Language Log

In the NYT this weekend, Ben Zimmer has a great piece on new horizons in humanities computing:  "The Jargon of the Novel, Computed", 7/29/2011. The article is illustrated with a bar chart of the frequency in COCA of "bolt upright" in various genres:

Among the nuggets you can find in Ben's article is an allusion to David Bamman and Gregory Crane, "The Logic and Discovery of Textual Allusion", LaTeCH2008, which alone is worth the price of admission. But the thing that mainly struck me was the possibility that I'd gotten "bolt upright" wrong, all these years.

Another example of extreme singular their, this one from Google+:

Having discovered that Rick Perry is a right-leaning hedger, if you will, while Mitt Romney is, if you will, a leftish hedger, I wondered what the distribution of these alternatives might be in general American usage.

A recent Reuters headline made Jeffrey Kallberg wonder "What is a 'desk hemorrhage' and why would GS want to rate one?":

Geoff Pullum, "It's like so unfair", 11/22/2003:

Why are the old fogeys and usage whiners of the world so upset about the epistemic-hedging use of like, as in She's, like, so cool? The old fogeys use equivalent devices themselves, all the time. An extremely common one is "if you will". […]

Like functions in younger speakers' English as something perfectly ordinary: a way to signal hedging about vocabulary choice — a momentary uncertainty about whether the adjacent expression is exactly the right form of words or not. If the English language didn't implode when if you will took on this kind of role among the baby boomers, it will survive having like take on an extremely similar role for their kids.

I responded  that "Like is, like, not really like if you will" (11/22/2003), mostly on the basis of a difference in maximum frequency of usage. I was reminded of this argument, and tempted to take it back, when I read "Texas Gov. Rick Perry: 'Obviously gay marriage is not fine with me…'", FRCBlog 7/28/2011.

Yesterday I noticed for the first time the "Music" feature of Neil J.A. Sloane's Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, which connects the OEIS's number sequences with Jonathan Middleton's Musical Algorithms site.

So, of course, I immediately listened to sequence A000108, the Catalan numbers, which (among many other things) count the number of ways to arrange n matching pairs of parentheses, or the number of full binary trees with n+1 leaves, or the number of Dyck words of length 2n:

1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 42, 132, 429, 1430, 4862, 16796, 58786, 208012, 742900, 2674440, …

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Today's Sheldon takes Contrastive Focus Reduplication up a notch:

[Tip of the hat to David Craig]

The Telegraph argues that "the inability to speak a host country's language […] is a very reasonable requirement of any immigrant":

Despite its simple and straightforward Chinese vocabulary, this sign in Dalian (a large city in northeast China) is badly translated into English:

(As usual, you may click on the photograph to embiggen it.)

The best part of Monday's post on the Facebook authorship-authentication controversy ("High-stakes forensic linguistics", 7/25/2011) was the contribution in the comments by  Ron Butters, Larry Solan, and Carole Chaski.  It's interesting to compare the situation they describe — and the frustration that they express about it — with the history of technologies for answering questions about the source of bits of speech rather than bits of text.

Ben Piché writes:

We here at the at 2011 IOL have uploaded the problems that our participants are currently working on. I have to say, they are rather challenging! Anybody who is interested can download these problems from our website and compete with our linguists in real time. We'll upload the solutions on Friday.

Give it a shot! This is the World Cup of linguistics!

http://www.ioling.org/problems/#9

I gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie in Paris, founded in 1897 by L'abbé P.-J. Rousselot. Antonia Colazo-Simon took this picture of l'abbé and me:

Hilary is finished with contrastive focus reduplication, and is now exploring the communicative potential of re-framing rhetorical questions as real ones: