This is a follow-up to Mark's post earlier today on affective demonstratives, though I am going to move us even further than he did from Palin and towards the lexical/constructional pragmatics. The overall picture is this: this NOUN reliably signals that the speaker is in a heightened emotional state (or at least intends to convey […]
In my post "Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008, I tried to comfort an American parent who was worried about a daughter's use of rising pitch accents on statements. As part of the recommended cognitive therapy, I observed that there are regional varieties of English, known as "Urban North British", in which rising pitch accents on statements are […]
I think it's turning into a trend — journalists are becoming linguists. Really bad linguists, but any sort of interest in the analysis of language and communication ought to be a good thing for the field, right? Unfortunately, in this case, it's a bad thing for the nation. A couple of days ago ("Does CBS […]
According to CBS News ("Did Hillary Mean It?", 8/27/2008): In her speech to the Democratic convention Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton urged fellow Democrats to vote for Barack Obama, and she did it in no uncertain terms — verbally. But did her body language match her words? Body language expert and former FBI agent Joe Navarro […]
With respect to a piece of political spam from John McCain that included the sentence "You will also have an exclusive opportunity to … ask questions to one of my top advisors", Graham commented Is "ask questions TO somebody" good American English? It reads very oddly to this Brit. Well, "ask questions to somebody" sounds […]
A graph of the current Google hit counts for "N minutes", 2 ≤ N ≤ 66, expressed as a proportion of the total hits for all 65 searches, looks like this: (As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)
This all started when John Cowan defended the New Yorker's account of a long-past Republican debate, by proposing that Rudy Giuliani retains the syllable-timed speech rhythm of his Italian ancestors, in contrast to Mitt Romney's standard American stress-timed speech. I didn't share the intuition, and did a little experiment to show that Rudy's syllables, far […]
Like I said yesterday, the whole stress-timed-vs.-syllable-timed business is "a gigantic tangled intellectual thicket that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of". And one of the comments on my post asked a question that tempts me in further: So then there’s a psychological perception of syllable-timed language that is not visible in […]
Yesterday afternoon, I got this note from John Cowan, that indefatigable correspondent: You linked to the piece on Romney vs. Giuliani speaking styles today, so I checked back to see if you ever added my comment on it, but I think I probably sent it during the period when my mail to you was being […]
On the basis of recent research in social psychology, I calculate that there is a 53% probability that Geoff Pullum is male. That estimate is based the percentage of the and a/an in a recent Language Log post, "Stupid canine lexical acquisition claims", 8/12/2009. But we shouldn't get too excited about our success in correctly […]