Shadow

Lynn Nichols
claims in her paper that 1a and 1b are counterfactuals, but not 2a and
2b. Morphologically and syntactically they are the same, but presumably
in [2] the truth value is under consideration but in [1] the truth
value is falsified by implication or "cancelled" later.
It’s splitting hair to me. I can easily come up […]

The book costs $150. No downloadable PDF file.

Pathways of Change
Grammaticalization in English

Edited by Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein
University of Amsterdam / Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

Studies in Language Companion Series 53

2000. x, 391 pp.
This […]

Time reported a short story on the dialect issue in China, which I
first saw a month ago on LanguageHat (I believe).

Time Bonus Section
February 2005: Global Business
China’s Cat-and-Mouse
Game
By MATTHEW
FORNEY/BEIJING
Monday, Jan. 31, 2005

After bashing each other with frying pans for decades, cat-and-mouse cartoon
combo Tom and Jerry are fighting a new battle–against Chinese nationalism.
Beijing’s censors banned […]

Character complexity and redundancy in writing systems over human history, by Changizi & Shimojo
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2004.2942

Alphabet similarities come in threes
ARABIC, Bengali and Cherokee scripts look utterly different, but in
fact have much in common. And the shared characteristics of these and
other scripts may tell us something about the limits of our visual
system.
Because
writing systems have to […]

Software converts camcorder into back-up drive
Cristalink of Auckland, New Zealand, has launched a software package
that converts a digital video (DV) camcorder into a back-up
data-storage device for […]

After doing all the fun activities, remember to visit this page and find out about Platonic Solids. The Cortona VRML Client and the converter is necessary to enjoy the site with FireFox.

Here are templates for making paper models for each of the 5 Platonic
solids and the 13 Archimedean
semi-regular polyhedra. You are […]

Rule No. 1 in education:   whatever values and believes you
want to install to the young and impressionable, drill them hard into
their minds (and fingertips) until they become
automatic and subconscious, and are remembered even when the host’s body is being consumed
by viruses and the brain cooked by fever.
Congratulations to Duke Arts and Sciences,
who did […]

Underwear is more than skin deep, and so are underpants. It/they hold(s) the key to an important psycholinguistic theory, according to Mark Liberman’s new LanguageLog post. And I completely agree.
As a psychologist I am no stranger to sex, syntax and semantics (Boroditsky, 2003; pdf).
But as a non-native English speaker, it is never […]

A perfect example for teaching … days after the NewScientist story on dyslexics being slow to respond in driving simulations, someone claims that dyslexics can be pro drivers. One wonders, however, how many traffic signs on the Indi 500 track.

Formula One ace Jackie Stewart attacks slur on dyslexic drivers

By Tom Anderson and […]

I am surprised that this didn’t come first from LeapFrog. Erin, what are you doing there?!
The ultimate success of the toy depends on market forces, but
conceptually, there are a few things they need to address. [mouth shut
until a million dollar note is presented]

Fisher-Price, Scholastic Plan […]

"The ability to provide hours of
endless entertainment is what sets the DV-CP702 apart from the rest.
The exclusive 6-disc capability of this DVD/CD player lets …"
Nobody expects perfect grammar from on-line shopping sites. But
"hours of endless entertainment" struck me as … well, philosphical. It suggests that a finite hours of entertainment has an indefinitely lasting […]

This Reuters story came out on Jan 31. The full story requires $$, and
this is the longest summary I can find. It’s especially interesting to
put it together with the Larry Summers’ "sex scandal" lately.
I am puzzled by terms such as "intelligence-related gray/white matter,"
which I’ve never heard before. I’d thought that the gray/white
distinction […]

One of the well known characteristics of dyslexics is slower responses
to language and written stimuli. The study is a good demonstration of
this. The results are not surprising, but the implications to driving
are. The most interesting message is probably at the end of the story
– clearly different responses to what this means to driving.
[…]