poverty of empirical research, but a revolution has already begun, which is bringing many exciting discoveries. I am pursuing further linguistics study because I want to participate in this research. There are many areas of research that intrigue me, in that there are many interesting behaviors, but they are tied together by the mathematical similarities of the models and methods. My research interests focus at the intersection of emergentist models, natural corpus data, and mathematical methods.

I particularly appreciate the recent reawakening to the statistical and inductive nature of language learning and to the interconnectedness of brain functions. Linguistics has been heavily concerned with how much language works like symbolic logic, and there has been much insight there. Indeed, one of the biggest factors that distinguishes human language from the communication in other animals is how much human language is symbolic and abstract. But as developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have revealed, and as should have been apparent all along, human language and cognition are still an awful lot like communication and cognition in other animals, and in that respect are unlike symbolic languages and computer processing. In humans, symbolic behavior is built on a foundation of statistical learning, just as in computers we can build statistical learning on a foundation of symbolic processing. The higher level description is quite useful, but behavior in the observed layer is still influenced by what lies underneath. We are now beginning to see more concretely how statistical behaviors arise from networks, and how the statistical systems produce symbolic behaviors. We are beginning to see how very complex language is, the result of interactions of many different factors, both structural and contextual. I am also intrigued by the parallels between the multi-layered system in the brain and the multi-layered system of quantum mechanics through biochemistry, and also the parallels between those systems and social networks. In one sense they are very different systems, yet the similarities there could yield valuable insights.

Furthermore, the current explosion of easily accessible machine-readable natural language corpora is opening up a wealth of new research possibilities. Some research that even fifty years ago would have required thousands of person-hours can now be done by one person in a few minutes, using only a computer, open-source software, and internet access, and much more can be done when annotated corpora and the resources for further annotation are available. In addition, corpus data can guide the design of psycholinguistic experiments and provide authentic stimuli, and comparable studies using corpus data and psychology methods provide a more complete perspective than either one alone could. Well-developed methodologies for corpus research hold the prospect of steady progress in empirical validation.

The combination of these two trends means that there are many reasons to be using math to study language. Many mathematical formalisms developed in other fields are finding use in language science, as isomorphisms are found in signal and image processing, bio-informatics, statistical analysis, and statistical mechanics. The inter-relatedness of many of the mathematical formalisms used in machine learning and statistics, including those based on neural networks, indicates that those methods are in fact, to a greater or lesser extent, crude models of human learning processes. To the extent that those methods offer analyzable descriptions of what has been learned, language science is being handed a suite of descriptive and predictive models, and we can learn much by taking full advantage of this gift. I have rarely had much interest in math for math’s sake, but applying math to the real world has always fascinated me. I particularly like the prospect of using math to explore language.

I am unusually well-prepared to pursue research at this intersection of language and math. I was raised in South America on a research center of SIL International, surrounded by linguists, and I absorbed much elementary linguistics before college. As an undergraduate at UCSB, I completed a BA in linguistics as well as a BS in physics, which provided me the mathematical frameworks for much of the work I do now. In the computational linguistics program at San Diego State, I have now added computational skills and knowledge of statistical methods, as well as further study in linguistics. As a result of my early education, I speak Spanish fluently, and the Chinese I began to learn as an undergraduate should be brought up to a reasonably high level this year, as I am living in China, studying the language and teaching English. I hope to be able to better take advantage of the many Chinese-language corpora, and I am also interested in the local languages (Wu dialect family here), which currently have many speakers, but they have an uncertain future due to the national language policy.

In the last few years I have carried out several research projects, some of which I hope to pursue further.

• My thesis research developed a method for evaluating hierarchical discourse segmentation, i.e. shallow discourse parsing or unlabeled outlining, which is difficult to evaluate taking into consideration the differing importance of the section breaks and the intrinsic imprecision of the section break locations. The research involved recruiting several dozen students to annotate passages via a web form interface, developing a method for deriving a gold standard from conflicting annotations, adapting two segmentation programs to produce hierarchical segmentations, and developing a statistical measure suitable to the peculiarities of hierarchical discourse segmentation. This work so far is only the first steps in a research program I hope to continue working on in the future.
• At an internship with Beth Sundheim at SPAWAR, I worked on several projects related to multi-lingual text processing and named entity recognition, including a study derived from the TDT 2002 link detection task, comparing the relative value of general lexical features, temporal expressions, and named entities for the identification of event-based topics, and comparing the published temporal expression vector spaces to some I developed. The internship was mostly language engineering rather than language science, but this study does begin to address how people express time concepts and conceptualize temporal similarity.
• With two fellow students I worked on developing a system to distinguish degrees of bias in politically oriented websites, approaching it from two directions: as a language classification problem, like distinguishing subjective language from objective language; and as a network partitioning problem, using position within the hyperlink network to identify affiliation. We harvested the test corpus from the internet, and hand-annotated the target classes. For the linguistic approach we used standard machine learning methods with linguistically-informed features, and for the network approach we used mathematical methods from social network analysis. There are now published papers addressing this problem from the network analysis perspective, but I believe the comparison between the social network and the linguistic features could help enlighten our understanding of partisanship, subjectivity and motivated reasoning.
• In another project with three other students, we worked on the problem of semantic role labeling, as proposed in the CoNLL 2005 Shared Task. We implemented a system that derived a wide variety of rule-based syntactic and semantic features for the sentences in the CoNLL 2005 corpus, to train a conditional random fields model of the target series of semantic role labels. A more complete system, with multiple alternative feature sets, could act as an analyzable model of human behavior, helping establish which factors are more significant in human assignment of semantic roles.

