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…
Why, hello there! It’s been ages since I’ve posted, but I’ve been pretty busy with a tiny new experiment. Ryden was born in October (the photo was taken at not-quite-two-months) and is now emphatically ingesting solids, crawling (but only backwards), and beginning to babble. Now that my life has gone from hallucinatorily topsy-turvy to relatively…
Okay, “smörgåsbord” is a Swedish borrowing, but close enough. It’s appropriate for this post, which will be a buffet of miscellaneous facts about the Norwegian language. I became interested in and started learning Norwegian because my brother has been living in Oslo for the past several years, where he is getting his Ph.D. in lichenology.[1]…
Something I’ve been planning to post occasionally are interviews with career linguists and related language folk – especially those working outside of academia. Yes, they (we) exist! Until recently these were rare birds, but lately the numbers are growing. I credit several factors: the growth of the discipline generally; the growth of technology industries trying…
It seems that the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, Caterpillar Inc., is in serious need of a basic semantics lesson. I came across this article a couple days ago: “Santa Cruz coffee shop with ‘cat’ in its name hit with cease and desist from Caterpillar Inc.” Beyond the ridiculousness of a giant corporation going…
This last post on accents and dialects summarizes an editorial by linguist, academic, and popular writer John McWhorter. McWhorter’s linguistics research focuses on sociohistorical language change and creoles, but he has published multiple articles and books about race relations as well. Here, he tackles a combination of those subjects with Black English (taking a particular…
