Welcome
On this site you'll find information about my research and teaching activities over the past few years: the pages include a current cv as well as links to some recent research papers. In the 'Personal Interest' section that follows there are also some links to three blogs reflecting my main unpaid interests: my family, writing and music (of all kinds, but especially popular music of the 1960s-1980s). If you find anything of interest here that you'd like to contact me about please do so or—in the case of the blogs— Devenish , Inishmacsaint, Naan Island) —post a comment: I look forward to hearing from you.
'Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment (Robert Benchley).'
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Brief Biography
I was born and grew up in Northern Ireland; from 1970-1980 I attended school in Belfast, first at Cabin Hill (prep school), then Campbell College, Belfast. In 1980, I won a place to read Modern & Medieval Languages at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, where I received my BA (Hons) in 1984. Between 1985-1987, I studied for an MA in Philosophy and Psychology of Language at Birkbeck College, University of London, while working as an EFL teacher. I then moved to the United States, obtaining a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California in 1991. In the twenty years since then, I have worked at universites in Germany (Heinrich Heine-Universitaet, Duesseldorf), Canada (McGill University, Montreal, QC), The Netherlands (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Radboud University, Nijmegen (Guest Researcher positionns), and the United Kingdom: from 2004,-2012 I held a permanent position as Professor of Linguistics and Language Acquisition in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, My publications include a monograph on Irish Syntax (Kluwer, 1995), and a number of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, on generative syntax, language acquisition and processing, and language and cognition. I am a member of the Editorial Board of Second Language Research. In recent years, my academic work has been increasingly concerned with the relationship between language and other areas of cognition, especially attention and visual perception.
Current Status
Since September 2010, I have been on leave from Sheffield, spending time with my family in Kobe, Japan, living on Rokko-san (Rokko Mountain), a national park to the North of Kobe. This academic year (since April 2011), I have held the 2011-2012 Megumi Visiting Professorship at Kobe College (Nishinomiya), where I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics. In April 2012, I will take up a permanent position at Konan University , Okamoto, Japan, in the Department of English Literature and Language.
Family
My mother and my sister and her family still live in Co. Down. My father, Gordon Duffield, died in 2010. As for me, I am married to Ayumi Matsuo: together we have three boys, Sean, Julian, and Justin (aged 11, 5 and 1 year). You can read about our lives on Rokko Mountain, and see pictures on the family blog (Devenish), which also contains reflections on life so far, and links to some of the music that inspires and comforts me.
Please click on the tabs below to read descriptions of current and future research projects.
For a comprehensive list of research publications, with links to recent articles in pdf format, click here.
For several years now, I have been developing a project concerned with the grammar of Vietnamese. The current project is the continuation of research originally funded in Canada by awards from FCAR (Government of Quebec) and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC internal grant). Since 2005, it has been partially supported by a discretionary award from the University of Sheffield. From February-June 2009, the work was also supported in part by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, Research Leave Award).
There are several medium-term objectives for the project: to publish a grammatical description (in English) of contemporary Vietnamese, including a description of the sound pattern (phonology) of the language, and to develop an on-line, searchable tagged lexicon of Vietnamese, with English and French translations. I have also set up an online archive to collect both theoretical and descriptive work dealing with the grammatical structure of Vietnamese, as well as with areally- and typologically-related language varieties. In addition to this descriptive work, I am working on a theoretical monograph on Vietnamese phrase-structure, for eventual publication in the Trends in Linguistics series (Mouton de Gruyter). You can read drafts of several chapters here.
Click here to go the Vietnamese online grammar site.
Click here to read theoretical articles on Vietnamese syntax
Jerry Fodor famously quipped: "I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats (Précis of The Modularity of Mind, 1985)."
This sums up my own position on the subject, except that I have no ethical or aesthetic objections to fibreglass: for a variety of reasons, I am a Universalist, who finds the idea of any theoretically significant form of cultural or linguistic relativism as worrying as it is objectionable. No-one with young children, and an appreciation of human history, can reasonably prefer social over biological determinism, unless they are incredibly optimistic about society, and I'm not...(though see this post ).
Nevertheless, it is inescapable that relativism in all its forms is enjoying a resurgence in popularity and respectability in the areas of Cognitive Psychology and Linguistics. My experience of teaching students over twenty years suggests it has always remained popular, but for a time it was possible to innoculate against it with a couple of first year Intro to Linguistics lectures. Now that it has returned in more highly evolved and multi-resistant strains, the serious challenge for Universalists is to try to combat it, or at least to contain it within areas where it might do some good (see below). So far, my contribution to these challenges is a commentary in Lingua on Nick Evans and Steve Levinson's influential BBS article, a general overview paper (Sapir-Whorf Redux), and an upcoming public lecture on Language Universals and Linguistic Diversity.