I believe my talents and training in both math and languages make me well-suited to a career doing this sort of research. For many years I have been interested in discourse, as a linearization of a complex belief network, and recent work in language induction (morphology, syntax, and semantics) is also quite intriguing, as are studies examining the relationships between language and general cognition, studies of motivated reasoning and perception, and many others. I have known I belonged in academia longer than I have known what my specialization should be, and even now my interests are diverse, extending well beyond the narrow definition of linguistics used by many. But in any case, this application of abundant language data, via statistical and computational methods, is what I most hope to work on.

Are your students in China (allowed, encouraged and, or forbidden to, but
still) asking you questions about the USA, or other non-course subject
matters? If so, what seem to be their major interests?

In my oral English classes, I try to get them discussing the topics that interest them, so their essentially is no non-course subject matter. I have not noticed any policy about what things should or should not be discussed, but of course their attitudes are strongly influenced by the media around them. It seems to be a common attitude that politics are boring, so political issues don’t come up very often, but there are a few in my stock of conversation questions. They have absorbed a lot of nationalistic sentiment. When asked to choose one song to listen to for the rest of his life, one student said he would choose the national anthem. When asked who their favorite famous person was, they mentioned Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and various movie and pop stars from the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. When they asked me, I said Gandhi, and they were surprised, they said, because he wasn’t American. When asked to be President of the USA for a day, they generally express views against the present president’s actions towards Iraq and North Korea. When asked to be a leader in their own country, they mention general economic development, the disparity between rural poverty and urban wealth, and environmental issues. I have also been asked about American’s understanding of rights and racial discrimination, because of an assignment they had in another class. On the other hand, they are quite interested in American movies and TV shows, and somewhat interested in American music. I’ve met several who know more about such things than I do, which I suppose isn’t all that much. I have also been asked about American traditions for Thanksgiving. And I have also been asked how foreigners can travel so far away from their families, since Chinese are still expected to live close to their parents, and the foreigners they meet here are all travelers.

What are some of the things/activities that bring you joy? And, have you
found any of that yet on your China trip?

I enjoy good relationships, understanding things, and absorbing nature. I try to keep several close friends, and despite our recent differences I’m still quite close with my family. My academic pursuits, both official and extracurricular, are driven by a deep desire to understand the world, and I think the only good explanation is that I derive a great deal of joy from an elegant understanding of something at least somewhat important. And I also really enjoy the simple things, of experiencing being alive in nature. Because of the short time and the language barrier, my developing friendships here are still pretty shallow, but there are plenty of interesting things to work on understanding — like the language, the culture, and teaching — and though there aren’t any beaches to walk on and there aren’t many dirt paths to run on, there are plenty of park areas around campus. Living and working here is more difficult than I expected it to be, but there’s still plenty to enjoy.

The following is an email interview, which will appear in some form in a future issue of the Family of Humanists newsletter.

1. You are or soon will be in China. Where are you (will you be) and what
are your professional plans and other ideas for using your time there?

I’m in Jinhua, a medium-size city in the middle of Zhejiang Province, just a four hour drive south of Shanghai. I’m teaching English classes at the university here, and my primary goal is to become more familiar with the language and culture. I’ve been contemplating a long-term stay here since I was first here in China eight years ago on a summer missions trip. I inherited an interest in Chinese culture from my father, and studied the language for three years as part of a linguistics major at UCSB. But because learning out of context is always hard and because I was also busy doing a physics major, the language didn’t stick as well as I had hoped. I didn’t come after I graduated college because I was feeling pretty ontologically lost as far as my worldview and the meaning of life, but I was still trying to work it out in a Christian framework. Over the last couple years I’ve grown increasingly discouraged about US culture, and felt stalled in my academics, so I decided it w as time to come. Next year, I plan to finish the computational linguistics masters program I was in at SDSU and enter a PhD program, probably in cognitive science.

2. You lived with your parents and siblings in South America for a number of years. Could you tell us about that time of your life and some significant experiences you had there?

That was most of my school-age years, but I’ve never been very good remembering stories. Being raised in a community of missionaries focused on linguistic research in Native American communities in Colombia has undoubtedly and profoundly shaped who I am. But it’s hard to describe.

3. I believe you have traveled quite a bit, as have your parents and your
siblings, what places have you visited and what have you observed and
learned about the peoples and places you’ve seen?

