Archive for the 'Linguistics' Category

09-09-12

Tags:Linguistics Being a non-native speaker of English, I wonder about the name of BBC’s World Have Your Say – why "have"? Is "world" plural? Or is this imperative? "World has your say" clearly sounds bad, but can anybody tell me why?

">BBC - World Have Your Say
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09-02-18

Tags:Computing Linguistics One of those things pop up in your mind after 1:30am:
So far as I know, no computer programming language has a counterfactual conditional statement:
IF_CF (A) Then_Would_Have_Been  B
Logically something like this is pretty straightforward to add: it’s not like we don’t know how to deal with modal logic (well, a lot less but […]

">Why are there no Counterfactual statements in computer languages?
»»» (Computing, Odds'n'Ends, Linguistics) | 0

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08-12-21

Tags:Linguistics psy145 Teaching Back in Sept this year BBC has a short story with professor John Wells on Should we relax English spelling rules?
Wells recalled times when he grew up, when ’show’ could be spelled as ’show’ or ’shew’. His proposal was not to standardize English spelling on a new platform, but to allow more […]

">BBC: Should we relax English spelling rules?
»»» (Teaching, Linguistics) | 0

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08-11-30

Tags:Linguistics spelling That’s how Ethan, 5.5 years, spelt STUPID. A few things are noteworthy.

 ST
In English the letter T in ST+V spelling represents something in between sounds /t/ and /d/. Some argue it’s underlyingly /t/, but becomes unaspirated when flanked between /s/ and a vowel. I guess it also contracts some of the voicing, too. An […]

">Stoapit

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08-11-08

Tags:Computing Linguistics Paperville psychology statistics Bob Port lists many interesting papers on this page in support of Rich Phonology, which I know little other than that it seems to emphasize on the richness (high dimensionality) of memory/representation of spken words (or do words exist if we are anti-segmental all the way?).
I am […]

">Rich Phonology: segments come from letters
»»» (Computing, Paperville, Psychology, Linguistics, Statstics) | 1

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08-11-05

Tags:Linguistics Paperville statistics A couple of interesting papers to augment probability with "perception" — I think that’s a misnomer, though.  The "perception" Zadeh talks about has little psychological reality. It refers to words, an expanded collection of modals. The direction of the pursue makes practical sense (as much as gHit counts makes linguistic sense). […]

">Probability + Perception + Fuzzy words = a new theory?
»»» (Paperville, Linguistics, Statstics) | 0

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08-10-31

Tags:Education Linguistics Paperville Research: Phonics abstracts Farrar, J., Ashwell, S. & Maag, L. (2005). The emergence of phonological awareness: Connections to language and theory of mind development. First Language, 25(2), 157-172. The emergence of phonological awareness was examined in a longitudinal study. Two issues were of particular interest: (1) the relationship between phonological […]

">The emergence of phonological awareness: Connections to language and theory of mind development
»»» (Paperville, Education, Linguistics) | 0

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08-10-18

Tags:Chinese English eye movement Linguistics orthography Paperville phonology psychology Research Looking at the title and abstract, I wonder why this one is published on JEP:HPP
Are phonological representations of printed and spoken language isomorphic? Evidence from the restrictions on unattested onsets. Pages 1288-1304 Berent, Iris Are […]

">Interesting pubs
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08-09-17

Tags:Linguistics Research I will be meeting with an independent study student tomorrow morning to go over some paper related to our spelling project. One of the papers is
The sbelling of sdops: Preliterate children’s spelling of stops after /s/ Authors: Hannam, Rachel; Fraser, Helen; Byrne, Brian1
Source: Reading and Writing, Volume 20, Number 4, June 2007 , pp. 399-412(14)
Abstract: […]

">The sbelling of sdops after /s/
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08-09-06

Tags:Cantonese Characters Chinese Linguistics Cantonese and other Southan Chinese dialects use characters that are not part of the official Chinese character set. In many cases they are invented quite recently, and the ways in which they are created are interesting.
An example is 冇, which means the opposite of 有 (to have, to possess). I […]

">有冇: nothing comes from something
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08-08-26

Tags:character Chinese Linguistics I left a bait in an earlier post 伊辛巴耶娃 to 伊娃 :
… Doesn’t matter if you don’t read Chinese — each character is always a syllable (except for 1 character, which I will not tell here; let me know if you know the answer).
Kevin at timelysnow.com wants to know the answer. […]

">瓩 - The only Chinese character pronounced as 2 syllables?
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08-08-26

Tags:Chinese Linguistics Following up the previous post on the disyllable preference of Chinese words, here’s another example:
The title of the following article reads : "22 champs talk about Phlying-fish and Bolt, who is greater; most choose the former"
Who is Phlying Fish?
 
