I’ve never written a TV or movie review before. My relationship with TV shows and movies is generally one of shallow passive consumption; I watch purely for entertainment. I don’t discuss or critique the things I watch, and I certainly don’t have very discerning taste in this arena (…in contrast to my engaged, critical relationship…
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…
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…
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…
Happy Halloween! In tribute to the holiday (my favorite), here’s a smidge of spooky linguistics. Ever play that game where you repeat some word so many times it starts to lose its meaning? That’s actually a thing, called semantic satiation. Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon where a person temporarily loses the meaning of the…
The Voynich manuscript is one of those marvels that, even in these times of boundless knowledge and incredible technology, eludes continual efforts to understand it. Not heard of the thing? Welcome to the show. There has been a vigorous little dance of press coverage over the past couple years. It goes something like this: Step…
I’m a Douglas Hofstadter fan. I read his book I Am a Strange Loop years ago, and it remains one of my three favorite non-fiction books, period. I highly recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the nature of consciousness. The cognitive scientist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid…
I love patterns. They’re how we learn and evolve, and they’re everywhere. Here’s a pattern for you. When I tell someone new that I do linguistics, their response often goes like this: Nod and/or smile and/or give small verbal acknowledgment. Slight awkward pause. “And what is linguistics again exactly?”[1] People know that linguistics has to…
