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Category Archives: linguistics
Are names rigid designators?
On Mount Desert Island in Maine, people refer to roads with the definite article. So what the street sign says is “Crooked Road” might be mentioned in a sentence as “He lives on the Crooked Road.” This is likely to be how many roads originally got their names, so Birmingham Road in Coventry used to [...]
Install Pragmatics Module
I think I just realized another reason why I don’t like Facebook — it doesn’t work so well with my pragmatics module. I can’t tell what my speech acts actually mean there, and I don’t know how failure to “friend” everyone I know, or lack of response to “notes” or “wall” or whatever that shit [...]
Discourse Anaphora
My dashboard tells me that up to now, I’ve written 99 posts (in this incarnation of SS), and the pressure of a round number bore down mightily, intimating that I had to come up with something good at this milestone. That, and other other down-bearing elements of my life, like papers, teaching, grading, etc. But [...]
what syntactic rule did I violate Walt’s preference and?
I’m at the point in the semester where I’m knee deep in teaching syntax, which is good as it’s something I don’t often think about but feel that I should know better than I do. It does, however, have the additional effect of making me notice how my idiolect contains all sorts of examples of [...]
language death
Just yesterday I was teaching the first class of an introductory linguistics course, and I asked students how many languages they thought were currently spoken in the world. Guesses ranged from one to ten thousand, which was pretty good for a first class. When the last version of Ethnologue came out, it claimed there were 6,912 languages [...]
Pullum deems student pompous
Over at languagelog, Geoffrey Pullum takes a student to task for writing on a test that some phrases in an example sentence “were not deemed noun phrases.” He feels that students shouldn’t be “deeming” anything, as they’re the students and he’s the professor, and that further pomposity was added by the passive voice. When I read [...]
Badenov wikipedia
I’m giving a talk tomorrow (info/abstract below the fold) which required me to find an image of Boris Badenov (don’t ask — it’s to illustrate an example slide). I went to his wikipedia entry, and found, to my delight, that someone has taken the time to create a long list of disguises that Boris has [...]
Also posted in nyc, technology Tagged graduate school, linguistics, logic, New York, reading 1 Comment
modern sabotage
In a meeting today of Linguistics 101 teachers at Rutgers we were discussing plagiarism. A colleague made a hilarious suggestion: give students a homework question about topic x, then go to the wikipedia article on topic x and alter it to be incorrect. Laugh at the results. I expanded on the theme, positing that one [...]
the velocity of slang
In a lecture the other day, I had a slide on “neologisms” to illustrate the concept of productivity. This was in Linguistics 101, a course populated by undergraduates from a wide variety of majors, and I thought I’d use “weblog” as an example of a neologism. So I pointed to “weblog” on the slide and [...]
Plus fast!