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Friday, February 7th, 2014
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| 5:00a |
Cold case: A linguistic mystery yields clues in Russian
When it comes to numbers, Russian grammar has a bewildering thicket of rules. A singular noun such as “table” (“stol” in Russian), used as the subject of a sentence, takes a special “case form” called the nominative singular. When used with numbers five and above, table takes a different form called the genitive plural (“pjat’ stolov”). And with numbers from two to four, it takes still a different form, the genitive singular (“dva stola”).
But with any number whose last digit is 1, the proper case is again the nominative singular: In Russian, “5,281 children” would be translated literally as “5,281 child.” Many of these forms change again if the noun is the object of a preposition.
“Russian has this astonishing mess with the numbers,” says David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and head of MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
What interests Pesetsky most about this mess are the rules of grammatical case: the prefixes and suffixes that, in many languages, tell us what part of speech a word holds in a given sentence. To read any Latin sentence, for instance, you must recognize the suffix that denotes the case ending of each noun, in order to see what part of speech that noun has, and to glean the proper meaning of the sentence. Today, case features prominently in German, Japanese, and Korean, among other languages. (In English, case exists only in small traces, such as the distinction between “she” and “her.”)
But the oddity of Russia’s case rules for numbers, Pesetsky thinks, may tell us something important about case more generally, by giving us a rare glimpse into aspects of the modern language that are normally hidden from view by other complexities. Case, he argues, does not comprise a stand-alone set of grammatical rules; instead, certain case endings naturally belong to, and derive from, certain parts of speech. Nouns, as Pesetsky puts it, are “born genitive,” and the existence of case may simply reflect how the different parts of speech interact with each other.
Now Pesetsky is making his case for this theory in a book, “Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories,” just published by MIT Press.
“The idea is to reduce the notion of case to the notion of parts of speech,” Pesetsky says. “You can get rid of an extra complication in the entire theory of grammar.” In so doing, however, Pesetsky says he is addressing a “deeper, more meaningful [question]: to ask why languages should have case in the first place.”
Born this way: Are nouns really genitive?
To anyone who has even struggled through, say, elementary Latin, the idea that nouns have a natural case seems quite peculiar. Consider the forms of the word for dog: “Canis,” the nominative case ending, means it is the subject of a sentence (“The dog ate Virgil’s food”), while “canem,” the accusative, means it is the direct object (“Virgil fed the dog”), and “cani,” the dative, is the indirect object (“Virgil took the food to the dog”). The existence of case provides such linguistic flexibility.
“The idea that nouns are born genitive is completely counterintuitive to everybody,” Pesetsky acknowledges. “It’s counterintuitive to me. It’s not an obvious proposal.”
To see why nouns might be inherently genitive, though, consider a Russian phrase Pesetsky discusses in his book: “eti poslednie pjat’ krasivyx stolov,” or “these last five beautiful tables,” which is an example of “case mismatch.” The words “these,” “last,” and “five” are all in the nominative case, but “beautiful” and “tables” remain genitive.
Pesetsky — drawing on a particular comparison first developed by his MIT colleague Norvin Richards, between Russian and the vanishing Australian language Lardil — asserts that this mismatch occurs because Russian is actually a “case-stacking” language, that is, one in which multiple cases can legitimately apply to a given word at a given time. In Russian, that case-stacking tendency is usually invisible, because of the interaction of other processes.
“My idea is that what nouns and verbs are doing when they do case marking is they’re really just marking some other phrase as having been dependent on them,” Pesetsky says. “A noun assigns genitive because genitive is just another name for noun. Verbs assign accusative because they are accusative. Prepositions assign instrumental or dative [cases] because they are [originally] instrumental or dative.”
In this view, the persistence of the genitive case in the numeral-based Russian nouns is not just a curiosity, but a window into the underlying mechanics of language.
Pesetsky’s proposals about Russian are not what is taught in Russian textbooks, notes Pesetsky, who first worked on the language in the 1970s.
“If you open up a Russian grammar book, they’ll tell you the numeral assigns the genitive case,” Pesetsky says. “My suggestion is we turn that on its head. What the numeral is actually doing is preventing the genitive that the nouns were born with from being erased due to assignment of another case by the verb.”
Spur for further research
Pesetsky says that his ideas have surprised some linguists, especially specialists in Slavic languages, but the book has received praise. John Frederick Bailyn, a linguistics professor at Stony Brook University who has written about Russian syntax, has called the book a “brilliant and astonishingly original account of one of the most notorious problems in Russian morphosyntax,” and adds that in so doing it “provides a radical simplification of the overall architecture of syntactic theory.”
As Pesetsky readily acknowledges, the discovery of certain examples showing that case does not operate as we have long assumed is a departure point for further inquiry.
“It’s unlikely that I’ve completely gotten rid of case as a separate system in the world’s languages,” he says. “What I suspect is that what we call case is really several interacting systems.” As a specialist in syntax, however, he does think that what might emerge from rethinking case is a more robust understanding of how case operations mesh with syntax, the fundamental rules of languages.
“Either I’m wrong, in which case it’s a spur for someone to come up with a better theory, or we have to overcome our intuitions,” Pesetsky says. | | 5:00a |
Goalie, photographer, scientist
Whether she’s blocking shots as goalie for the men’s ice hockey team or examining cancer cells as a research assistant in the Whitehead Institute, MIT senior Kate Koch loves a challenge.
A new Marshall Scholar, Koch will study radiation biology in a master’s program at Oxford University next year, after which she plans to pursue an MD/PhD. One day, she hopes to practice as a pediatric oncologist and run her own research lab. “I never wanted to be anything besides a doctor, since the first time someone asked me, ‘What do you want to be?’” Koch says.
Koch was born just 10 minutes from MIT at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, but her parents — both physicians — moved the family to Ohio when she was a few months old. She grew up with two younger brothers in Cleveland, attending an all-girls’ school called Hathaway Brown.
“The school I went to did a really good job getting girls excited about math and science,” Koch says. “They said, ‘You’re smart, you’re intelligent, you can do this.’”
Koch loved her calculus and chemistry classes, and as a sophomore, she began doing research on multiple sclerosis at the Lerner Research Institute through a research program offered by her high school. When it came time to look at colleges, Koch wasn’t initially sold on MIT.
“MIT was not really on my radar until my senior year of high school — I thought I might not fit in, and might not have fun there,” Koch admits. Then she visited campus. “The students here were so enthusiastic; there was just such a positive vibe and energy,” she says.
Some months later — on March 14 at 1:59 p.m., to be exact — Koch was sitting in the bleachers of an ice hockey state championship game. Just as the winning goal was scored, she opened her acceptance email and joined the crowds in cheering.
Skates in one hand, camera in the other
Koch started figure skating when she was 2 years old; four years later, when her younger brother came home with ice hockey gear, she demanded a shot at that, too. “After that, I really fell in love with it, and it was a great way to grow up,” Koch says.
As the only girl on the team, Koch needed a dose of determination, which she had in no short supply. “When I was really little, there was always the, ‘You shouldn’t be here, go play with your Barbies,’” Koch says. “When they said, ‘Girls don’t play hockey,’ I said, ‘Yes, they do.’” In high school, Koch joined the women’s ice hockey team as a goalie.
When Koch got to MIT, she sought to continue playing hockey at a challenging level. She still remembers walking into the ice rink during the first few weeks of her freshman year and seeing the men’s hockey team seated on the bleachers, looking at her quizzically as she asked to join the team. “I think they were a little skeptical in the beginning, because they’d never had a girl on their team before,” Koch says. Now, she says, she considers members of the team some of her closest friends.
When she doesn’t have hockey skates on her feet, Koch is likely to have a camera in her hands. Back in Cleveland, she and a friend would sneak into abandoned industrial buildings for interesting shots. At MIT, she pursues her photographic passion through classes in the Art, Culture and Technology program, where she works on projects that examine the “relationship between science and what it means to be human,” Koch says.
Shots at cancer
During her sophomore year at MIT, Koch began doing cancer research in the lab of biology professor David Sabatini. During her three years as a research assistant, Koch has seen firsthand how difficult the disease is to target. Researchers must determine how to destroy the many different types of cancer cells that exist, while simultaneously protecting healthy cells.
“It’s vastly complex, and there are a lot of different people working on different parts of this problem: How do we kill this heterogeneous mass of cancer cells, but also how do we do it in a way that’s not going to affect your normal cells?” Koch explains.
Koch has helped to investigate one potential approach to the complex problem, by cutting off the cancerous cells’ energy supply. While normal cells employ two different chemical pathways, many cancer cells rely predominantly on a pathway called glycolysis to produce ATP, the cells’ energy currency.
“The question that we asked was, ‘Could you target this pathway as a therapeutic strategy?’” Koch says. If the researchers could figure out a way to inhibit glycolysis, they could theoretically “starve” the cancerous cells that depended on it for energy.
The research team sought to understand how a small toxic molecule, 3-bromopyruvate, inhibits glycolysis. They identified a transporter, MCT1, that allows 3-bromopyruvate to enter cells. While MCT1 is present on some normal cells, it is more highly expressed on certain types of cancer cells, making those cells susceptible to the lethal effects of 3-bromopyruvate.
