Update Part of this post was incorporated into an article I wrote with Brian Kelly and Alistair McNaught that appeared in the December issue of Ariadne. As part of that work and feedback from Alistair and Brian, I expanded the final section from a simple list of bullets into a more detailed research programme. You […]
Category: Linguistics
Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is “knowledge is power”. It is used to refer not just to education, of course, but to all sorts of intelligence gathering from business to politics. […]
I have forgotten a lot of things in my life. Names, faces, numbers, words, facts, events, quotes. Just like for anyone, forgetting is as much a part of my life as remembering. Memories short and long come and go. But only twice in my life have I seen a good memory die under suspicious circumstances. […]
I always thought this little bit by Demetri Martin highlights a crucial deficiency in any distinctive feature analysis. Demetri Martin: “I was at a party, and I saw a guy with a leather jacket, and I thought, ‘That’s cool’. Then I saw a guy with a leather vest and I thought, ‘That’s not cool’. It […]
Note: This was intended to be a brief note. Instead it developed into a monster post that took me two weeks of stolen moments to write. It’s very light on non-blog references but they exist. Nevertheless, it is still easy to find a number of oversimplifications, conflations, and other imperfections below. The general thrust of […]
I have a number of pet peeves about how people use language. I am genuinely annoyed by the use of apostrophes before plural of numerals or acronyms like 50’s or ABC’s. But because I understand how language works, I keep my mouth shut. The usage has obviously moved on. I don’t think, ABC’s is wrong […]
Somebody commented on the Language Log saying “of course […] Chomsky was a massively gifted linguist” http://j.mp/9Q98Bx and for some reason, to use a Czech idiom, the handle of the jar repeatedly used to fetch water just fell off. Meaning, I’ve had enough. I think we should stop thinking of Chomsky as a gifted linguist. […]