linguistics
Something that’s stuck with me in social software design is the importance of selecting verbs. This notion appeals to the linguist in me, but I truly believe that it’s a really significant step in the process of design. In Jyri Engestrom’s superb, and in some ways canonical, work on social objects, defining verbs is one [...]
The Guardian editorial this morning (“In praise of … the rule of three”) reminded me of a memorable lesson I had at school about linguistic devices used in political speeches. (It was probably this kind of lesson which prompted me to later do a degree in Linguistics.) Here’s a quick list of the patterns I [...]
Almost every sentence of this story is misleading: Parrot’s oratory stuns scientists. A parrot with a fairly above-average ability to mimic human language, no doubt after years of training by a dedicated owner, is entertaining, but not ground-shattering, and no reason for any scientists to be stunned or have to revise any theories. The claim [...]
Fiona and I have been trying to do a bit of a clearout, and as part of that we decided to see if we could get rid of some old academic textbooks, which have been sitting on our shelves pointlessly for a few months (or in my case, a year). As students are only just [...]
I saw this story – Cows also ‘have regional accents’ – a couple of weeks ago, and didn’t give it much thought. However, it’s just been pointed out to me by a friend that the report was written by Prof. John Wells, who is one of my ex-lecturers in linguistics at UCL! Luckily, we never [...]
Every now and again you come across a Wikipedia article that no other site would bother to write or maintain. The one example of this I just spotted is List of scandals with “-gate” suffix. The use of ‘-gate’ as suffix to name a scandal is one of those odd linguistic word games that don’t [...]
Via a link from Tom Coates, I started reading about the Pirahã people people on Wikipedia, and it’s pretty interesting. Then yesterday’s Independent contained an in-depth article – Unlocking the secret sounds of language: Life without time or numbers – on the subject. As someone who studied a Linguistics degree, the news that there’s a [...]
Matt Webb has written a lovely piece about ‘er’, comparing the meta-linguistics meaning of it when uttered verbally (which he pins down pretty accurately), with the ‘undo’ key on the keyboard.
Tags are hot. If you don’t know what they are, check out this and this and this. Another website that has tags is 43 things and its sister site 43 places. They know me well, I got them some press a while back (all publicity is good publicity). Anyway, onto the point of this post, [...]
I graduated from my degree, a BA Linguistics at UCL, this summer (with a 2:1). It feels a bit weird to have come back from something so academic, into a world which barely understands what linguistics is. So, over the next few weeks, I plan to publish some of the essays that I ploughed so [...]