Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Makers
By Cory Doctorow 2009
416 pages
Cory Doctorow chronicles the near future cycle of tech booms and busts. Doctorow creates a compelling and complex world where characters ride the “New Work” movement from infancy to old age. Centered around hardware hackers called makers the story opens at the dawn of a physical dot-com style boom where large corporations turn venture capitalists leveraging small teams of creative makers with all the tools to make whatever products they can imagine. With the ability to physically replicate almost anything ideas spread like digital files and soon everyone is making for themselves leading to the inevitable financial bust. Documenting everything is a journalist turned blogger who struggles with how to cover events she is personally a part of. Doctorow imagines a world where people are empowered to make things themselves and explores how this freedom conflicts with corporate, legal and governmental structures. Touching on everything from genetic therapy diet fads to future Disney turned goth Makers never ceases to entertain and inspire readers to image a world where the only limit to what we can build is our creativity, and our legacy institutions. While it is tempting to sum up the book “Techology giveth and Technology taketh” a more apt summary might be “Technology changeth and we must deal”.
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Against Markedness (and What to Replace it With) – Haspelmath (2006)
Haspelmath argues that notions of markedness in linguistics are unmotivated . He instead proposes to replace the notions by detailed analysis and explanations based on textual frequency. He systematically examines 12 different uses of markedness throughout the linguistic literature showing in each case why the notion of markedness is unmotivated and could be replaced by alternative analysis or simpler explanations. His overall claim is that there is generally no theme unifying the different uses of markedness other than iconicity which he rejects in another paper and frequency which he favors. As a result he dismisses the notion and challenges users of markedness based explanations to justify its use. I found his claim that rarity/frequency in the world is strictly speaking irrelevant for linguistics surprising. He goes on to say all that matters is text frequency, which is sometimes, but by no means always correlated with frequency in the world but does not really back up his claim with evidence. I also think Haspelmath underestimates the degree to which contextual situations can effect the phenomena he is examining. It is not just frequency of use that is important but contextual frequency.
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Frequency vs. Iconicity in Explainin Grammatical Asymmetries – Haspelmath (200?)
Iconicity is the claim that the structure of language reflects the structure of experience. Many phenomena accounted for by iconicity are in fact accounted for by the principle of economy. Iconicity of quantity where forms denoting greater quantity are longer is explained by the fact that the shorter forms are more frequently used and should be shorter based on economy of the length of linguistic form. In a similar way Haspelmath accounts for iconicity of complexity where more complex meaning are expressed by more complex forms by demonstrating the more complex meaning s are less frequent and are therefore optimally encoded by longer forms. Iconicity of cohesion claims that meanings that belong together more closely semantically are expressed by more cohesive forms. This is also debunked in favor of a frequency based explanation. The economy explanation also helps explain numerous counterexamples to iconicity claims. The take away message is that markedness and iconicity are epiphenomena to be banished from linguistic theory in favor of explanations based on relative frequency of occurrence and economy. While the paper is in a position to make use of large amount of corpus evidence to support the claims relatively little is used. This is unfortunate but Hapelmath’s claims provide motivation for future research and validation.