Angus Grieve-Smith

I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I’ve known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue.

What is “text” for a sign language?

Recently I’ve written two posts about bright resonance in response to Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter, “Sexy Baby Voice.” Bell describes “sexy baby voice” as having three characteristic features: “high pitch”, “vocal fry” and “slurring.” My first post supported Byron Ahn’s analysis that found that Bell’s “sexy baby voice” samples didn’t have reliably higher pitch than the non-“sexy baby voice” samples, and suggested that she’s probably talking

Youth, authority, gender and creaky voice

Angus Andrea Grieve-Smith

I could write – and have written – the past twenty years as a string of successes for my linguistics career: I have presented my work at many conferences on linguistics, digital humanities and literature, in several countries. My pioneering work in computational sign linguistics continues to be cited on a regular basis. In 2008 I was hired to teach linguistics at Saint John’s University, where I developed an introductory linguistics curriculum.

Everybody fronts

I’ve always been uncomfortable around historical re-enactors at museums – people who are walking around in period costume while visitors in modern clothes are browsing the exhibits.

I don&#8217;t want to chat with a machine

I’ve told you about one kind of category fight, accusing someone of a bait-and-switch and this week I came across an excellent example of another one. A blogger who goes by the alias of Doctor Nerdlove wants to protect the category of Socially Awkward Men from incursions by people who are just assholes. In this case, the Socially Awkward Men have established themselves as a disabled class and asked for accommodation.

Gatekeeping the creepers

In my previous post, I discussed the differences between existential and universal statements. In particular, the standard of evidence is different: to be sure that an existential statement is correct we only need to see one example, but to be sure a universal is correct we have to have examined everything. But what if we don’t have the time to examine everything, and we don’t have to be absolutely sure?

Estimating universals, averages and percentages

If you have an Android phone like me, you probably use Google Calendar. I like the way it integrates with my contacts so that I can schedule events with people. I like the idea of it integrating with my Google+ contacts to automatically create a calendar of birthdays that I don’t want to miss. There’s a glitch in that, but I’ve created a new app to get around it, called Selected Birthdays.

Introducing Selected Birthdays

For the past five years I’ve been working on a project, the Digital Parisian Stage, that aims to create a representative sample of Nineteenth-century Parisian theater.

The Digital Parisian Stage is now on GitHub

It’s that time again! A bunch of

 really eager

computer scientists have a prototype that will translate sign language to speech! They’ve got a

 really cool video

that you

 just gotta see

! They win an award! (from a panel that includes no signers or linguists). Technology news sites go wild!

Ten reasons why sign-to-speech is not going to be practical any time soon.

I just got back from the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Ames, Iowa, and I’m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be

 said

. You may think you know

 said

. It’s the past participle of

 say

. You’ve said it yourself many times.

“Said” for 2016 Word of the Year

Imagine that you belong to a category, like “tourist.” You fit all the necessary conditions for membership in that category: you are traveling to another part of the world for recreation. But that category has a bad reputation – literally a bad name. What do you do? You split the category.

Category fights: Splitting

I’ve never been to Baltimore, but I would like to visit one day. I’ve never watched “The Wire,” but I’ve seen a couple of John Waters movies. I also went on a date once with a woman from Baltimore.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Baltimore

When I think of Los Angeles accents, I think of three things: Chicanos, surfers and Valley Girls. I’ve only been to Southern California once, so these have all come to me filtered through caricatures in movies, television and music. The exaggerated Chicano accent performed by Cheech Marin.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Los Angeles

I’m pleased that so many people found my last post on forgetting and language change interesting. Ariel Cohen-Goldberg in particular noted this about forgetting:  Cohen-Goldberg is absolutely right, and this stems from forgetting. The more frequently we do something, the more likely we are to do it the same way, without forgetting how.

Forgetting the infrequent things

I just got back from attending my second meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association. My experience at both conferences has been very positive: friendly people, interesting talks, good connections. But I would like to see a little more linguistics at NeMLA, and better opportunities for linguists to attend. I’ve talked with some of the officers of the organization about this, and they have told me they welcome more papers from linguists.

