Language Log

Another in our series of occasional postings on Noam Chomsky in cartoonland.

At some time in the middle 1970s, Deirdre Wilson and I noticed that we had never seen the past participle of the verb stride anywhere. In fact we didn't even know what it was. When you stride off, what is it that you've done? How would it be described? Have you strided? Have you strode? […]

In the section on "Theories of Language Development" in Karen Huffman's Psychology in Action, Wiley, 8th edition, 2005 (p. 303), we read that … Noam Chomsky … suggests that children are born "prewired" to learn language. They possess neurological ability, known as a language acquisition device (LAD), that … enables the child to analyze language […]

If you're watching track and field events in the coming Olympics, keep an eye out for British runner Christine Ohuruogu, competing in the women's 400m race (she's currently the World Champion in the event). In 2005, Ohuruogu graduated with a degree in linguistics from University College London, and her thesis was all about taboo vocabulary, […]

The first extended transformational-generative grammatical study of any aspect of a language written by anyone other than Noam Chomsky was the study of nominalizations by Robert B. Lees in his MIT dissertation, published as a monograph in 1960. In it, Lees attempted, among other things, to offer a detailed treatment of noun-noun compounds. Other early […]

Britt Peterson's article on Literary Darwinism in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education Review ("Darwin to the Rescue") points to the use of numbers as a central doctrinal conflict in literary scholarship: [Northrup] Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I […]

In case you haven't already seen it, or heard it discussed anywhere, here's the cover of the 21 July New Yorker ("The Politics of Fear" by Barry Blitt):   One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong (from Sesame Street). Question: which one?

This is a follow-up on my Language devaluation and Pushing buttons posts from last Monday, and coincidentally also a follow-up on (the first comment on) Bill Poser's Obama's Indonesian post from Friday. I had promised in the Language devaluation post that I would (when I found the time) collect arguments for why English should not […]

Dipping randomly into another one of Roy Peter Clark's Glamour of Grammar essays ("What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar", 5/8/2008), I found this curious piece of revisionist intellectual history: In our common culture, grammar has taken on at least three sets of meanings and associations. It still refers to the etiquette of writing […]

Here on Language Log we have recently been twitted by readers who believe we have been insufficiently attentive to celebrity linguists, in particular Noam Chomsky (I find the idea that we should choose topics for our postings using personal fame as a guiding metric bizarre, but there it is). Mark Liberman has now responded, linking […]

Mark's post about linguistic celebrities reminds me of a conversation I had quite some years ago with David Perlmutter, whom linguists will know for his work on syntax and sign language. We asked each other who was the most famous person we had met. After running through candidates well known in academia but perhaps less […]

A couple of weeks ago, it became clear that a certain number of Language Log readers feel that we don't devote enough attention to linguistic celebrity. "As a non-linguist", wrote Moira Less, "I must admit to having been surprised at how infrequently Chomsky is mentioned here (almost never?). I think he's only linguist who is […]

I'm nearly sure that the people who submit comments on this and other weblogs are all intelligent, knowledgeable and thoughtful. Often, this is plain in what they write. But sometimes, in order to maintain my commitment to this belief, I'm driven to conclude that a commenter has recently tunneled through the barrier separating us from […]