Words R Us

By Lera Boroditsky (Stanford researcher) "Scholars have long wondered whether different languages might impart different cognitive abilities. In recent years empirical evidence for this causal relation has emerged, indicating that one's mother tongue does indeed mold the way one thinks about many aspects of the world, including space and time. The latest findings also hint that language is part and parcel of many more aspects of thought than scientists had previously realized."

"Computational Linguistics became an open access journal, freely available to all online readers. ... Computational Linguistics is the longest running publication devoted exclusively to the design and analysis of natural language processing systems. From this highly-regarded quarterly, university and industry linguists, speech specialists, and philosophers get information about computational aspects of research on language, linguistics, and the psychology of language processing and performance."

A look at the famous Buffalo (repeat as necessary) sentence construction.

I saw this article (below) and had to get the buffalo-down: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo-buffalo/

The original Mr. Sulu employs rhetoric to reduce to absurdity a bill introduced in Tennessee that would forbid public school teachers from discussing homosexuality in classrooms.

"[W]hen you can't tell if word X is a noun or a verb, that means X is a state of mind... Going by this graph from the Google Ngram viewer, it looks like the prom is still well in the lead, but EW is right that people have begun to use plain old prom a lot more in the last decade."

Comprehensive post, with statistics about usage of "different from/than/to." "Calling different than or different to "wrong" is misguided. It's an old grammar myth that has trickled down to the present day. Why perpetuate a stigmatizing non-rule? Let people speak whatever way comes naturally to them, so long as they make themselves clear, and consistent with context.  Dialectal differences should be savoured, not savaged."

Interesting blog: Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK

I remember gerunds....

Mr. Maretzki found an article the other day that defines nouns as slow-acting verbs... the ing-less gerund really shows how that could be true!

"According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, [the American style] was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order 'to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space).'" Ironically, though, this article only uses the "logical punctuation" style once - in the title.

I love it when punctuation marks fit neatly within the quotation. The opposite makes me feel strangely queasy...

"Our results indicate that despite the differences in the structure and vocabulary of the languages analyzed, the impact of word ordering in the structure of language is a statistical linguistic universal."

This commercial was a commercial of a guy who was walking around. As he walked around he noticed that the people around him were digital people and creatures who looked foreign and strange. The guy finally walked into a diner where he ordered a coke. The monster next to him accidentally grabbed for his coke at the same time he did and the monster became a normal girl and no longer a "stranger". The enthymeme here is that everyone and anyone is no longer a stranger if they like coca cola. They imply that if two people like the same thing they are no longer strangers because they share something in common and can relate to each other. However this statement is not always true. Just because you share a liking for one thing with someone else doesn't automatically mean that the other person is no longer a stranger to you.

This is Boone: the enthymeme in this commercial is: you should choose Geico because Geico insurance can save you 15% or more. part A of this is that geico can save you money but the second part of this is missing. part B could be something like: choosing an insurance company that saves you money is good. so all together it would be: Geico can save you 15% or more and choosing an insurance company that will save you money is good so you should choose Geico. the fallacy here is kind of hard to spot but it could be false dichotomy: there are multiple other insurance companies that could save youl money and but it seems as if Geico is the only one.

Premise 1: Geeks don't wear (Dockers) pants Premise 2: You don't want to be a geek Conclusion: You should wear Dockers Pants The unstated premise is the second premise. This is the weaker premise because some people don't mind being geeks and enjoy not wearing pants. One of the fallacies used is ad populum. The commercial appeals to the fact that men don't want to be geeks and they want to be manly and accepted. Therefore they should wear Dockers pants.

Logical Fallacy: Hasty Generalization Babies can do easy things + Etrade is an easy thing The hasty generalization is that Etrade is so easy a baby can do it. This is not true because babies can't go online and invest. However it makes the consumer think about how easy etrade is to use.