Including linguistics at literary conferences

The Problem   You’ve probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the woods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on running shoes. The other says, “Why are you wasting time? Even with running shoes you’re not going to outrun that animal!” The other replies, “I don’t have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun you.”  For me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue about climate change.

I just have to outrun your theory

This showed up today in the comments that Akismet flagged for spam:

One way of generating spam

I was feeling very nervous, sitting there in Professor Bigshot’s office. I had just been accepted into the PhD program, and was visiting the department to get to know everyone and see if it was the right fit. I hadn?t applied to any other PhD program. If I didn’t go here, I probably wouldn’t get a PhD. You can figure out pretty easily who Professor Bigshot is, if you care. I guess you could say I’m giving her a pseudonym for SEO reasons.

What Professor Bigshot said

Even if you didn’t grow up in a hippie town like I did, you may very well like to eat natural foods. If I weren’t allergic I would eat natural chicken; everyone says it’s healthy, right? Not so fast!

How to get to the bottom of category fights

Language change has been the focus of my research for over twenty years now, so when I taught second semester linguistics at Saint John’s University, I was very much looking forward to teaching a unit focused on change.  I had been working to replace constructed examples with real data, so I took a tip from my natural language processing colleague Dr. Wei Xu and turned to SparkNotes.

The History of English through SparkNotes

This is the sixth post in a series inspired by Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter “Sexy Baby Voice.” In previous posts last year, I’ve covered the three key features she uses to define this vocal style – bright resonance (which Bell refers to as “high pitch”), creaky voice (“vocal fry”) and legato articulation (“slurring”), and discussed the various ways that we can manipulate our vocal tracts to create or amplify bright or dark resonances.

Your athletic voice

Scene: a quietly bustling bistro in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement.

SERVER: Oui, vous désirez? PIXELBUDS: Yes, you desire? TOURIST: Um, yeah, I’ll have the steak frites. PIXELBUDS: UM, OUAIS, JE VAIS AVOIR LES FRITES DE STEAK SERVER: Que les frites? PIXELBUDS: Than fries? TOURIST: No, at the same time. PIXELBUDS: NON, EN MEME TEMPS SERVER: Alors, vous voulez le steak aussi? PIXELBUDS: DESOLE, JE N’AI PAS COMPRIS.

How Google’s Pixel Buds will change the world!

I was browsing through the Wikipedia page on relative pronouns and I found this table: Position With explicit relative pronoun With omitted relative pronoun In formal English Subject That’s the man [who ran away]. — That’s the man [who ran away]. Direct object That’s the man [who I saw yesterday]. That’s the man [I saw yesterday]. That’s the man [whom I saw yesterday]. Indirect object That’s the man [who I gave the letter to]. That’s the man [I

Nonstandard relative clauses

Viewers of

 the Crown

may have noticed a brief scene where Prince Charles practices Welsh by sitting in a glass cubicle wearing a headset.  Some viewers may recognize that as a language lab. Some may have even used language labs themselves. The core of the language lab technique is language drills, which are based on the bedrock of all skills training: mimicry, feedback and repetition.

A free, open source language lab app

When Timm, Laura, Elber and I first ran the @everytreenyc Twitter bot almost a year ago, we knew that it wasn’t actually sampling from a list that included every street tree in New York City. The Parks Department’s 2015 Tree Census was a huge undertaking, and was not complete by the time they organized the Trees Count! Data Jam last June. There were large chunks of the city missing, particularly in Southern and Eastern Queens.

And we mean really every tree!

What does it take to have an accent – or not to have one? I thought I had a great example of a Memphis accent when I discovered that Aretha Franklin was born there. But then I found out she moved away when she was two. I knew Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, a hundred miles away, but he lived most of his life in Memphis. Do either of them have a Memphis accent?

America’s Loveliest Accents: Memphis

Last month I wrote those words on a slide I was preparing to show to the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, as a part of a presentation of my Digital Parisian Stage Corpus. I was proud of having a truly representative sample of theatrical texts performed in Paris between 1800 and 1815, and thus finding a difference in the use of negation constructions that was not just large but statistically significant.