All of them have actually spent more time abroad than I have, and except for my older sister, they have all been more places. But I have travelled a fair amount. I spent a summer in northern China, another summer in Mexico City, and one summer the family did the tourist thing in Europe, with some time in Uzbekistan where my brother was working at the time. One thing that has struck me is how much people around the world are becoming more alike, sharing more and more physical culture, habits, and languages. Educated urban youth, especially, listen to a lot of the same music, wear similar clothes, enjoy many of the same activities, and have similar values and aspirations. On the one hand, that means we are losing our differences, making it easier to communicate with and understand distant members of the world community. On the other hand, we are losing our distinctiveness. A lot of local flavor and community is being washed away. We are becoming more connected with distant people and places, but becoming less connected with the people and places physically closest to us, and disconnected from the resources we consume and the waste we produce. I think this might help solve some of the perennial human problems, but it brings new ones. China in particular is an interesting place to watch it happen because it is now one of the most quickly changing countries in the world, and they have been dealing with some of these issues for over two millennia.

4. You’ve emailed some relatives who are members of the Family of Humanists
(FOH) that you now call yourself “a secular humanist”. How do you define
and describe that term and what it means to you?

I come to that term without much reflection or reading on it. I think I like the term because it emphasizes values (humanism) rather than a particular metaphysical stance. First principles and theoretical details can sometimes be important and often enough interesting to consider, but they’re quite difficult to evaluate, and awfully easy to disagree about. For the purpose of living life in community, what matters most is a core of common values, and I think that’s what the phrase “secular humanism” captures. “Humanism” because I believe life is most aptly framed in terms of people and their communities, and values that optimize their individual and collective health are the ideal core values. “Secular” because, though spiritualist traditions have captured elements of truth that are difficult to express in other terms, they are fundamentally intrinsically subjective, and thus easily mistaken.

People are prone to overgeneralization, and so religious-like thinking might perhaps be as inescapable as our “naive physics”, that is, our intuitive, flawed conceptualization of physical behaviors. For example, we intuit that heavy objects fall faster than light objects, overestimating the effects of wind resistance on our observations, and our intuitions about angular motion are often wrong, such as thinking that objects held to a circular path will move in a spiral path when released, or underestimating the effects of the angular momentum of a spinning object. People who develop better intuitions of these behaviors still have flawed intuitions of quantum mechanics and relativity. In much the same way, I think, people’s ability to identify patterns and causes spills over into superstitions that are difficult to distinguish from reality. Religions and superstitions might be unavoidable, but these ideas in the border zone, between ideas that we can evaluate externally and ideas that no one believes, have an important exploratory role. Religious traditions are a valuable source of concepts and theories, but they shouldn’t be trusted beyond what can be objectively evaluated, and they form a poor basis for social contracts.

5. Could you also give an idea of your philosophical / religious beliefs
and how this may make a difference in your daily life and future plans?

My perspective is that the religious traditions that surround us express truths about community health, in a way analogous to how naive physics or even early scientific theories express truth in an incomplete or superficial way. Human societies are very complex systems, and it is quite difficult for an individual to correctly and intuitively understand much about the behavior of such a system. Subtle truths that help maintain the society’s health get preserved within elaborate theories that are otherwise false, much the way a beneficial mutation may be preserved along with detrimental mutations within a genome. As such, religious beliefs are to be respected as valuable sources of truth, but they are also to be regarded with caution. In my daily life, this means my sense of ethics is largely unchanged from what it was when I was a Christian, though I am much less confident about the reliability of my intuitions. My future plans are pretty hazy, partly because I have a much weaker sense of life purpose.

6. You wrote “it was a long process, but the turning point was about three
years ago now”. Could you describe the process, tell us about the turning
point, and some incidents or persons that caused you to investigate your
previous ideas?
7. If there are any writers or publications that you find or have found
particularly helpful in your search for better understanding, could you
identify them, tell us about them, and what ideas you found provocative or
helpful?

I can remember late in high school being unable to understand how any Christian with a solid understanding of the faith could ever turn away from it, or how any intelligent person who seriously and honestly considered the evidence could possibly reject it. In college, for really the first time, I became good friends with non-believers, and in dialogues with them and with my uncle Devin, I started to realize that my worldview was not as coherent as I had perceived it to be. Having been raised in a Christian tradition that highly respected scholarship, I had many answers for difficulties that my Christian friends were dealing with, but it became increasingly clear to me that my faith was not as obvious as I had once believed it to be. Faced with several major questions that I could not answer satisfactorily, and feeling like the issues I had with metaphysical naturalism (that is, non-supernaturalism) were at least tractable, about 6 years ago I admitted to myself that I no longer believed, and I told a few people about my doubts, but I continued to search for solutions to my questions, and several months later I became convinced that I had overestimated the difficulties, and I decided to give Christianity another chance. Over the course of another two years I tried again to iron out my issues, but ultimately I was unable to find a faith I could believe. In the year after I graduated from college, I admitted to myself I could not continue as a Christian, and began to try to establish for myself what I did believe.

