Following up on two earlier Breakfast Experiments™ ("Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels", 6/5/2014; "Consonant effects on F0 are multiplicative", 6/6/2014), here are some semi-comparable measurements of consonant effects on fundamental frequency (F0) in Mandarin Chinese broadcast news speech. [As I warned potential readers of those earlier posts, this is considerably more wonkish than most LLOG […]
Here on Language Log, we've often talked about the great difference between Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) and the various other Sinitic languages (e.g., Cantonese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc.). The gap between Classical Chinese and all modern Sinitic languages is even greater than that between MSM and the other modern forms of Sinitic. It is like the […]
[Warning: an unusually nerdy follow-up to an unusually nerdy post…] In the comments on yesterday's post "Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels", the question came up whether the effect of consonant voicing on vowel pitch is additive (e.g. plus or minus N Hz) or multiplicative (up or down by M percent). The fact that […]
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I spent the past couple of days at a workshop on lexical tone, organized by Kristine Yu at UMass. A topic that came up several times was the question of whether "segmental" influences on pitch — for instance, the fact that voiceless consonants are typically associated with a higher pitch in the first part of a […]
Early last summer, an inquiry from Sanette Tanaka at the WSJ led me to do a Breakfast Experiment™ on the relationship between the language of real-estate listings and the price of the associated properties ("Long is good, good is bad, nice is worse, and ! is questionable", 6/12/2013; "Significant (?) relationships everywhere", 6/14/2013; "City of […]
Several times over the past few years, I've speculated that American "uptalk", stereotypically associated with Californian "Valley Girls" in the 1980s, might in fact have originated with the characteristically rising intonational patterns of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland, by way of the Scots-Irish immigrants who migrated to California in the 1930s Dust Bowl exodus. For […]
In Meg Wilson's post on marmoset vs. human conversational turn-taking, I learned about Tanya Stivers et al., "Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation", PNAS 2009, which compared response offsets to polar ("yes-no") questions in 10 languages. Here's their plot of the data for English: Based on examination of a Dutch corpus, they argue […]
Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, "Cluttered writing: adjectives and adverbs in academia", Scientometrics 2013: [H]ow do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to avoid adverbs and adjectives (Zinsser 2006). Adjectives and adverbs sprinkle paper with unnecessary clutter. This clutter does not convey information but distracts and has no point especially […]
This year's Penn Reading Project book is Adam Bradley's Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. In my discussion group yesterday afternoon, several participants complained that some important things about the "poetics" of rap are lost in a purely textual presentation of the lyrics. One student observed that in pieces he knows, the rhythm […]
Human secondary sexual characteristics include a large difference in the pitch* of the voice, caused by a large difference in the average size of the larynx. This larynx-size difference is about five to seven times larger, in proportional terms, than the average difference between the sexes in height or other linear dimensions (about 50-60% compared […]
Last month, I taught a short course on "Corpus-based Linguistic Research" at the LSA Institute in Ann Arbor, in which the participants were asked to do individual projects. One of the undergraduates in the class, Alex R., undertook to examine the time-course of variability in English spelling, starting with the Paston Letters, which are "a […]
This is an illustrative Breakfast Experiment™ for my course at the LSA Institute (on "Corpus-Based Linguistic Research"). It starts from an earlier LL post, "When men were men, and verbs were passive", 8/4/2006, where I observed that Winston Churchill, often cited as a model of forceful eloquence, used the passive voice for 30-50% of his […]
Sanette Tanaka, "Fancy Real-Estate Listing, Fancier Verbiage", WSJ 6/6/2013: Savvy real-estate agents know it's not just what you say. It's how long it takes you to say it. More-expensive homes go hand-in-hand with longer real-estate agents' remarks—the language written by the agent that supplements the house description and photos in a listing. Agents use a […]