At several stations on the commute from Swarthmore to University City station, around half of the people who get on the train are Indians. Usually they are happily conversing with each other in one or another South Asian language. Today the train was packed, and I was sitting on the aisle seat next to four […]
From Ivanka Trump's Instagram account: The best moment of the day! A post shared by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Apr 4, 2017 at 6:36pm PDT
Yesterday I claimed that "if you examine a random stretch of English speech closely, within 10 seconds (of speech time, not your analysis time) you'll notice an instance of an interesting general pattern that has never been systematically studied in the linguistic literature." And I promised to test that claim on a clip from the […]
From Chinascope (4/3/17): Party Officials Criticized for Mispronouncing Words during Public Speech A Duowei News [Multidimensional News] article quoted an article from Jiefang Daily [Liberation Daily] on March 30 which sharply criticized a number of party officials for mispronouncing words during their public speeches and said that the phenomenon resulted in quite a lot of laughter […]
Geoff Pullum, "The world's greatest grammarian", Chronicle of Higher Education 4/3/2017 [emphasis added]: We mostly did 11-hour days, starting as soon after 7 a.m. as we could and working till 6 p.m., breaking for a short lunch at 1 p.m. to discuss the morning’s work. Virtually every day we would find over our sandwiches that […]
A Reuters article of March 30, 2017 has the title " China says 'no such thing' as man-made islands in South China Sea". Upon reading this headline, the world asked, "Have the Chinese gone completely out of their mind?" For the last couple of years, we have watched China building these bases at a feverish […]
From Susan Rice's interview today with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, an interesting example of emphatic multiple negation: Your browser does not support the audio element. I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would.
From Senator Maria Cantwell's Facebook wall: Any attempt to say that Judge Gorsuch is not anything but overly qualified for this job is blasphemous. Misnegation, or not? The layered uses of any make the calculation harder.
[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane. See "Sinological suffering", 3/31/17, for background.] I snapped this picture at the library today:
Many Language Log readers have been complaining about the absence of any recognition of April Fool's Day at this site. I can only lament your lack of perceptiveness. There have been pranks all over the place and you simply didn't see them because you are too gullible. The primary linguistic one was Victor Mair's amusing […]
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Ellen Eldridge and Raisa Habersham, "I-85 collapses after massive fire: ‘The entire bridge is compromised’", Atlanta Journal-Constitution 3/31/2017: The bridge on I-85 northbound just south of Ga. 400 near Piedmont Road collapsed about 7 p.m., Atlanta fire spokesman Sgt. Cortez Stafford confirmed. No injuries to motorists or first responders were reported. Officials said they […]
Eve Armstrong and Henry Abarbanel, "Model of the songbird nucleus HVC as a network of central pattern generators", Journal of neurophysiology, 2016: We propose a functional architecture of the adult songbird nucleus HVC in which the core element is a "functional syllable unit" (FSU). In this model, HVC is organized into FSUs, each of which provides the […]
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