Over the years, we've viewed the phenomenon of word aversion from several angles — a recent discussion, with links to earlier posts, can be found here. What we're calling word aversion is a feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded […]
Mitt Romney sometimes exhibits a rapid repetition of phrase-initial function words, often intermixed with um and uh. This behavior was especially frequent in the third presidential debate (10/22/2012). Here's an example from the beginning of his first response: Your browser does not support the audio element. um uh this is obviously an area of great concern […]
Sharon Jayson, "What's on Americans' mind? Increasingly, 'me'", USA Today 7/10/2012: An analysis of words and phrases in more than 750,000 American books published in the past 50 years finds an emphasis on "I" before "we" — showing growing attention to the individual over the group. This is actually true as stated. If we take […]
In a couple of earlier posts, I noted a gradual change in the tendency of American newspapers and U.S. Supreme Court opinions to use the phrase "the United States" as a syntactic subject ("The United States as a subject", 10/6/2009; "'The United States' as a subject at the Supreme Court", 10/20/2009). Thus in a small […]
The words and phrases that annoy people are typically criticized as over-used, illogical, fashionable among a disliked group, or shifted in a confusing way from an earlier meaning. It's often true that such irksome usages have indeed increased in frequency — thus "at the end of the day", which was the Plain English Campaign's choice […]
Tyler Cowen, "I wonder if this is actually true", Marginal Revolution 7/12/2012. Researchers who have scanned books published over the past 50 years report an increasing use of words and phrases that reflect an ethos of self-absorption and self-satisfaction. "Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades […]
I'm in Berkeley for the DataEDGE Conference, where I'm due to participate in a "living room chat" advertised as follows: Size Matters: Big Data, New Vistas in the Humanities and Social Sciences Mark Liberman, Geoffrey Nunberg, Matthew Salganik Vast archives of digital text, speech, and video, along with new analysis technology and inexpensive computation, are […]
Yesterday evening at dinner, some members of the LSA Publications Committee were idly discussing the changes over time in fashions for given names. It's obvious that things change — but it's less obvious whether these changes are cyclic. It makes sense that out-of-fashion names might come back after a generation or two — but does […]
My Breakfast Experiments™ aren't quite as rigorous as Mark Liberman's. He has direct access via a high-speed line to the entire Linguistic Data Consortium collection of corpora at his breakfast table, and writes R scripts for statistical analysis as if R was his native language (it may well be, come to think of it). My […]
A few days ago ("Evaluative words for wines", 4/7/2012), I illustrated how a trivial method can help us uncover the contribution of individual words to the expression of opinion in text. For this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I'll illustrate an equally trivial approach to learning how words fit together structurally, using the same small collection of […]
There are two basic reasons for the increased interest in "text analytics" and "sentiment analysis": In the first place, there's more and more data available to analyze; and second, the basic techniques are pretty easy. This is not to deny the benefits of sophisticated statistical and text-processing methods. But algorithmic sophistication adds value to simple-minded […]
Brett Reynolds writes: Over on English Language & Usage, the following question appeared: Many Japanese textbooks of English mention the "feminine 'so'": the use of "so" for "very" is more typical of a feminine speaker. I don't think this is true in the US (I learned English living in Southern California and have now lived […]
Tom Chivers, "Sadly, Jamie Redknapp is literally correct", The Telegraph 3/12/2012; "Literally, a discussion about literally", BBC Radio 4 Today.