And yet...there is something to Linguistic Relativism, as my own recent research shows. At least, there appears to be something to the idea that the structure of the language we speak predisposes us to construe events and situations in particular ways (certainly, when we need to talk about these events). This is, of course, the central dea behind the "Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis" proposed by Dan Slobin, an hypothesis that provides a nice general explanation for some experimental results that have emerged from experiments I have recently carried out with Yayoi Tajima (Keio University). In co-authored work arising out of Tajima's 2008 MA thesis, we are revisiting some influential papers on cultural relativism by Richard Nisbett and his colleagues (Masuda & Nisbett 2001, Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan 2001), which purports to show that Asians and Westerners 'think' differently in virtue of deep-seated cultural differences. Our research compares Chinese, Japanese and English participants in a series of visual recall tasks: the results show that Chinese and English participants' data pattern together, and in opposition to those of Japanese participants. We attribute this split in the 'Asian' response to syntactic, rather than cultural, factors: Our results thus challenge the idea of any straightforward dichotomy in perception between Asians and Westerners, and highlight the role played by grammatical/information structure in "Thinking for Speaking" (Slobin 2003). Preliminary results of this research were presented at the Conference on the Mind-Context Divide (University of Iowa, April 2009), a version of the paper appears in the Proceedings. Subsequently, we have carried out an extensive follow-up of that experiment, which once again confirms the split in the Asian Response (This paper is now in revised submission to Cognitive Linguistics, the initial draft is published here) .
Language acquisition research, whether in the area of first or second language acquisition, is concerned with understanding the relationship between the kinds of input that the language learner is exposed to, and the kind of linguistic knowledge they end up with, and which they can use in language processing (comprehension and production of spoken language, reading and writing); also, perhaps, in complex thought. Almost everyone involved in linguistic research accepts that there is a difference between implicit knowledge of language (which generativists call grammatical competence) and language use (performance): the ideological divisions and (often vitriolic) debates surround the questions of how to define and how best to investigate competence, and whether one or other concept—competence or performance—should be considered to be of any deep scientific interest. Many generativists take the view that performance/language use is at best of secondary importance, and that the everyday notion of a language (e.g., 'The English Language') is a poorly defined and theoretically incoherent one. By contrast, most functionalists, cognitive linguists, psychologists and anthropologists consider that language acquisition and use can only be properly understood within a theory (or set of theories) that take into account the social, biological, physiological and cognitive structures within which language is embedded, and that it is meaningless to study competence without regard to actual performance ability (see, for example, Seidenberg & MacDonald 1999).
As someone who has worked for and with language researchers on both sides of the formal/functional divide, I have a good appreciation of the ways our ideologies frame and constrain the questions we ask about competence, and the ways through which we advance our various discourses. In a recent overview article on psycholinguistics, which has now been accepted as the core content of a new textbook, I attempt to guide myself and the reader through what I term 'the two souls of psycholinguistic theory', in order to try to understand some of the main empirical results in a more ecumenical context. I also try to sketch a particular view of competence in two recent publications (Duffield 2003, 2004).
Having thought it over, it seems to me that the crux of the matter in the unfortunately named 'Nature-Nuture' debate is grammatical convergence: whether adult native-speakers of a particular language variety, from different socio-economic groups, varying in measures of general intelligence, working memory and educational attainment, with differences in infant and childhood development, nevertheless end up with essentially identical competence grammars. (This is not the question of whether everyone uses language equally well: no experiments are needed to determine that we're all quite different in this regard.) If we can show that native-speakers really do converge in this way, it reinforces the generativist position against the emergentist one. If however, the behavioral evidence for non-convergence is stronger, this would seem to render moot the nativist "Poverty of Stimulus" arguments (cf. Pullum & Scholz 2002, Reali & Christiansen 2004).
What is most striking about this is that we still really don't have any clear answers, because the work really hasn't been done: generativists simply assume convergence without clear empirical evidence, while emergentists up to now have not been interested in investigating the sorts of phenomena that tell us about implicit competence, preferring to concentrate on production data instead. (Whatever it might say about differences in language performance, no amount of spontaneous production data will tell us much about convergence/non-convergence in abstract grammatical competence). I address this issue a little more fully in a recent commentary article ('The kids are alright...aren't they?').
In convallis nibh vitae justo. Quisque ac lectus vitae sem consequat sagittis. Donec turpis nisi, feugiat sollicitudin.
