I recently became interested in patterns of speech and silence. People divide their discourse into phrases for many reasons: syntax, meaning, rhetoric; thinking about what to say next; running out of breath. But for current purposes, we're ignoring the content of what's said, and we're also ignoring the process of saying it. We're even ignoring […]
People — especially Americans — are ignorant. This is something that Everyone Knows, because we read or hear about it from time to time in the mass media. Thus we can listen to Robin Young tell us on NPR's Here and Now that A new survey conducted by Chicago's McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which has […]
I did a double-take at a photo caption in yesterday's NY Times: "Zara Phillips, a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II’s, was part of the team that won a silver medal in eventing on Tuesday." "A granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II's"—why the unusual double genitive (was the term originally Jespersen's)? Despite all the attention given to […]
Senator Rick Santorum has taken over the lead in national polling for the Republican presidential nomination; and so there is increasing interest in his ideas for new national policies, for example as he explains them in this October 2011 interview with Shane Vander Hart. As a linguist and a true conservative, I'm especially intrigued by […]
Patrick Howley ("Standoff in D.C.", The American Spectator 10/8/2011) describes his activities as a journalist and agent provocateur at the OWS protests in Washington D.C.: The fastest-running protesters charged up the steps of Washington's National Air and Space Museum Saturday afternoon to infiltrate the building and hang banners on the "shameful" exhibits promoting American imperialism. […]
Nick Collins, "Earth is home to 8.7 million species", The Telegraph 8/23/2011: Previous guesses had put the total number of different species at anywhere between three million and 100 million, but a new calculation based on the way in which life forms are classified puts the estimate at the lower end of that scale. The […]
Reader Sarah C pointed out an interesting turn of phrase in Jordan K. Turgeon, "Myths About Memory", The Huffington Post 8/3/2011: According to previous research, when defendants wrongly committed of a crime were later exonerated by DNA testing, the primary evidence in the original case often came from an eyewitness. [emphasis added] (Obligatory screenshot here…)
This post is the promised short discussion of Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray, "Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals", Nature, published online 4/13/2011. [Update: free downloadable copies are available here.] As I noted earlier, I recommend the clear and accessible explanation that Simon Greenhill […]
Rick Rubenstein asks Has there been any research done on the familiar phenomenon wherein a word which is repeated over and over begins to look misspelled, or even like complete gibberish?
A few days ago, I asked for help in tracking down some of the scientific support for Matt Richtel's claims about the bad effects of "digital overload" ("More factoid tracking", 9/1/2009). One of the more trackable factoids was the "study conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant […]
Nobody does sarcastic invective like the English, and Steve Connor, the science editor of The Independent, recently demonstrated his command of the form. But he started out in a shaky moral position, and he got his facts wrong, so it didn't turn out well for him.
You've probably heard about Microsoft's new search site bing. I don't know much about it yet, but I did observe a couple of things that may be of interest to those of us who try to use web-search counts as data.