Sampling is a labor-saving device

In a recent post, I talked about one reason that the word “cisgender” was coined. I agree that it is a good idea to have ways of talking about people who aren’t trans without evoking a context of “real” or “normal” to imply that we are not legitimate or to highlight our minority status. If this were the case, something like “non-transgender men” might be enough. But many of the arguments for “cis” go beyond this.

Trans, cis and the default

C’est l’année 1810, et vous vous promenez sur les Grands Boulevards de Paris. Vous avez l’impression que toute la ville, voir même toute la France, a eu la même idée, et est venue pour se promener, pour voir les gens et se faire voir. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez? Vous arrivez à un théâtre, vous montrez un billet pour une nouvelle pièce, et vous entrez. La pièce commence. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez de la scène? Quels voix, quel langage?

Le Corpus de la scène parisienne

A few weeks ago I posted about “Sexy baby voice,” the topic of a chapter in Lake Bell’s audiobook about the culture and politics of voices.

Controlling the brightness of the voice

One thing I have to mention at this point: It’s okay to not like an accent. This is a matter of taste. You like what you like, and you dislike what you dislike. If you think an accent is ugly, or lovely, that’s completely your prerogative. On the other hand, patterns of likes and dislikes can be telling. If all the accents you dislike are from cities, maybe you’ve got something against cities or the people who live in them.

America’s Loveliest Accents: New York

Josef Fruehwald has some well-thought-out criticism of Gawker’s latest hate-fest, “America’s Ugliest Accent.” He concludes: “At the risk of coming off as a slacktivist, I’d encourage you all to be the change you want to see in the world, and say something nice about an accent today, even if it’s just your own.” I was actually thinking, as I looked at the Gawker bracket, how much I like some of these accents.

America’s loveliest accents: Boston

Recently I’ve written a few posts in response to the notion of “sexy baby voice” in Lake Bell’s latest audiobook.

Slurring sexy babies

Recently some guy tweeted “Seeing the Star Wars movies does not make you a Star Wars fan. Actual Star Wars fans have done some of the following…”  This is a great opportunity for me to talk about a particular kind of category fight: coercion. Over the past several years I’ve written about some things people try to do with categories: watchdogging, gatekeeping, pedantry, eclipsing and splitting.

Coercing with categories

Since I first encountered

 The Parisian Stage

, I’ve been impressed by the completeness of Beaumont Wicks’s life’s work: from 1950 through 1979 he compiled a list of every play performed in the theaters of Paris between 1800 and 1899. I’ve used it as the basis for my Digital Parisian Stage corpus, currently a one percent sample of the first volume (Wicks 1950), available in full text on GitHub.

On this day in Parisian theater

On Saturday I found out that Alan Hudson died. Alan was my doctoral advisor at the University of New Mexico until his retirement in 2005, and a source of support after that. I first met Alan when I visited the UNM Linguistics Department in 1997. Alan welcomed me into his office with a broad smile, and asked, “So Angus, have you made up your mind about whether you want to come here?”  “Well…” I said.

Remembering Alan Hudson

Last January I wrote that the purpose of phonetic transcription is to talk about differences in pronunciation. Last December I introduced accent tags, a fascinating genre of self-produced YouTube videos of crowdsourced dialectology and a great source of data about language variation. I put these together when I was teaching a unit on language variation for the second-semester Survey of Linguistics course at Saint John’s University.

Teaching language variation with accent tag videos

In January I wrote that I believe online learning is possible, but I have doubts about whether online courses are an adequate substitute for in-person college classes, let alone an improvement. One of those doubts concerns trust and intellectual honesty. Any course is an exchange. The students pay money to the college, the instructor gets a cut, and the students get something of value in return. What that something is can be disputed.

Online learning and intellectual honesty

Yesterday Tyler Schnoebelen posted an important warning to anyone who thinks translation is simple, by going through various translations of the quote “the stuff that dreams are made of” from the movie

 the Maltese Falcon

.  Unfortunately it’s even worse than he says, because the official French translation, at least, is not very good. One spring evening when I was in college in Paris I went out to see

 Casablanca

.

Making dreams and stuff

There’s been a lot of talk over the past several years about online learning. Some people sing its praises without reservation. Others claim that it doesn’t work at all. I have successfully learned over the internet and I have successfully taught over the internet. It can work very well, but it requires a commitment on the part of the teacher and the learner that is not always present.