One of the key research questions in language acquisition is to understand of the nature of the gift for language. For typically developing children, this gift is almost universal. For adults, it seems vanishingly rare: at least in predominantly monolingual countries, only very few second language learners in monolingual countries achieve native-like performance in their non-native language, such that they pass for native-speakers. Of course, there are many related linguistic, cognitive and social factors underlying success or failure in this domain. What is reasonably clear from previous studies however is that motivation and perseverance alone do not guarantee success in SLA, nor does sufficient exposure: for some people it just comes easily, for others the situation seems pretty hopeless. We know something about how to measure aptitudesee Skehan (2002), for an excellent overviewbut we don't really understand what it is. For reasons that should become clear immediately, we shall approach this question by investigating in the first instance the abilities of monolingual children and adults. The starting-point for this line of research stems from recent work on the development of infants face-recognition and face-discrimination skills, and specifically, the Own Race Bias (ORB), investigated by Kelly et al (2005). ORB refers to the fact that people are typically better at discriminating among faces from their own ethnic group. Specifically: (i) adults are 2.23 times more likely to correctly identify own-race faces as opposed to other-race faces (Meissner & Brigham, 2001); available data suggests children also demonstrate the ORB (e.g. Pedzeket al., 2003; Sangrigoli & de Schonen, 2004a); (iii) one study has found evidence of the ORB in 3-month-old infants (Sangrigoli & de Schonen, 2004b). Kelly et al (2005) chart the development of ORB, and preferences during the first few months of life. These authors conclude that sensitivity to ethnic morphological differences emerges very early in life, as a result of faces seen within the visual environment: this sensitivity is the precursor of the ORB, which has its onset between 6 and 9 months of age. Such studies on facial preference complement other studies by Pascalis et al on face discrimination. Simplifying considerably, these studies support the conclusion that at birth there is no ORB and no facilitation for discrimination among own-race faces, but that by 12-13 months, there is evidence of a clear ORB, and non-native faces have become that much harder to discriminate.
The striking thing about these facts is how closely they parallel those of phonological development: as the work of Janet Werker and Patricia Kuhl demonstrate, at birth children can perceive phonological contrasts in any language; by 6-9 months, most children can only reliably discriminate vowel sounds that are contrastive in their own language(s); by 12-14 months, most children can only perceive native consonantal contrasts. This decline in perceptual skills clearly has an impact on SLA production (very few L2 learners are able to lose their "non-native" accent). The conjecture underlying this research is that the parallels between facial and phonological discrimination are not coincidental. Cutting to the chase (and theres a lot to fill in here!) what should be determined is whether there are reliable correlations between preserved sensitivity to non-native phonemic contrasts and preserved discrimination skills with respect to other-race faces (for monolingual, mono-cultural individuals). Note the assumption here, that the ORB and reduced phonological discrimination is a property of groups, but not necessarily of individuals: I expect that some people will do significantly better than others in these discrimination tasks, and that these individuals form a subset of those who make good second language learners). If everyone after the age of 13 months is uniformly bad at non-native discriminations of both kinds, the project wont get off the ground (though we may still have learned something). Currently, I am working to create a battery of discrimination tasks pairing face-recognition and auditory discrimination tasks, comparing reactions to native vs. non-native faces and sounds. This will bea cross-linguistic study comparing English and Japanese children and adults (hence the international collaboration). With luck the results will yield some partial answers to fairly large questions about how 'special' language is, cognitively speaking, see Fodor (1983), as well as providing a greater understanding of thecognitive prerequisites of the gift for language.
Please click on the tabs below to access links to recent publications.
Published articles, including articles in press
Duffield, Nigel. forthcoming. Low assertion as low modality in English and Vietnamese. To eppear in Lingua (special issue).
Duffield, Nigel & Trang Phan. 2011. What do Chinese L2 learners know about Inner Aspect and Unaccusativity in Vietnamese: an experimental psycholinguistic approach. In Nguyen Hong Con (chief editor) Proceedings of International Conference on Linguistics Training and Research in Vietnam , 379-412. Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Đai Hoc Quoc Gia Hà Noi.
Duffield, Nigel. in press. Head-First: On the head-initiality of Vietnamese clauses. To appear in volume [Proceedings of Linguistics of Vietnamese Conference] (to be edited by Daniel Hole & Elisabeth Löbel (eds.)). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Submitted January 2010.
Duffield, Nigel. 2011. On Unaccusativity in Vietnamese and the Representation of Inadvertent Cause. In R. Folli and C. Ulbrich (editors) Researching Interfaces in Linguistics, 78-95. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press.
Duffield, Nigel. 2009. Commentary: When is a Copy not (a Copy)? Theoretical Linguistics 35, 251-259.
Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clause structure: separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45, 765-814.
Duffield, Nigel. 2001. On certain head-final effects in Vietnamese. In K. Megerdoomian and L. A. Bar-el (eds.) Proceedings of WCCFL XX (West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics), University of Southern California,101-114.
