Group items tagged

Everyone needs a copy editor. Today, the Texas Republican Party is probably wishing it had one, too. Check out this sentence from the just-adopted 2016 party platform: As Texas Monthly rightly points out, the sentence actually says that homosexual behavior "has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, and shared by the majority of Texans."

Marion Underwood is drowning in teenage texting data. For the last four years, the University of Texas at Dallas professor has been collecting texts sent by and to 175 adolescent students at a large suburban Texas high school as part of a study dubbed the BlackBerry Project.

Umm ... (Asked by Tom Lanier of Austin, Texas) Not everyone says "um", "er" or "ah" when they hesitate while speaking. It depends upon the language. For example, speakers of Mandarin Chinese often say"zhege" which roughly translates as "this". In English we say "um", "er", "ah", or other vocalisations for reasons that linguists are not entirely sure about.

John Pennebacker, a University of Texas-Austin psychologist, found that language could successfully predict speed dating successes, as well as the relative longevity of such matches.. When the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. "The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now." This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. "When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically." Pennebacker also says that by analyzing language, you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

Pennebaker (psychologist, linguist at University of Texas) seems to focus on connections between language and social interactions.

"... a group of us have been studying ways to make sense of large amounts of language data generated by people on the ground in Libya. ... You won't be surprised when I tell you what event coincides with the most obvious peak in positive emotion as well as in volume of tweet traffic: Gaddafi's death. Specifically, the vertical dashed black line marks the time when news of Gadaffi's capture and death were first made public." Their report, Evolution of Sentiment in the Libyan Revolution, is here (PDF): https://webspace.utexas.edu/dib97/libya-report-10-30-11.pdf

Joshua Hinson's first biological son was born in 2000. His son's birth marked the start of the sixth generation that would grow up speaking English instead of Chickasaw, which was the primary language his ancestors had spoken for hundreds of years. Hinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Texas.

Writer JRR Tolkien took bits of his favourite real-world languages and spliced them together. Listen carefully to the dialogue in the forthcoming movie of Return of the King and you might recognise some old English, a Welsh lilt here and there, and even some Finnish. "They are invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound," says Fred Hoyt, a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish.