Sarah Currier asked: Last night I was reading a beautifully written, prize-nominated novel, but was thrown out of my immersion in it by what I thought was an anachronistic bit of language. I do have a particular fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to "bored of" and I am convinced it is fairly recent as common usage. I am […]
Google Suggest is an fun new tool for probing the textual Zeitgeist. Using it on "Language Log" yields: Bare "Language Log" gets 36,900,000 results (as we can see by getting suggested continuations for "language lo", though I'll spare you the picture). It's clear that lots of regular readers use Google to find us, rather than […]
Over at the Brainstorm blog ("Psychology Today Editors Flood the Blog Zone"), Matthew Hutson asks "What does Caroline Kennedy know that we don't?" This is about Caroline Kennedy's filled pauses, of course, but what struck me first about Matt's post is the way that the blog format allows a journalist to take a more personal […]
Yesterday, I took a quick poll of a few small English-language texts, to see how often future-time meanings were expressed in various tensed-verb forms ("Alternative futures", 12/11/2008). My conclusion was that by far the commonest method in written American English is to use forms of the modal auxiliary will; but that in spoken American English, […]
In yesterday's post on "what's will?", I rashly asserted that "the commonest way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will". This provoked immediate questions and counter-claims. So I promised to devote a Breakfast Experiment™ to quantifying the choice among alternative verb forms used to express future time in English.
This is a follow-up to Mark's post earlier today on affective demonstratives, though I am going to move us even further than he did from Palin and towards the lexical/constructional pragmatics. The overall picture is this: this NOUN reliably signals that the speaker is in a heightened emotional state (or at least intends to convey […]
In my post "Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008, I tried to comfort an American parent who was worried about a daughter's use of rising pitch accents on statements. As part of the recommended cognitive therapy, I observed that there are regional varieties of English, known as "Urban North British", in which rising pitch accents on statements are […]
I think it's turning into a trend — journalists are becoming linguists. Really bad linguists, but any sort of interest in the analysis of language and communication ought to be a good thing for the field, right? Unfortunately, in this case, it's a bad thing for the nation. A couple of days ago ("Does CBS […]
According to CBS News ("Did Hillary Mean It?", 8/27/2008): In her speech to the Democratic convention Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton urged fellow Democrats to vote for Barack Obama, and she did it in no uncertain terms — verbally. But did her body language match her words? Body language expert and former FBI agent Joe Navarro […]
As a result of an exchange (1, 2 ,3 ,4, 5) with Alan Gunn in the comments yesterday, I was reminded that for many years, legal scholars throughout the U.S. were subjected to a peculiar form of stylistic tyranny, imposed by a curious work known as The Texas Manual on Style. According to James Lindgren […]
With respect to a piece of political spam from John McCain that included the sentence "You will also have an exclusive opportunity to … ask questions to one of my top advisors", Graham commented Is "ask questions TO somebody" good American English? It reads very oddly to this Brit. Well, "ask questions to somebody" sounds […]
A graph of the current Google hit counts for "N minutes", 2 ≤ N ≤ 66, expressed as a proportion of the total hits for all 65 searches, looks like this: (As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)
This all started when John Cowan defended the New Yorker's account of a long-past Republican debate, by proposing that Rudy Giuliani retains the syllable-timed speech rhythm of his Italian ancestors, in contrast to Mitt Romney's standard American stress-timed speech. I didn't share the intuition, and did a little experiment to show that Rudy's syllables, far […]