Language Log

The poor fellow in the following short video is taking a Mandarin listening comprehension exam: pic.twitter.com/1uct9PSFAb — Déjà vu (@daja_vu_) July 26, 2019

Does Paul Grice's "cooperative principle" enjoin politeness? Jessica Wildfire sees it that way ("Maybe you’re not rude after all", Splattered 6/29/2018): A teacher sent me home for showing my underwear in fifth grade. The same year, I also got in trouble for asking a classmate about their gender identity. Stuff like that was always happening. […]

An introduction and guide to my series of posts “Corpora and the Second Amendment” is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. COFEA and COEME: lawcorpus.byu.edu. This […]

[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu.] A recent paper by Alex Joske features Sitar སྲི་ཐར་ (Wylie Sri thar, Chinese transcription Sita 斯塔), a senior CCP united front cadre. Sitar's career included decades at the Central United Front Work Department, of which he was a vice head between 2006 and 2016. He later became a […]

Nothing is sacred. Tiny Hong Kong with a little over 7 million population facing off against ginormous PRC with its population approaching 1.5 billion, yet the Hongkongers have held out with their large (as many as 2 million people at times) protests for 8 weeks now — despite the pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, […]

Recently a friend sent me this example of a hard-to-parse sentence (source here): What have you been surprised men you’ve been seeing expect without doing the work to show they deserve it? This is not exactly a "garden path" sentence, which  Wikipedia tells us […] is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a […]

Writing on a concrete planter in Hong Kong:

Chris Brannick posted this photograph of a fan on his Facebook page:

Graffiti painted by protesters in the Liaison Office of the PRC in Hong Kong:

"UPDATE 1-China tells U.S. to remove 'black hands' from Hong Kong" Reuters   (7/23/19) China said on Tuesday that U.S. officials were behind violent chaos in Hong Kong and warned against interference, following a series of protests in the city, including bloody clashes on the weekend. "We can see that U.S. officials are even behind such […]

In "Which justifies what?" (7/3/2019) and "Thematic spoonerisms" (7/14/2019), we noted cases where writers exchanged noun phrases so as to produce literally nonsensical propositions: the inconvenience didn't justify the cause instead of the cause didn't justify the inconvenience, and ampicillin is resistant to multiple strains of U.T.I.s instead of multiple strains of U.T.I.s are resistant […]

Shared by David Cowhig:

Ivanka Trump congratulates Boris Johnson: