Okay. I didn’t want to write a post on ChatGPT, because its public release has been like shrapnel through the meat of the internet – but at the end of the day this IS a language blog, and I would be remiss for not doing due diligence. If you’ve been under a rock for the…
Have you ever experienced something from the written page come to life? I have. No, I didn’t see the purple dragon from my teen fantasy novels, or communicate with an unfolded-refolded nine-dimensional sophon from Trisolaris (hey…it’s been forever since my last post, I’m way overdue for a bit of nerding out). No – I’m talking…
I was a yoga skeptic for years, until I got pregnant and tried a prenatal yoga class. The teacher was magnificent. I attended once a week throughout pregnancy, and although physically I grew heavier and heavier, each class left me feeling buoyant. After my son was born, I went back for “mama and baby” classes,…
Saw this WSJ article a few weeks ago about differences in emoji usage between older and younger age groups. The gist: people older than 30 use and interpret emojis more literally, while Gen Z (those in their teens and 20s) adopt a much less straightforward (e.g. often sarcastic) usage – resulting in digital miscommunications. …
Perusal through the material on this blog will quickly show that my interests trend towards words and language acquisition. This post combines the two topics: the first section has some interesting morsels on word learning from a book (that I’m reading) by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, called How children learn the meanings of words; the…
This post is about a tiny ubiquitous word and a large infrequent word. The tiny ubiquitous word is and. The large infrequent word is polysyndeton. How do they relate? In literature (and other stylized forms of language, like speeches, songs, and play or film dialogue), polysyndeton is a device in which conjunctions, like and, are…
Recap: What is “baby sign language”? I made an attempt at defining this concept in the last post, which I’ll reproduce here: baby sign language is signing between (hearing) parents/caregivers and young children, where the signs are either from a real sign language like ASL, are idiosyncratic inventions of the family using them, or are…
September was National Deaf Awareness Month. I tried to post this piece before the month ended, but alas! Better late than never. I’d like to discuss and dispel some of the many misconceptions around signed languages. Here are a few of the most common: Sign language is universal – there is only one Sign languages…
After much delay (eek! just realized it’s been a year!), I have another interview with a career linguist for your reading pleasure. [See the first interview here.] Even though I still get the “I’ve never met a real-live linguist” reaction when telling folks what I do, these days there are indeed people working full-time, earning…
I’d like to discuss a theory in cognitive linguistics which is very near to my heart[1]: frame semantics. I’ll also present FrameNet, a database built using frame semantic theory, which has been and continues to be an excellent resource in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Why is frame semantics…
