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 […]
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 […]
You've probably noticed that how people talk depends on who they're talking with. And for 40 years or so, linguists and psychologists and sociologists have referred to this process as "speech accommodation" or "communication accommodation" — or, for short, just plain "accommodation". This morning's Breakfast Experiment™ explores a version of the speech accommodation effect as […]
Now that I've got morning internet access again, and the semester is more or less underway, it's time for another Breakfast Experiment™. In "Markov's Heart of Darkness" (7/18/2011) and "Finch linguistics" (7/13/2011) , we learned that Joseph Conrad's paragraphs are more markovian — at least in terms of their distribution of lengths — than zebra finch […]
Yesterday, Marc Cenedella did a sort of Breakfast Experiment™, and reported the results in "I, Obama: The President and the personal pronoun": President Obama has taken criticism in some sectors for his use of the personal pronoun in describing, and applauding, the nation’s success in covert operations. So I’ve spent my Saturday morning at the […]
A couple of days ago ("On not allowing Bin Laden to back-burner", 5/3/2011), I noted that English (like other languages) often turns a noun denoting a place into a verb meaning "cause something to come to be in/on/at that place". I also noted that other causative change-of-state verbs generally have intransitive/inchoative uses as well (The […]