Unpublished articles, including submitted papers
Duffield, Nigel. Polarity Emphasis and Low Modality in Vietnamese and English. Text of presentation made at GIST 4 (Workshop on Polarity Emphasis), Ghent, September 2011.
Duffield, Nigel. Interesting Facts? Events, Inadvertent Cause and Unaccusativity in English present participles. To appear in volume [Proceedings of Forces in Grammatical Structures Conference] (to be edited by Bridget Copley & Fabienne Martin). Submitted January 2010 (32 ms. pages, 6.5k words).
Duffield, Nigel. Illusory Islands?: On Wh Questions in Vietnamese (Bruening & Tran 2006). Previously submitted to Journal of East Asian Linguistics (45 pages, 7k words).
Duffield, Nigel. Particles and Projections in Vietnamese Syntax. (in progress). Draft chapters of this monograph can be downloaded from this site .
Published work
Tajima, Yayoi, and Nigel Duffield. To appear. Japanese vs. Chinese differences in Visual Recall Tasks: a response to Masuda and Nesbitt. Accepted with revisions to Cognitive Linguistics .
Duffield, Nigel. 2010. Roll up for the Mystery tour: Commentary on Evans and Levinson 2009. Lingua 120, 2673-2675.
Duffield, Nigel and Yayoi Tajima. 2010. On the Non-Uniformity of Asian Thinking (for Speaking): A Response to Masuda and Nisbett. In Michael Iverson, Roumyana Slabakova et al (editors) Proceedings of Mind-Context Divide Workshop , 28-39. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Tajima, Yayoi, and Nigel Duffield. 2010. Linguistic influence on attentional patterns: An approach from the grammatical parameter of SVO/SOV word order in Japanese, English, and Chinese languages. Proceedings of the 10th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association, vol.10, 587-593.
Unpublished papers, including work in submission
Duffield, Nigel. 2011. Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur: Reflections on Universal Grammar and the importance (or otherwise) of Language Diversity. Text of talk delivered at Kobe College, October 2011. Available here.
Duffield, Nigel. 2011. Sapir-Whorf redux: what might just be right about Linguistic Relativity? Ms. available at http://ngduffield.staff.shef.ac.uk/papers/sapirwhorfredux.pdf
Tajima, Yayoi & Nigel Duffield. Submitted. Linguistic versus cultural relativity: on Japanese-Chinese differences in picture description and recall. In submission to Cognitive Linguistics.
Published work, including articles in press
Duffield, Nigel & Trang Phan. 2011. What do Chinese L2 learners know about Inner Aspect and Unaccusativity in Vietnamese: an experimental psycholinguistic approach. In Nguyen Hong Con (chief editor) Proceedings of International Conference on Linguistics Training and Research in Vietnam, 379-412. Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Đai Hoc Quoc Gia Hà Noi.
Duffield, Nigel. Loose Ends: Commentary on Sorace. 2011. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (Special Issue, edited by Sivina Montrul) (1.1k words).
Duffield, Nigel, Matsuo, Ayumi and Leah Roberts. 2009. Factoring out the parallelism effect in VP-ellipsis: English vs. Dutch contrasts. Second Language Research, 25(4), 427-467.
Duffield, Nigel. 2009. The Kids Are Alright, arent they?: Commentary on Lardiere. Second Language Research 25, 269-278.
Duffield, Nigel. and Ayumi Matsuo. 2009. Native-speakers vs. L2 learners sensitivity to parallelism in VP-Ellipsis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 31, 1-31.
Duffield, Nigel. 2008. Roots and Rogues in German Child Language. Language Acquisition 15, 225-269.
Duffield, Nigel, Matsuo, A., Wood, G. & R. Churchill. 2007. How different can it be for English and Japanese children? In Otsu, Yukio (ed.) Proceedings of the Seventh Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. Tokyo: Hitzuji Syobo Publishing, 77-94.
Duffield, Nigel, Matsuo, A. and L. Roberts. 2007. Acceptable Ungrammaticality in Sentence Matching. Second Language Research 23, 155-178.
Coming soon
Inishmacsaint consists primarily of entries on academic topics, as well as longer, more considered writing on other themes: it contains links to a number of recent papers and drafts.
Click on the picture to go to the blog.
Naan Island West is a more experimental site, containing some attempts at fiction, and other literary links.
Devenish is a blog documenting our lives as a family, together with some reflections on wider themes. Most of the articles were written over the past year, since the birth of our youngest son, Justin, on November 1st, 2010.
Contact me If you'd like to comment on anything you read on this site, or if you have any questions, please contact me using the form below.
Nigel Duffield 2011 All Rights Reserved Mail:nigelduffield_gmail.com