The books and articles I read were overwhelmingly those written from a Christian perspective, and the only strongly opposed view I remember reading was Ingersoll’s “Why I am not a Christian” but I do remember reading one of Michael Shermer’s books, either How We Believe, or Why People Believe Weird Things, and I read Robert Ingersoll’s “Why I am Agnostic”, which itself wasn’t very convincing, but I pegged it as representative of the questions and misperceptions that I as a Christian needed to be able to address. [Ed: "Why I am not a Christian" is an essay by Bertrand Russell, which I might have also read, but it didn't stick like Ingersoll's did.] The issues that most influenced me to leave Christianity were:

• understanding that many intelligent well-informed people honestly could not believe
• seeing group-think behaviors in the Christian communities I knew and in other close communities, both religious and non-religious, that enabled me to see my religious experience in a new light. (Shermer’s book might have been influential here.)
• realizing that as I attempted to integrate what I knew about the physical and spiritual worlds, the spiritual world increasingly resembled phenomenological description rather than a complementary reality or more fundamental reality, as I had previously seen it.
• I became convinced that if the gospels reliably represented early Christians’ experience of a death and resurrection of Jesus, his teachings about hell had to be taken seriously, which became overwhelmingly horrific, even understood according to C.S. Lewis’s fairly kind and sensible explanation.

8. Could you describe what you are looking for in life? Both short term and long term?

Compared with how I was as a Christian, I really don’t know. Even now I feel quite lost, sensing that there objectively is such a thing as wasting your life, but I have a pretty hazy idea of what a life well spent looks like. Perhaps there is simply a wider number of ways of living a life well. My heritage and upbringing has left a deep sense of responsibility to serve the less fortunate, but the problems we are facing are often overwhelming. I don’t think I am optimistic enough to deal directly with the most serious problems, and I need measureable signs of progress. Because of that, and because I am probably incorrigibly intellectual, I think I need to find a place for myself in academia, where I can do some public good without having to measure my life’s work against an insurmountable problem. I am searching for a role in the human community, suitable to my interests and abilities.

Recent surveys report that approximately 50% of US residents reject evolution altogether, with 42% agreeing that “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time”. In contrast, in Germany and England, the statistic is about 20%.

If there were no scientific consensus on evolution these figures would make sense. Or if it were like the global warming situation, in which the scientific community has only in the last couple decades come to consensus on the basics, that global temperature is rising and probably caused by rising atmospheric CO₂, and a few scientists are still not sure that human factors are more important than non-human ones, confusion among the general populace would be understandable and forgiveable. However, the scientific consensus on the essentials of evolution and on its timescale, especially, is much stronger and has been established for much longer.

It seems that the Christian Church has been a major catalyst in the scientific illiteracy of the American public, and yet there is no reason for it to have played that role. Throughout the 1800s the theologians that modern evangelicals esteem displayed considerable interest in staying informed of the developments in geology and biology that were pushing back the estimated age of the earth and clarifying the origins of the natural world. Many of the most prominent theologians of the 19th century were Old-Earth creationists, including Benjamin Warfield, the Hodges, and Scofield. James Orr, who, of the authors of the Fundamentals, most addresses the interaction between theology and science, takes a position somewhere between old-Earth creationism and evolutionary creationism. In the last volume of the Fundamentals, geologist, pastor and professor of N.T. Greek G.F. Wright, another pastor named Henry Beach, and a third anonymous author did write strongly anti-Darwinian articles, but Wright nevertheless held old-Earth views, and the other two don’t seem to be well-recognized authors. (The anonymous author was “An Occupant of the Pew” not the more not famous and extremely prolific author named “Anonymous”.) A. H. Strong was an evolutionary creationist, as was C. S. Lewis. The trend continues into the present: Alister McGrath is an evolutionary creationist, Wayne Grudem accepts either YEC or OEC, as does J.P. Moreland (ibid). R.C. Sproul’s comments on Creation and Time and the book he has written on the subject seem to indicate he is an old-Earth creationist. J.I. Packer sees to no problem with full biological evolution. (There are exceptions, of course. Norman Geisler, for example, is young-Earth[see comment below], and at least early on, Carl F.H. Henry was a young-Earth creationist.) Similarly, the most prominent people in the Intelligent Design camp are overwhelmingly Old Earth Creationists: out of Michael Behe, William Dembski, Dean Kenyon, Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer, and Paul Nelson, only Nelson believes in a young Earth, and at least Behe also accepts common descent. All of these people might object to evolution in (1) its claim that speciation occurs without divine intervention, and all but the evolutionary creationists might object to (2) its claim that humans are descended from non-human apes. They do not dispute that (1) the earth is billions of years old and the universe is even older, and (2) mutation and competition do play an important role in shaping the diversity of the biological world.

In contrast, the ’science’ taught on Christian radio, and regularly given stage time in sunday schools and bible studies essentially teaches that evolutionary biology is a giant hoax: that the bible clearly teaches that the Earth is 6000 years old, created ex nihilo in a form much like the present, only much nicer, since that was before the Fall and before the Flood. The scientific enterprise is treated like an organized conspiracy set on destroying Christianity, or even all morality.

