Language Log

Earlier this year, I observed that there seem to be some interesting differences among individuals and styles of speech in the distribution of speech segment and silence segment durations — see e.g. "Sound and silence" (2/12/2013), "Political sound and silence" (2/8/2016) and "Poetic sound and silence" (2/12/2016).

So Neville Ryant and I decided to try to look at the question in a more systematic way. In particular, we took the opportunity to compare the many individuals in the LibriSpeech dataset, which consists of 5,832 English-language audiobook chapters read by 2,484 speakers, with a total audio duration of nearly 1,600 hours. This dataset was selected by some researchers at JHU from the larger LibriVox audiobook collection, which as a whole now comprises more than 50,000 hours of read English-language text. Material from the nearly 2,500 LibriSpeech readers gives us a background distribution against which to compare other examples of both read and spontaneous speech, yielding plots like the one below:

Driving back from the airport last night in unusually heavy traffic I came to a sign that said "FORM TWO LANES".

Or, we could ask, is Brexit like Passchendaele or like The Somme?

I mean, of course, whether the noun Brexit should normally be used with a definite article ("Are you for or against the Brexit?") or without ("Are you for or against Brexit?").

We need to ignore all the constructions in which Brexit is a modifier of another noun: the Brexit vote, the Brexit campaigners, the Brexit turmoil, etc.  But when Brexit is the head of a noun phrase, I've been assuming that it's a strong proper name that should be anarthrous, like Christmas or Passchendaele or Language Log.

Khorri Atkinson, "Trump on Texit: Texas ‘will never’ secede", Texas Tribune 6/25/2016:

Asked what he would do as president if Texas seceded from the United States, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on Saturday said he did not think that would happen.

“Texas will never do that because Texas loves me,” Trump told reporters in Scotland.

Roni Stern, "If you Brexit — You Bought it", Finance Magnates 4/20/2016. Also, Annie Laurie, "Brexit? I hardly even touched it!", Balloon Juice 6/25/2016. And many tweets, e.g.

Remember @BorisJohnson: you #Brexit, you bought it pic.twitter.com/xjo5S9nBv1

— Dexit Cashin (@Tweet_Dec) June 25, 2016

Carmen Fought observes that "Fellow citizens, we have to up our insult game. The Scots are making us look like wankers. ‪#‎mangledapricothellbeast‬".

Certainly the Scots have taught us a wide variety of new words and insult phrases in response to Donald Trump's tweet about Brexit.

Bob Ladd sent in a link to "Five Questions on Brexit to Jo Shaw", Verfassungsblog 6/24/2016 [emphasis added]:

There’s a possibility for the Article 50 trigger to be delayed, and the UK simply to carry on in membership, and then – once the UK population has had long enough to digest the real implications of Leave […] a second referendum could be held, perhaps this time under better conditions. I’m not sure that this will happen, though, precisely because the issue is complicated by the internal territorial pressures discussed in the next section. I don’t think anyone is under any illusion that Boris Johnson is not some sort of ideological Leaver, so it could be that if he becomes Prime Minister then we will see moves in this direction.

(1/2) For those of you keeping score at home, I gave exactly 18 f*cks about my Pats. Upon reflection, 12 probably would have been sufficient

— Ben Affleck (@BenAffleck) June 23, 2016

(2/2) We Boston fans have always been known for our subtlety. One of my favorite interviews; hope you get to see the entire episode. #GoPats

— Ben Affleck (@BenAffleck) June 23, 2016

Tim Kenneally, "Ben Affleck Has a F-ing Thing or 18 or Say About His Bill Simmons Interview", The Wrap 6/23/2016.

Cameron Majidi sent in this photograph taken on East Broadway in Manhattan:

Or is it portmanteaus? Anyhow, forget Portugexit and Italexit and the rest:

Here's what else might happen if we Brexit:

Grexit
Departugal
Italeave
Czechout
Oustria
Finish
Slovakout
Latervia
Byegium#EUref #iVoted

— Alvin Carpio (@AlvinCarpio) June 23, 2016

Update — now that Leave has won the referendum, we should be talking about Brexiit (3rd singular perfective indicative active), or perhaps more realistically Brexibit (3rd singular future indicative active), or maybe some other combination of aspect, mood, and tense…

At an excellent restaurant in Leipzig last night the server quickly identified me as an Auslander whose German might not be up to grasping every nuance of the menu, so I was given an English menu as well. (It was a bit humiliating, like having a bib tied round my neck. I have tried to explain elsewhere why my knowledge of German is so shamefully thin and undeveloped despite my having once spent 18 months living in the country.) On the English menu was a dish at which I raised a native-speaking eyebrow: Frankish little shovels, it said. And since there is no limit to my dedication as a linguistic scientist, I ordered the dish just to see what these little shovels were like.

A couple of days ago, Dilbert highlighted a problem with robot emotions, beyond the issue that Zach Wienersmith raised a few weeks ago:

The external evidence of "cognition" is sometimes obscure and ambiguous, but the Turing Test approach is especially problematic in evaluating "emotion".

Is there some pop culture reference I'm missing here? Or has the Washington Post turned its advertising outreach over to Monty Python?