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Lingua Franca, a blog from The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses various issues related to language and applied linguistics, including poetry, style, grammar, dialects, words.

"A new study of word frequencies in political blogs finds that equations describing earthquake evolution fit the eruption of topics onto political blogs."

Thanks, Ryan! We're going to read this for homework, since it relates to what we've been doing with computational tools and language.

For many current middle and high school students, writing takes shape in all kinds of forms. They send texts, write on social media sites, update their own blogs, and of course, write for school assignments. Research indicates both pros and cons in using technology as a writing tool.

For many current middle and high school students, writing takes shape in all kinds of forms. They send texts, write on social media sites, update their own blogs, and of course, write for school assignments.

This blog has various articles re: the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting. Recent posts include the role of Asians in hip-hop, popular media and code-switching.

Jennifer Sclafani, Georgetown University linguist, examines the idiolect of Trump. Everyone possesses an idiolect: an idiosyncratic form of language that is unique to an individual. Trump's idiolect seems particularly polarizing. Critics might decry Trump thusly: "He doesn't make any sense." "He uses a lot of small words." "His speeches are non-substantive." On the other hand, supporters see Trump as "authentic," "relatable," and "consistent." He's a "straight shooter" who "doesn't mince words." So how does one idiolect produce such polarizing evaluations? It has to do with the precarious connections between linguistic form and meaning. The relationship between the two, as the anthropologist Elinor Ochs describes, is non-exclusive, indirect, and constitutive. Put simply, there are multiple meanings associated with any given linguistic feature, and the connection between form and meaning is a two-way street Whichever meaning is activated by a specific pronunciation, or any other aspect of your idiolect, has everything to do with context: Where are you? Who is your audience? What is your purpose? What image are you trying to project? These are factors that candidates are always taking into account as they put forth their presidential selves on the campaign trail. Tailoring their speech to the context, like when a candidate takes on a drawl while campaigning in the South, has been grounds for being labeled "inconsistent" or "fake," as we've seen with Hillary Clinton, even though this type of linguistic accommodation is a perfectly natural feature of everyone's idiolect.

Hearing is important for humans to understand the world around them and it lies in our nature to want to describe what we hear. To do this, we frequently make use of onomatopoeias. But what exactly is an onomatopoeia? It is 'the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named'. This blog post offers a cross-linguistic peek at onomatopoeia.

This study examining the online identity and language use of teens who maintain personal blogs. Expression of gender, identity, and use of language were examined in terms of disclosed personal information (sexual identity, emotive features, and semantic themes).

In the last half century, much effort has been placed into teaching animals, primarily apes, a basic language. However, successes have been limited: animals using signs to obtain things in which they were interested, for instance. But no animal has yet acquired the linguistic capability that children have already in their third year of life. Here are some things that differentiate humans from animals: 1. The fact that animals don't ask "why?" shows they don't aspire to knowledge and are incapable of justification. 2. The inability of animals to use negation shows they lack basic logical abilities. 3. Another essential characteristic of human language is its normativity-namely, the fact that there are right and wrong uses of a word or phrase. Animals lack this capacity.

linguistics blog

This Scientific American blog article provides a handy run-down of research findings re: music's effect on the brain, including 1. Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch, and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise. Even those w/ a few years of music training showed more robust neural processing of sounds. Music "tones auditory fitness", critical for perceiving speech and distinguishing, recognizing and processing conversation in noisy environments. 2. Musical training and education may confer linguistic, mathematical, and spatial benefits, and promote social development/"team player" capacities.

I think you'll enjoy this video, which plays with language/words visually.

Thanks, Mark. I just now embedded it on the Moodle page for everyone. Nice find!

good blog for stat-minded inquiry into linguistics

From my personal blog

Anthony Shugaar reflects on the fine art of literary translation: how do you properly render details like dialect or culturally-understood details?

Author Clive Thompson argues, "The fact that so many of us are writing - sharing our ideas, good and bad, for the world to see - has changed the way we think. Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge." Every day, we collectively produce millions of books' worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media - the equivalent of 36 million books.* (The entire US Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around 23 million books.) He notes the Internet has spawned a global culture of avid writers, one almost always writing for an audience, and suggests that writing for a real audience helps clarify one's thinking, enhances learning, and arguably, betters writers' organization, ideas, and attention to editing.