Language Log

Comment spam isn't getting any better, but it's certainly getting more frequent. Akismet is now catching more than a thousand LL spam comments (or what it identifies as spam comments) every day.

Some very small but non-zero percentage of this is not in fact spam. So I used to scan everything in Akismet's grease trap, in order to rescue the real stuff. In the past, I've salvaged worthwhile contributions from John Cowan, Language Hat, and others. However, the volume is now so great that I usually don't have time to do this.  If your genuine contribution is trapped and flushed, I apologize in advance — let me know by email if you think this has happened.

With this post I reach my thousandth Language Log contribution. I wrote 676 posts for the old series, before the original server died in agony in April 2008. Those were written from Santa Cruz, California (between 2003 and 2005 and in 2006-2007), from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard (2005-2006), and from Edinburgh, Scotland (2007-2008) The old series posts are preserved in read-only mode here, with all their typos and the occasional broken link or missing image; they can be custom Google-searched here. A complete list of links to all of my posts in the old series can be found here.

Since April 2008 I've written another 323 posts in the current series, mostly from Edinburgh (a few from other places while travelling); they are all listed here. This one brings me to the round number of a thousand. It's a convenient point at which to stop and think about whether to write any more.

The Linguistic Data Consortium will change its network IP address between 4PM and 6PM EST on Friday, November 12th. During that time, Language Log will be unavailable, since its server is on the LDC network.

It may take up to 72 hours for external networks to propagate the new IP addresses, so Language Log readers may have trouble accessing the site until Monday, November 15th. The new IP address, if you're able to make use of this information, should be 128.91.252.31.

In addition, I'm now in Groningen for ExAPP 2010, and will be traveling back to the U.S. on Saturday, so I may be an even worse correspondent than usual this weekend for independent reasons.

Warm congratulations to The Independent's columnist Howard Jacobson, who was announced yesterday as the 2010 winner of the much-coveted Man Booker Prize.

Jacobson has had a very rough time on the only three occasions Language Log has mentioned his columns. He was castigated for an alarmist piece of hyperbole attacking "language experts" (in "Preaching the gospel of wrong is right"); for some overblown and under-supported claims about grammatical ignorance (in "Educational sky is falling says blithering windbag"); and for a feeble attempt at a syntactic joke (see the brief remark at the end of "Canoe wives and unnatural semantic relations"). Yet here he is, at 68, winning a £50,000 prize for The Finkler Question, a comic novel about English Jews. It makes me very happy.

Of the 23 recipients of the 2010 MacArthur Fellowships (the so-called "genius grants"), two are linguists: Jessie Little Doe Baird, program director of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, and Carol Padden, a professor in the Communications Department at the University of California San Diego who specializes in sign languages. Congratulations to them both!

Descriptions of their work from the MacArthur Foundation after the jump.

The department that it is my privilege to lead runs a colloquium series that begins this year on Thursday 30 September with a myth-busting talk by our own Professor John Joseph, about what he calls "the least understood book in the entire history of linguistics". I'll be there, and on the edge of my seat. Because I've never seen anyone try to link Indo-European comparative phonological reconstruction to bisexuality before.

Quentin Atkinson, Claire Bowern, and Russell Gray have launched a web-based "North American English Dialect Survey".

On the AAAS Facebook page, this announcement from:

Alison Chandler McNew June 18 at 10:35am

Dear science enthusiasts,The 2010 Dance Your Ph.D. Contest is underway, and we'd LOVE to have even more entries this year than last. You can help us surpass 100 entries by telling anyone you know who has a Ph.D or is pursing a Ph.D. in a science-related field about the contest.

Who knows, maybe it will be one of YOUR friends who will entertain us all by being gutsy enough to tromp around on stage in only a loin cloth! Of course, if your friend wants points for originality, he or she will have to think up something else equally as riveting. Yup, all KINDS of crazy stuff has been done in years past. Check out these videos from 2009: (link)

Here is our official announcement:

We are proud to announce this year’s "Dance Your Ph.D." video competition. We invite anyone who has a Ph.D. or is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in a science-related field to transform their research into an interpretive dance and submit it for a chance to win up to $1,000 and receive recognition from Science magazine. Submitting your entry is easy! Please become a fan of our Facebook page, here, to get more information, receive updates, and help spread the word! This is your chance to prove to the world that scientists CAN dance! Best wishes,

Alison Chandler
Marketing Manager
AAAS

I'm imagining a dance on Sanskrit sandhi, with words combining with words, or morphemes with morphemes, and one or both participants being altered in the process…

I'm pleased to say that, after considerable delay, Cambridge University Press has now set up on its website some limited electronic access to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Amazon also has some search-inside access too, both at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. The chapter we chose for making searchable online is a particularly useful one, in that it is largely free-standing: it is chapter 2, called "Syntactic overview", in which Rodney Huddleston surveys the structure and terminology of the entire book, giving a capsule version of the analysis that is elaborated in the following chapters.

I've added two new sites to our blogroll, both well worth regular visits:

The Economist has launched Johnson:

In this blog, named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, our correspondents write about the effects that the use (and sometimes abuse) of language have on politics, society and culture around the world

And Crikey has launched Fully (sic) — or perhaps I should write .au/fully (sic):

Crikey’s very own language blog for discerning word nerds. Sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Australian linguists getting all hot and bothered about the way we communicate.

Busy June 20 – June 26? Could you manage to squeeze one of the most intellectually intense weeks of your life into your summer schedule? For free?

I'm talking (once again!) about the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLI 2010), of which I am program chair. It's aimed at graduate students, researchers, and advanced undergraduates, in fact anyone interested in formal approaches to language, philosophy, and computation. And I bring you, Language Log reader, some hot news that gives you the chance of attending the school and making 100-150 new friends for life for free… provided you apply by June 1.

Here's the news (and this is aimed at students). The National Science Foundation has given preliminary approval for a sizable grant to NASSLLI 2010. Together with other funds we have raised this will enable us to provide students with financial support to attend the school. We expect to be able to reimburse the registration fees of about 40 deserving students, and to pay further travel expenses for those whose need is greatest. You can find online information on how to register and how to apply for the grants – see the Support is Available from NASSLLI Itself section on the NASSLLI grants page. Basically, you need to send NASSLLI an email with a reason why NASSLLI is relevant for you, and have your academic advisor send an email too.

I'm really, really looking forward to meeting many of you in Bloomington, Indiana at the end of next month, and if you want to ask me personally about it, send me an email.

Hey, I hadn't realized that Language Log is now on Facebook and you can "like" it (in the old days that was becoming a "fan"). My dear son Morriss, the social media maven in our family, tipped me off! I've linked to it on my own Facebook page, but I expect word will spread faster by mentioning it right here. Someone will have to explain in the comments when and why it happened — I can only say it has happened!

Hearing of my desperate search for useful things to do while I am stranded stranded in the Boston area, some kind people at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory invited me to give a talk there today, and of course I was delighted to accept. Details below the fold.