Words R Us

half-way down the page there is a list of posts by linguists about sarcasm

"Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. What's the driving force behind it? "Looking for short cuts, especially if you have to say something over and over again, is a common motivator," says Groves."

Fascinating discussion between Lera Boroditsky and Mark Liberman (and three guests) about whether or not language shapes how we think. Many other interesting links, also. (At the end of the 10-day debate, Economist readers voted, 78-22%, that they believe that language shapes how we think.)

login: vt@punahou.edu password: oahua

login: vt@punahou.edu password: oahua

Including corpora of historical and contemporary American English, British English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Check out the visualization: http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/21/speechome-interactive-visualization-language-acquisition.html "This interactive visualization provides a look into the most complete record of a single child's speech development ever created... But parentese is not universal. It varies between different parents and cultures, and in some cases has been reported to be absent altogether. What effect, then, does it have on child development? Answering this question could help guide better ways to help children that have difficulty learning language." With links to the actual studies at the bottom of the page.

"Your question is really asking, "What is a syllable?" For the most part, our original grammar school understanding that "A syllable is a part of a word with a single vowel sound" is essentially correct, but there's more to it than that. Let's look at a linguistic defintion of "syllable":..."

See also the graphs at the bottom of the page. "Perhaps the biggest collection of words ever assembled has just gone online: 500 billion of them, from 5 million books published over the past four centuries... The words make up a searchable database that researchers at Harvard say is a new and powerful tool to study cultural change... You can, for instance, type in a word or a short phrase, and the database produces a graph - a curve that traces how often an author used those words every year since 1800."

"We've also had wars on drugs, obesity, idleness, poverty, oil-price speculators, science, saturated fat (part of the "battle of the spreads"), and Waitrose (the aggressor was M&S)... Then, of course, there's the "war on terror", George W Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001."

"It is well known that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over and over again, the meaning drops away. ... They found that after saying a word aloud 2-3 times per second for 15 seconds, subjects' estimates of its position in this semantic space moved to a point nearer the origin [it became more meaningless to the speaker]."