There is widespread consensus even among conservative theologians and evangelical scientists that young Earth creationism is false and that natural science informs sound belief rather than destroys it, and yet lay Christians are taught a creation myth as if it were literal history, and are taught to distrust science altogether. The result is an American Church that is scientifically illiterate — unable and unwilling to consider scientific data in the formulation of public policy — and taught a strawman as if it were foundational doctrine. This is unexcusable, with serious consequences both for the American Church and for the nation as a whole.

In part 1 we looked at grammatical acceptability judgements for variations on the sentence “Me and my brother were chatting with my neighbor”. We observed two tendencies:

• “I” is generally preferred in the subject of the sentence, and “me” is preferred in the object of “with”.
• Overall, “I”/”me” sounds better after “my brother” than before, and “I” is preferred over “me” after “my brother”, while “me” prefers to come before “my brother”. Also, switching the order of “I” and “my brother” affects things more than switching the order of “me” and “my brother”.

We saw, however, that “I and my brother were chatting with my neighbor” and “My neighbor was chatting with my brother and me” are less acceptable than these two generalizations would predict. Furthermore, some of the other sentences seem to be bit more acceptable than a simple application of these rules would predict.

So what else is going on? And really, why do people show these acceptability preferences?

Here, for your enjoyment, are a bunch of numbers. As has been discussed extensively on LanguageLog and Corpora List, hit counts can be fairly unreliable, but they do give some indication of frequency of usage.

(BNCWeb is 100M words of British English. Some searches pull up hits for other constructions, and in those cells the number in parentheses is the actual hit count, and the other number is my estimate of the portion of those hits that actually represent the language usage we’re looking for. I’ve switched to present tense here (”I am“), where there are more distinct conjugations of “be”, to help reduce these undesired hits.)

If you pull up part 1 in a new tab and compare the two tables, you’ll notice that within the groups (b-e, f-i, j-m) there’s a fair correlation between high acceptability ratings and high hit counts. The sentences judged 1 barely have any hits (or none), ranging up to the sentences judged 5 having millions of hits. One exception is that “with my brother and me” scored fairly high in acceptability, but fairly low in usage. Apparently either this construction is more common among college-age Californians than among other English speakers, or it’s a form that they accept, but don’t actually produce. As I explain below, I think it’s this second option.

Oddly enough, however, all the constructions except “with I” have some usage. (And actually, if we had the patience, we could probably find some real examples among the millions of “with I” hits.) Take for example, “me am” and “with I and my brother”. Even these constructions rated really unacceptable have people using them, often enough on purpose. Y R THEY BUCHERING TEH BUTIFUL ENGLISH LANGUGE?!!1! Why? Because even officially incorrect language forms have contexts in which they are appropriate, even more appropriate than the “standard” forms. Livejournalist Illusion saying “me am happy and now shall do the happy dance” expresses something different than “I am happy…” In using the non-standard language she is expressing an abnormal, goofy mood.

Let’s return now to the puzzle. You may have already noticed that you would be more likely to use these constructions in some contexts than others. If your own intuitions haven’t already convinced you, compare the contexts for “Me and my brother are” with the contexts for “My brother and I are”, and look at how the count ratio changes when you add other words like “alas” (ratio goes from 1:4 to 1:9)[1][2] or “omg” (ratio goes from 1:4 to 1:2)[1][2]. There may also be a dialect difference, but there is at least a register difference, i.e. a difference in context of use.

If we take another look at the regularities we found earlier, keeping in mind that the favorite forms (”my brother and I” and “me and my brother”) represent slightly different language varieties, we can see a rather interesting situation. While the single pronoun differs between subject and object, and it does not differ between register, the compound noun phrase differs between registers, and it does not differ between subject and object!

Those of you who had a fair amount of grammar in school might be all like, “Wait! That’s not how academic English works.” And you’d be kinda right. Kinda. “With my brother and me” is the traditionally grammatical form. It was rated as fairly acceptable, but not often used, probably because we’re exposed to it as an officially grammatical form, but disagrees with our experience, which is ultimately what our productive grammar is derived from. “With my brother and I” is hard to count because so many of the hits are something else (like “with my brother, and I …”), but it appears that when “with my brother and me” is used, it does tend to be a bit higher social context than “with my brother and I”. The fact is, while “with my brother and me” has been maintained in teaching, “with my brother and I” is more common usage except in the most carefully edited language, and has been around for a long time.

So what all this illustrates is that since language is constantly changing, and a single language has different varieties appropriate to different contexts, as well as varieties spoken by different people, the common concepts of “bad grammar” and “proper English” are not very coherent.

Some may say that “my brother and I were” and “with my brother and me” are inherently more proper because they are more logical, in that they maintain the rules that “I” goes in the subject and “me” in the object, and you always put others before yourself. But the fact is, language isn’t completely logical. While human language does have many statistical regularities, and even some rules that seem to always be followed, real human language has all kinds of idiosyncracies and exceptions. The processing in the human brain is analog, associative and probabilistic, not symbolic, deductive or deterministic. The language that results from that processing has organic, chaotic order, not the order we get from formal logic.

