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October 5, 2014 @ 6:59 am
· Filed under Psychology of language
We start with a psycholinguistic controversy. On one side, there's Herbert Clark and Jean Fox Tree, "Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking", Cognition 2002. The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in […]
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July 16, 2014 @ 9:26 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Language and culture
This post follows up on Mark Dingemanse's guest post, "Some constructive-critical notes on the informal overlap study", which in turn comments on Kieran Snyder's guest post, "Men interrupt more than women". As part of a project on the application of speech and language technology to meetings, almost 15 years ago, researchers at the International Computer […]
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July 3, 2014 @ 5:00 am
· Filed under Linguistics in the comics
Apparently it's a stereotype that Canadians are always apologizing. Thus Jordan Rane, "10 things Canada does better than anywhere else", CNN 7/1/2014: In Canada, apologies happen constantly — "sorries" flying in from all sides like swarms of affable killer bees. Apologies are issued not just for some negligible mishap, but for actually having the gall […]
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June 21, 2014 @ 7:53 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Phonetics and phonology, Prosody
A few years ago, with Jiahong Yuan and Chris Cieri, I took a look at variation in English word duration by phrasal position, using data from the Switchboard conversational-speech corpus ("The shape of a spoken phrase", LLOG 4/12/2006; Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman, and Chris Cieri, "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation", InterSpeech 2006). As is […]
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June 8, 2014 @ 10:18 am
· Filed under Language and computers, Translation
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 […]
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June 6, 2014 @ 6:07 am
· Filed under Phonetics and phonology, Prosody
[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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June 5, 2014 @ 10:49 am
· Filed under Phonetics and phonology, Prosody
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 […]
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November 19, 2013 @ 1:56 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics
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 […]
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November 10, 2013 @ 7:16 am
· Filed under Linguistic history
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 […]
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September 7, 2013 @ 4:40 pm
· Filed under Computational linguistics
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 […]
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July 15, 2013 @ 8:12 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Linguistic history
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 […]
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June 12, 2013 @ 8:23 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics
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 […]
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December 27, 2012 @ 8:36 am
· Filed under Computational linguistics, Psychology of language
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 […]
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