The study proved a principle: Future research could use the same techniques as the Sabatini lab to pair a cancer-killing drug with a transporter to get it into cancerous cells. “By going about that process, you could make a ton of different chemotherapeutic agents,” Koch says.
The team’s hard work in the lab paid off. The results of the study were published in Nature Genetics in January 2013 — Koch’s first publication as a contributing author.
Koch loves the problem-solving and discovery in research, but those alone probably wouldn’t be enough to keep her in the lab, she says. It was her time volunteering at Massachusetts General Hospital that fueled her passion for cancer research, she says.
“To be able to put a face to the disease and see the other side of it — it makes it more meaningful,” Koch says. “That really reinforced the fact that I did want to do medicine, but I also want to do research and to develop more cures and targeted therapies that can help treat these patients that I’ve met.”
| | 3:00p |
Speakers at MIT’s 40th annual MLK Breakfast honor King’s legacy
As the MIT community gathered for the 40th annual breakfast celebration of the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., speakers reflected on how much the nation has progressed toward his dream of inclusiveness over those decades — as well as on the need to keep working toward that vision, despite the fact that signs of racism in society have become less obvious.
Graduate student Mareena Robinson, who is pursuing a doctorate in nuclear science and engineering, spoke on King’s leadership during the early days of the civil rights movement. “Unlike race relations today, where prejudice and discrimination is subtle and often denied by the ones who perpetrate it, the discrimination of that time was undeniable, inescapable, and not to be apologized for,” she said.
Robinson added, “It is true and must be acknowledged that much progress has been made … with the election and re-election of our first African-American president, who stands as a symbol of America’s ability to look beyond race and judge a man by the quality of his ideas and the content of his character.”
“While I can celebrate these things, I cannot be content,” Robinson said. “I am frustrated with the slow pace of progress. … As Dr. King showed us through his life, in order to make progress out of the darkness of hate and frustration, love must be more than a circumstantial emotion. It must be a constant state of being that filters our thoughts and regulates our actions.”
Celebrating differences
Margo Batie, a senior majoring in physics and nuclear science and engineering, recalled her own progression from an inner-city high school in Los Angeles — a school with a 51 percent dropout rate — to the daunting challenges of MIT. “I don’t want to come here and have the one fact that distinguishes me from everyone else on this campus to be my inner-city upbringing,” she said. “I also don’t want to go home and be deemed the ‘one who made it out.’”
Batie said, “I’m not an anomaly in both worlds and I shouldn’t be one in either world. I’m a person who made personal choices and has personal interests, and these are the things that have shaped me to become who I am today. I’m owed the opportunity to embrace these things, and embrace these interests while pursuing a degree at a top institution.”
“I don’t want to be this great black nuclear engineer, or that great female physicist,” Batie added. “I want to be that great nuclear engineer who is black, and who is female.”
“Dr. King once said, ‘We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now,’” Batie said. “I want my differences to be celebrated, and not swept under the rug.”
The battle for the ballot
“We have not yet arrived at the postracial future,” sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, a University Professor at Georgetown University, said in his keynote address. Dyson recalled King’s early speeches — given long before the ones that made him famous worldwide.
“He said, ‘Give us the ballot,’” Dyson said. And indeed, he added, “The ballot box became the means by which a profound transformation of America was registered.”
At the same time, Dyson said, “We now see that same ballot box used to undermine and challenge,” such as through laws that discriminate against gays or that impose drastically different penalties for drugs more prevalent in minority communities.
The recent death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, pointed to a discrepancy, Dyson said: “When it comes to people of color,” he said, drug use “is often seen as a defect of character.”
Pervasive stereotypes
MIT President L. Rafael Reif, who introduced Dyson, spoke about today’s “quieter and less obvious” forms of discrimination. He cited a recent article by an Asian American computer scientist, an MIT alumnus, who talked about the stereotypes — in his case, mostly positive ones — that are still pervasive in our society.
This kind of subtle stereotyping, Reif said, is “in some ways harder to stop. … We have not yet created a society without stereotypes. We have not yet reached a place where people are judged only by the content of their character, or only by the quality of their code.”
The annual breakfast also featured music by the MIT Gospel Choir and by the choral group Tribute, and honored recipients of the Institute’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Awards and the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars — participants in a program that has brought more than 100 visiting professors to MIT, Provost Martin Schmidt said, including 11 who are presently on campus.
This year, marking the MLK Breakfast’s 40th year, a special Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Wesley Harris, the Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. |
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