None of the constructions above is the most appropriate option in all contexts, and most of the constructions have social contexts in which they are appropriate options. It may be “improper” to write “Me and my brother was …” in a resume cover letter, but equally improper for a cholo to say to his cuates, “My brother and I were …” The only sense in which there is proper language is in that for every social group and social context, there is set of acceptable language forms, and in order to be accepted in a social group, you have to be able to produce the appropriate language. Everybody has to be able to expertly alternate between language varieties as they change social contexts. As the phrase is most often used, learning to use “proper English” is really about learning which language forms belong in which contexts, and since no one grows up speaking with the same forms used in formal written English, all of us, some more than others, have to learn this new language variety that the general society has constructed and given high social status to, to be accepted in certain scholastic, employment and civic contexts.

The trouble comes in that we confuse high social status with inherent quality. We associate it with education, since it does take education to learn formal English, but we ignore the fact that some home language varieties are more like formal English than others, and that some people’s education focuses more on formal English than others. Perhaps because of education, we associate formal English with intelligence, ignoring that it is just as much if not further removed from the observed behavior. And somehow there is a pernicious tendency to see lower status language varieties as less logical and motivated by laziness. The result is that we fail to appreciate all the other language varieties. And that’s kinda sad.

Shortly after posting my last blog post, I came across this comment (at bottom of page) criticizing the anti-HR4437 marches as a bunch of “illegal aliens” whining about no longer being allowed to break the law. I wrote the following up, but then started to second guess the details. I think all my readers have views pretty similar to my own, but I thought I would share this with you all anyway, partly because it fleshes out more of my thinking about law-breaking, and partly because these fairly rough thoughts, and the resources I’ve linked to below, might be of use to you folks in talking to people like “Skylark”.

I too am a big fan of the rule of law. But part of that package is a requirement to keep our laws just, protecting the rights of people, not necessarily the interests of businesses or any other organization. “The trust and stability that come from an expectation of honesty and fairness” comes not from enforcement alone, but from the enforcement of just and humane laws. Further militarizing the border and penalizing humanitarian activities doesn’t do that.

We’ve known for many years now that the primary victims of increased (illegal or legal) immigration are other immigrants. Are the legal immigrants pushing this kind of legislation? No, legal immigrants and descendents of legal immigrants are marching in solidarity with the undocumented. What does this indicate to you? I think that should indicate this is more about rejecting anti-immigrant attitudes than the legal issue.

The primary beneficiaries of illegal immigration are the businesses that employ undocumented workers. The total cost of education and medical care for undocumented workers is much less than the taxes they pay, and their per-capita GDP is less than their wages. The rest of society is also benefitting from them. Undocumented workers are not asking us to leave the bank vault open, but to acknowledge that they are an integral part of our society, and that they are not a ‘criminal element’ to be evicted at all costs.

Enforcement policies alone do very little to stem illegal immigration. In the years from 2000 to 2005, 85% of immigration from Mexico was unauthorized, in spite of the increase in border enforcement during the last decade.

Immigration and migration are social phenomena caused by economic factors. In this same period that border enforcement and unauthorized immigration have increased, the economic disparity between here and the other side of the border has also increased, in spite of NAFTA, which was supposed to narrow the gap. Treating unauthorized immigration as simply an issue of law enforcement is overlooking the root causes, and ignoring the human issues.

I know I should match up the stats with the sources, but that’s too much work. Everything here is found somewhere in the documents in this list (I think): http://del.icio.us/serapio/immigration

If you know me much, you know I kinda like to follow the rules. Of my siblings, I’m probably the second most conservative driver (after slowlane). And though I have once or twice asked family members to forge my signature for me, I have done so rather reluctantly, and done so much less than others. During Napster’s hey-day I conscientiously avoided participating, and even today I very rarely pull any restricted music off the internet, and I don’t use unlicensed software. I’ve never been able to say any “vulgarities” stronger than “crap”, “dang”, or “good grief”, and can’t write any words (except in quotations) stronger than “shit”. I never tried to drink as a minor, and have never tried any recreational drugs. So as you can see, I’m sickly faithful to following the rules, but the truth is, there are good reasons to break rules. There are many good reasons to break social norms, the enumeration of which I will leave as an exercise for the reader, or for another time. Here I would like to explore the reasons for breaking the law.