We all have seen his face way too many times in the past […]

">论菲鱼
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08-08-18

Tags:Chinese Linguistics Chinese has shifted from a monosyllabic language to a mixture of mono- and bi-syllabic languages. The preferred phonological structure for new words is now bisyllabic. The on-going Beijing Olympics Games presents an unexpected opportunity to testify this.
伊辛巴耶娃 (in pinyin: yi-xin-ba-ye-wa or -va) is the official translation of Yelena Isinbayeva (Елена Гаджиевна Исинбаева), […]

">伊辛巴耶娃 to 伊娃
»»» (Odds'n'Ends, Linguistics) | 1

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08-07-30

Tags:Cuneiform History Linguistics Paperville Research symbol system writing system  
I’ve been reading The Invention of Cuneiform by Jean-Jacques Glassner, originally published Paris: Seuil, 2000, in series L’univers historique (ISBN 0-801807389-4), translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop.
I will reserve comments for later. Here’s some quotables from the […]

">The Invention of Cuneiform
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08-03-31

Tags:Linguistics paraorthography statistics Mark Liberman offers additional readings for a freshman who has a big ambition 
 
Language Log: Ask Language Log: Comparing the vocabularies of different languages
 
 If you’re interested in taking this further, here are a few inadequate suggestions:

My lecture notes on morphology from Linguistics 001.
The Natural Language Toolkit, and the associated book. You might start with Chapter 3, Words.
My lecture […]

">Ask Language Log: Comparing the vocabularies of different languages

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08-03-30

Tags:Linguistics psychology
Back in Sept 2007 Scientific American has an article on the potential evolution advantages of schizophrenia. The claim was that schizophrenia is a language disorder —  hmm…
It’s No Delusion: Evolution May Favor Schizophrenia Genes: Scientific AmericanCo-author Crespi says that a number of theories have been floating around regarding the persistence of schizophrenia’s genetic […]

">schizophrenia is a disorder of language?
»»» (Odds'n'Ends, Psychology, Linguistics) | 0

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08-03-24

Tags:Education eye movement Japanese Linguistics Research Nobuyuki and I are workign on a couple papers looking at word/phrase spaces in Japanese reading. Japanese typically do not put in spaces between words, although it’s standard practice before 2nd grade. How do they decide where to put in spaces in elementary texts?
nobuyuki’s research blog: […]

">Definition of BUNSETSU( phrase) in Japanese
»»» (Research, Education, Linguistics) | 1

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08-03-24

Tags:evolution language Linguistics Paperville Research Babel’s Dawn is filing a number of interesing reports from the Evolang conference. No time to comment on all, but here’s a partial list.

Babel’s Dawn: Words Are More Human than Syntax
Neanderthals Had Language
Recursion Can Be a "Side Effect"
"Words Are More Human than Syntax"
"Fossil Evidence of […]

">Babel’s Dawn: Evolang Conference Reports

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08-03-24

Tags:evolution language Linguistics Is being "symbol minded" (DeLoache, 2004) the same as having symbolic systems? I don’t see the connection from the following blog entry. 
Babel’s Dawn: Neanderthals Had Language
 
Neanderthals had language comparable to that ofHomo sapiens, Bordeaux-based archaeologistFrancisco D’Errico told participants in the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Saturday, March 15, 2008). 
 

 
… D’Errico based his claim […]

">Babel’s Dawn: Neanderthals Had Language

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08-03-14

Tags:Computing Linguistics The RASP System
 System OverviewRASP is a domain-independent, robust parsing system for English. For ease of installation, the system is distributed in the form of binaries for 3 widespread unix architectures (Intel-32bit and -64bit/Linux, and Sparc/Solaris), with source code for most of the modules. It is free for research purposes.RASP was originally developed on […]

">The RASP System
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