Jeremy Thompson Catholic PhD in Biblical Languages, Programmer, Runner

I’ve recently been reading Anna Basso’s Aphasia and Its Therapy.  I found this passage interesting where she states that it is sometimes necessary to make assumptions, whether or not one believes them to be true or can prove them to be true, in order to progress:

The use of pathological data for the study of the normal cognitive system is not straightforward; it requires some assumptions.  The main assumptions of cognitive neuropsychology are the modularity assumption, the universality assumption, and the subtraction assumption.  Cognitive neuropsychologists do not assert that these assumptions are true; they do, however argue that they have to be true in order for cognitive neuropsychology to be possible.

I think this struck me because a modularity hypothesis is not something I’m sold on (I don’t ascribe to modularity; however, research on aphasia does keep me on the fence about it).  But, I buy what Basso says here.  I don’t doubt that settling on an assumption like modularity has allowed researchers to move on make practical progress for people with aphasia.

I think this is applicable regardless of the area of study a person engages in.  In the sciences, the assumption has to be made that human beings and rats are similar enough for things that work on rats to work on humans because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to run some experiments on humans.  In the study of Shakespeare or the Bible, someone may believe we have no idea who the real author of a text was, but we have to assume a context for an author in order to analyze the text even if we know that assumption could not be entirely true.

Of course, at some level we want to make as certain as possible that our assumptions are defensible.  However, sometimes we have to make assumptions to make progress.

Last week I posted some of my experience doing continuing ed in Python programming with the O’reilly School of Technology.  Before entering in on learning programming some people want to know just how far they need to go with it in order for it to be useful.

In many ways, I’m sure the answer is the more the better.  But, you really don’t need to learn that much programming in order for it to save you a considerable amount of time on some tasks.  For example, I use these lines of code just about every day:

import codecs

data = []

f = codecs.open(“C:/xyz.txt”, “r”, “utf-16”)

for line in f.readlines():

line_data = line.split(“/t”)

data.append(line_data)

That little bit of code didn’t take me too awful long to learn.  But, it lets me read a tab-delimited text file and put the contents of each tab-delimited line in a list.  From there, if you know if-statements, for-loops, and operators like “and,” “or” and “not,” you can do a whole lot of things with the data that you read from a text file.  I have it on good authority (i.e., Rick Brannan told me) that if you add regular expressions to those statements, loops and operators, you can do almost anything that most non-professional programmers would need to do with Python.

Of course, there are always better and faster ways to do things.  That is one of the reasons I thought it was very helpful to have an instructor with O’reilly school.  Often he was able to tell me: your code works, but here’s a better way you could’ve done that.  Even with that said, code that works is better than beautiful code for most tasks.

I’d say that that it varies how long it would take someone to get to a point of doing useful tasks.  But, if you had a good month or two to dedicate an hour or so a day to learning a language like Python, I think you’d be really surprised by some of the things you might be able to do.

I’m catching up with my blog reading from last week.  Kris Lyle brings up an interesting case in which two experts on New Testament discourse disagree with one another from John 15.7.  I have no particular interest here in whether Levisohn or Runge is correct about the information structure of the verse, but what I was impressed with was Kris’s demonstration of how to think through the issues involved:

1. No doubt the word order is marked. The question is which constituent is marked: the verb or the non-verbal constituent?
2. Normally when a non-topical constituent is placed before the verb it’s to mark it as focal (as Levinsohn suggests), though sometimes all the other non-verbal constituents can be moved up front so as to save the verb for last, isolating it at the end and marking it as focal (which is what Runge indicates).
3. How to determine which is which is basically to gauge which constituent is more given/presupposed than the other: “ask” or “whatever you want”.
4. In 14.13 both concepts are equally activated via left-dislocation.
5. In 14.14 the balance is disrupted and “anything” (τι) is marked as focal.
6. In 15.16 they are equally activated as a single topic.
7. 16.23 same thing as before.
8. In 16.24 the concept of asking for stuff is discussed in an unmarked fashion (i.e. default).
9. Over all, it seems that Jesus is internally flustered (in a good way) because his disciples have asked God for nothing! It seems he’s trying to egg them on, coaxing them into asking (for anything) so that God might be glorified through the fruit that his reaped in his compliance with their requests.
10. With that said, I think that “asking” (i.e. prayer) is the most presupposed instruction that Jesus is passing on to his peeps in John 15.7. It’s not that there is anything new about the instruction to pray. It’s what Jesus has been talking about, is about to do, and more importantly, one of the primary modes of “abiding” or “remaining” in the vine that he reveals. In praying, while abiding, fruit is borne—requests are granted.
11. So I think the part of the sentence that makes this utterance into an assertion (i.e. what is focal) is the “whatever you want” part. He’s already instructed his disciples to do this (almost verbatim) in 14.13, but at that point no part is marked. But then, in the next verse, this “whatever you want” aspect is in fact marked out as focal. So I think here, too, we have the same thing: “whatever you want” is fronted to indicate it as the focal part of the utterance.
12. And I thus side with Levinsohn. No hard feelings Steve. 😉
13. WHAT DO YOU THINK??

Information structure is not really my thing, but I do find myself thinking about the information structure of particular texts from time to time.  And, I think Kris has given me a good example to click back to see how I can think through issues of markedness that I might come across.

At any rate, if you are interested in the information structure of that particular verse, click through an interact with Kris on his blog.

Did you know clicking the link that this post was going to be about Benedict Cumberbatch?

Gretchen McCulloch, a graduate student in linguistics at McGill University and blogger at All Things Linguistic, explains the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator here and here and why some of the names generated work and some don’t.  I admit some names made me smile because I’m not a fan of the new Sherlock on the BBC (aberration is the term I prefer), and I thought some of my friends who are fans of the show might like to see this. I enjoyed seeing a picture of Benedict Cumberbatch with Bandicoot Cabbagepatch underneath it (be aware that there is some language in the name generator that some readers of this blog might find offensive in which case don’t click through).

At any rate, check out Gretchen’s explanation on her blog, which I found through this post on languagehat.com, an also new to me blog that I’ve been enjoying over the last couple of days.

Dear angry people of the internet,

This is just your annual reminder that the word “holidays” as in “happy holidays” has religious origins in the words “holy days.”  As a Catholic, we still have “holy days” that correspond to what some people call “holidays.”  Perhaps the religious origins are less overtly obvious than “Christmas,” but this is not something to war over.  The only people who should have a problem with the word “holidays,” in my opinion, are people who already have a problem with the word “Christmas” and a certain brand of Protestant Christians who don’t like things like liturgical calendars.  So, next time someone wishes you “happy holidays” maybe just tell them “happy holidays” in return, smile inwardly that the vestiges of religious language are inescapable, and move along.

Sincerely,

Jeremy