One situation is fairly mundane. Laws are made as generalizations, and despite the recent increase of legal code, laws are not meant to specifically cover every individual situation. The letter of the law says not to drive through an intersection when the light is red. But if you’re taking a dying person to the emergency room at 3:00 in the morning, not many people would expect you to wait out the stop light. We all apply similar reasoning to everyday situations, figuring for example that when the speed limit is 65 and the slowest vehicles are going 70, following the letter of the law doesn’t make sense. In Brazil, there are so many stop signs and stop lights that the society as whole has downgraded ‘pare’ (’stop’) in that context to mean ‘yield’. The letter of the law says that you aren’t supposed to drive faster than 65, or you aren’t supposed to coast through the intersection, but as long as you don’t go too fast, neither the traffic cops nor the other drivers will care. When the society as a whole has decided that the speed limit should effectively be 70 rather than 65 or that those signs should be yield signs rather than stop signs, it is advisable to make the legal code agree with that social norm, to get rid of ambiguity and confusion. This is the sort of ambiguity that makes it easier for law enforcement to discriminate, and the confusion that has many many people thinking that anything is fine as long as you don’t get caught. What matters is not getting caught or not, but the standard of behavior established by the society you participate in. On matters that get codified as law, the law should agree with those social standards.

Another situation is when there is an unjust law restricting your own behavior. In some such situations, these restrictions might be merely inconvenient, other times oppressive, and sometimes they might require complicity in someone else’s oppression. Clearly, laws that require complicity in the oppression of someone else must be violated. At the other extreme are inconveniences due to different understandings of the details of how a political system should work. These, I believe, should be tolerated. In a democracy, we will have differences of opinions about what behaviors are constructive and permissible, and which behaviors should be regulated or left to individual choice. In the public forum, voice your opposition to these laws, but for the sake of the rule of law, the legal code deserves some respect even when it diverges from your personal sense of justice. For example, I believe that pot should be regulated more like alcohol or tobacco than cocaine. (And alcohol should be less regulated as well.) But as long as pot is illegal, I don’t want to try it. On the other hand, I believe the current system of penalties for possession is oppressive, and thus (among other reasons) wouldn’t be able to work in law enforcement. When you find yourself in a situation where you must violate a law because of it’s oppressive nature, expect the possibility of the corresponding legal penalty. In some cases this might mean certain legal or financial preparations. Some cases would be subsumed in the following category.

A third situation is the case of passive resistance or civil disobedience, when there is an unjust law, legal system, or corporate policy, whose injustice needs to be revealed and highlighted for the public, to force a change. The goal of breaking the law in this case is to raise awareness of the issue, and use the contrast between the official crime and the legalized injustice to turn public opinion against the unjust policy. Ideally, you would want to only break the single unjust law, so that the ‘crime’ committed is directly linked to its injustice. In real life, however, this is rarely possible. When the injustice lies in how public funds are spent or how multinational corporations escape responsibilities by taking advantage of lenient regulations abroad, there is no unjust law that an individual can target for violation. In this kind of situation, where breaking the law is public relations, there are three often competing constraints. First, in order for there to be a strong association in the minds of the audience between the crime and the injustice, the violated law should be closely related, conceptually or contextually. Second, in order to be persuasive, the crime should be minimal–if you are violating the unjust law, violate that law alone, if at all possible, and if you are violating some other law, do something that is just barely illegal, to delineate the boundary between what we as a society have decided is and is not legally permissible. When protest actions stray towards more serious crimes, it becomes very easy for people to assign a label of miscreant or criminal, and dismiss the message of the action. Third, in order to strongly influence a wide audience, the action has to be highly visible and arrest people’s attention. I have the urge to try to elaborate how this balancing act should work, but since I have no experience in any such things, I would probably not illuminate much.

This seems to me to be a fairly complete list of reasons for law-breaking, but if you think I’ve left something out, I’d like to hear about it.

Last semester in the class I was teaching I did an experiment that I thought had clearly interpretable, interesting results. Well aware that my students were quite unaccustomed to linguistic analysis, I didn’t expect any of them to see all that was obvious to me, but the write-ups I received were still disappointing. Many of the students did no linguistic analysis, and those that did rarely noted even the patterns that I thought were really basic. So here, as catharsis, I will present the experiment and what I conclude from it.

The question we start with is this. Officially, saying something like “Me and my brother were chatting” is ‘bad grammar’. However, people say stuff like that all the time. Also, related phrasings that are officially more grammatical, like “I and my brother were chatting” are rarely used. Why is ‘bad grammar’ (like “Me and my brother were chatting”) so common while other related options are rare? The answer to this question reveals that ‘bad grammar’ and ‘proper English’ aren’t quite what people normally conceive them to be.

I presented my students with the following example sentences and asked them to rate their acceptability on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is something that doesn’t really sound like English, 3 is something you don’t think you would say but you hear other people say, and 5 is something you would feel fine saying. (The implication here is that sentences rated 2 and 4 lie somewhere between the sentences rated 1 & 3 and 3 & 5, respectively, but there were a couple students who missed that, thinking the only options were 1, 3, and 5. Do we speak the same language?) We then averaged everyone’s ratings. My deapest apologies to those of my readers who care about statistical significance, since I did not collect the data on a case-by-case basis, precluding variance calculations.

There are several patterns worth noting here. The first sentence (a) was included just to verify that people understood the task, so let’s start with the second block.

