I'm at the AAAS 2011 meeting in DC, mainly because as chair-elect of Section Z (Linguistics) I'm duty-bound to be here, but also partly because I'm giving a talk in a symposium tomorrow afternoon on "The Digitization of Science: Reproducibility and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer". The session was organized by Victoria Stodden, and this is its […]
I have a piece on "Fresh Air" today on the Was-Jane-Austen-Edited-and-Why-Would-It-Matter-Anyway kerfuffle that Geoff Pullum discussed in a post a couple of weeks ago. After looking over the Austen manuscripts online, I concluded that the whole business was meretricious nonsense. What's most interesting is the extraordinary attention given the claims. It testifies to Austen's Gagaesque […]
Six and a half years ago, in a Language Log post about the spread of texting in Japan, I commented on the lack of enthusiasm for texting in the U.S. ("Texting", 3/8/2004): I don't think that I've even seen anyone texting in the U.S. Now that I think about it, this is a bit surprising, […]
From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, a link to a Nova "The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers" piece on Jean Berko Gleason (shown with an enormous wug), here. Very charming. My grand-daughter (now 6) is a fan of these "Secret Life" pieces (and also some short Discovery Channel programs, especially one on leeches); JBG is one […]
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Reader NG sent email to note an innovative method of taboo-vocabulary avoidance, deployed by Lisa de Moraes or her editors in "'Sons of Anarchy' cast has a few bleepin' words for Emmy voters", Washington Post 8/4/2010. The story to be covered includes a July 8 Facebook entry by Kurt Sutter, "We don't like your kind", […]
Consider this passage from Kate Lahey, "DJs case will be a watershed", The Age, 8/4/2010, sent in by an alert reader: Margaret Thornton, a law professor at the Australian National University specialises in discrimination law and policy. She says the high profile of this {sexual harassment] case would undoubtedly encourage other women to speak out. […]
It's been widely reported that the Arizona Department of Education has begun working to remove teachers whose English-language skills are viewed as inadequate. According to press reports, the evaluators aim (among other things) to remove teachers with "accents", which probably means Spanish accents in most cases. Casey Stegall, "Arizona Seeks to Reassign Heavily Accented Teachers", […]
[Attention conservation notice: this post wanders a bit too far into the psycholinguistic weeds for some readers, who may prefer to turn directly to our comics pages.] In a recent paper, Ansgar D. Endressa and Marc D. Hauser document a puzzling result: Harvard undergraduates fail to recognize the regularities in "three-word sequences conforming to patterns […]
Grace Wu sent me a photograph taken at Taipei Storyland, shown at the right (click on the image for a larger version). The characters running down the right side of the picture read as follows: WO3 YAO4 SHUO1 GUO2YU3, BU4 SHUO1 FANG1YAN2 "I want to speak the national language, not the topolects." In other words, […]
According to Tycho at Penny Arcade ("The True Face of Our Enemy", 8/17/2009) The Think B4 You Speak campaign is basically incoherent, and operates from some deep misconceptions about how and why people communicate. These assertions have been collated and placed sequentially in today's comic offering The strip in question: (Click on the image for […]
What do you call it when each player on a team is responsible for defending against just one specific player on the opposing team? If you're playing in such a system, what do you call the player you're responsible for guarding? OK, now what if the players are female? I asked myself such questions several […]
As a public figure, you're in trouble when the media are less interested in what you have to say than in how you say it. This is now the sad situation of Caroline Kennedy, whose filled pauses seem to be getting more press than any other aspect of her bid for Hillary Clinton's senate seat. […]
Yesterday's email brought this sensible question from Judith Parker, a middle-school teacher at The Philadelphia School: In the grammar text we are perusing, the concept of modals has raised its head. The words "The nice thing about modern grammarians is that they have reduced the number of TENSES in English to just two, PRESENT and […]