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Tag Archives: linguistics
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 [...]
Posted in linguistics, nyc, technology Also tagged graduate school, logic, New York, reading 1 Comment
Fire Exting Atsher Box
Fire Exting Atsher Box, originally uploaded by thatgirl.
“It’s true,” either Britney’s pregnant again or I suck at daily posting.
It’s the last day of NaBloPoMo and it’s clear I’ve failed. I’m not really a “post daily” kind of person in a good month, and this month happens to be both “finish qualifying paper” month and “drive to Michigan for Thanksgiving and then drive back again what seems like a few days later, and is [...]
Newspaper may omit verb
Apparently all they need is the modal at the New York Times. As of 9:25 pm today: Or perhaps ‘gun-control’ is one of those nouns that’s slipped the surly bonds of its lexical category and become a verb? UPDATE: It turns out that the missing verb was … (drumroll) … ‘take’. In this context I [...]
yet more fun with ambiguity
A few years ago, Walt and my sister and I were on a roadtrip to Michigan, accompanied by the dulcet tones of John Hodgman, reading to us from the areas of his expertise (this audiobook was free for a while on itunes, and may very well still be — if it is, I advise you [...]
Are names rigid designators?