In sentences (b) through (e), note that there is a very strong preference for ‘I’ rather than ‘me’ as the subject of the sentence, and a similarly strong preference for ‘me’ rather than ‘I’ to come as the object of the preposition ‘with’. It’s because of this that ‘I’ is often called a subject pronoun, and ‘me’ is called an object pronoun. This contrast between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is very widespread, and similar contrasts are common in other languages and used to be much more common in English. But now, this sort of contrast only appears with personal pronouns. Glancing ahead quickly, also note that none of the other sentences recieve scores as high or as low as sentences (a) through (e). The more complex sentences are neither as acceptable as the good sentences here, nor as unacceptable as the bad sentences here.

In sentences (f) through (i), we note that between (f) and (h) there is a strong preference for ‘I’ to come after ‘my brother’, whereas between (g) and (i) there is a noticeable preference for ‘me’ to come before ‘my brother’. The other thing to notice is that, in contrast to the pattern we noted in (b) through (e), ‘me’ seems quite acceptable in the subject. In fact, if we average the score from (f) with (h) and the one from (g) with (i), we get 3.05 for both! The choice between ‘I’ or ‘me’ has no net effect on the acceptability of this sentence. If we average the other way, we see that there is an overall preference (3.65 vs 2.45) for ‘my brother’ to come before the first person pronoun. To explain this preference, you may recall from grade school an admonission to “put others before yourself” in situations like this as a sign of respect. But why is “I and my brother” still less acceptable than “My brother and me” or “Me and my brother”, contrary to the strong preference for ‘I’ that we observed in (b) through (e)? We leave this question unanswered for the moment.

In sentences (j) through (m), we note that (j), (k) and (l) are all approximately of the same acceptability, whereas (m) is much less. Based on the patterns we have noted above, it is quite understandable that (m) is rated so poorly since it violates two generalizations: we have the subject pronoun ‘I’ in the object of a preposition, and we have it preceding ‘my brother’. Note however, that sentences (k) and (l) each violate one generalization, while (j) violates neither, and yet (j) is the worst rated of the three. What is going on here?

To answer these questions, we will take a look at some usage data in part 2.

We live in the information age. The age of information. This means that our economy and much of our culture is defined by the exchange and manipulation of information. Wisdom may be another case entirely, but the amount of information available to us is increasing exponentially. The problem with this much information is that useful information is lost among irrelevant information. A database full of numbers or a library full of books is useless if you can’t find the one you need. As an experimental scientist, I have a responsibility to discover the truth among competing theories. As an academic in my field, I also have the opportunity to help make information widely accessible, intuitively retrievable, and self-organizing. In this space, I will be doing neither of these things. I will be spouting off about things I am largely unqualified to speak about, increasing the total quantity of irrelevant and unhelpful information.

Actually, I hope I have thought about these things a bit more than the average person. Also, for the sake of my own sanity, and for the sake of building community with those around me, there is a need for me to spill out some of the ideas I have stored up inside me. I have spent a ridiculous amount of my life to date in thought, and it’s time I let my people see some of its fruits, if they choose to do so.

You have to be more cautious when criticizing another culture than when criticizing your own. It is easy to criticize other cultures foolishly, and quite difficult to understand another culture well enough to offer well-founded criticism. Humans are imperfect, and thus the cultures we create have imperfections, flaws which individually and collectively we should strive to correct. Yet it is all too easy to project your ideas of normal behavior onto other cultures and conclude that those cultures are gravely flawed in some arena, or even inferior as a whole, when the differences are merely different conventions representing similar value systems. For example, contrasting conventions about how far apart to stand when speaking with another person, how loudly to speak, timing of eye contact or amount of physical contact likely stem from subtle differences in values of individuality vs community, productivity vs personal relationships, authority vs equality, tradition vs progress, etc. However, through the colored glasses of another culture, these contrasts are exaggerated and even twisted to reflect lack of humanity. Valuing individuality and productivity becomes selfishness and lovelessness. Valuing community and personal relationships becomes laziness and a lack of personal responsibility. Valuing authority becomes subservience; valuing equality becomes irreverence. Valuing tradition becomes mindless primitivity; valuing progress becomes soulless mania. In order to accurately evaluate the flaws of a culture, you have to be intimately familiar with it. This generally means that the only culture that we can confidently criticize and strive to change is our own. On the other hand, cultures and subcultures come in varieties and sub-varieties, and we are members of one humanity. Just as insights into our own cultures can come from observing others, we can gain insights into other cultures based on observations of our own, and it is occasionally appropriate to work to change cultures besides our own.

My home culture is rather idiosyncratic and poorly defined. I don’t identify very well with American culture in general, nor with any of the various sub-cultures defined by their music, religion, sports or other entertainment. I am becoming acculturated into academia, but otherwise any comments I make regarding social or cultural change mean I am advocating changing a culture I cannot wholly claim, and probably do not properly appreciate. I hope, however, that my lack of home culture and my experience with many different cultures, along with my penchant for thinking too carefully, give me a small soapbox to stand on and thump vigorously.