Online learning: Definitely possible

I’m a regular watcher of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so in February I was looking forward to his take on “AI“ and the large language models and image generators that many people have been getting excited about lately. I was not disappointed: Oliver heaped a lot of much-deserved criticism on these technologies, particularly for the ways they replicate prejudice and are overhyped by their developers.

The supposed successes of AI

At the beginning of June I participated in the Trees Count Data Jam, experimenting with the results of the census of New York City street trees begun by the Parks Department in 2015. I had seen a beta version of the map tool created by the Parks Department’s data team that included images of the trees pulled from the Google Street View database. Those images reminded me of others I had seen in the @everylotnyc twitter feed.

@everytreenyc

Last month I went on a walk with my friend Ezra. It was his birthday, so we walked for almost two hours, drinking coffee, eating cinnamon rolls, and talking about semantics and coding. The funny thing is that Ezra lives on the West Coast and I live in New York, so we conducted our entire conversation by cell phone, with him walking through Ballard and Loyal Heights, and me walking through Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst.

Viewing in free motion

I am looking forward to presenting my Digital Parisian Stage corpus and the exciting results I’ve gotten from it so far at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics at Iowa State in September.

Printing differences and material issues in Google Books

I bought a nice little tablet at BestBuy, and I wanted to use it to test an Android app I’m developing. In order to do that, I have to connect the tablet to my Windows laptop and run something called ADB. Unfortunately, in order for ADB to connect to it, Windows needs to recognize it as an ADB device, and BestBuy hasn’t done the work to support that.

How to Connect an Insignia NS-15AT10 to ADB on Windows

Some people have come up with the word “cisgender” to refer to people who aren’t transgender, as an alternative to problematic terms like “normal,” “regular” and “real.” Some have gone beyond this and asked their allies to “identify as cis,” and even treat trans people as the default realization of their genders. As a trans person and a linguist, I disagree with these last two for a number of reasons.

Will “cisgender” work?

This is the fifth post in a series inspired by Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter “Sexy Baby Voice.” In previous posts I’ve covered the three key features she uses to define this vocal style – bright resonance (which Bell refers to as “high pitch”), creaky voice (“vocal fry”) and legato articulation (“slurring”), and discussed the various ways that we can manipulate our vocal tracts to create or amplify bright or dark resonances.

That is not your voice

I wrote recently that if you want to be confident in generalizing observations from a sample to the entire population, your sample needs to be representative. But maybe you’re skeptical. You might have noticed that a lot of people don’t pay much attention to representativeness, and somehow there are hardly any consequences for them. But that doesn’t mean that there are

 never

consequences, for them or other people.

Why I probably won’t take your survey

I wrote most of this post in June 2022, before a lot of us decided to try out Mastodon. I didn’t publish it because I despaired of it making a difference. It felt like so many people were set in particular practices, including not reading blog posts! My experience on Mastodon has been so much better than the past several years on Twitter. I think this is connected with how Twitter and Mastodon handle threads.

Dialogue and monologue in social media

A few days ago, Byron Ahn drew our attention to an excerpt from a new, six-hour audiobook, Inside Voice by Lake Bell, credited as an “actress/writer/director/producer.” Bell is a friend of author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell, and Gladwell agreed to serve as a kind of sounding board for Bell’s ideas about something she calls “sexy baby voice,” pointing to the voices of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian as paradigm examples of it. Gladwell, whose

Listen to the voices of the sexy babies

You may be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the global standard for representing speech sounds, ideally independent of the way those speech sounds may be represented in a writing system. Did you know that sign languages have similar standards for representing hand and body gestures? Unfortunately, we haven’t settled on a single notation system for sign languages the way linguists have mostly chosen the IPA for speech.

Fonts for Stokoe notation

The news these days is that “cisgender” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is a descriptive tool, so if people are using the word, the editors should put it in. But as a transgender person, I don’t like the word and I’m not happy people are using it.  Ben Zimmer had a nice writeup about the word in March.

Why some people like “cisgender”

In 1936,

 Literary Digest

magazine made completely wrong predictions about the Presidential election. They did this because they polled based on a bad sample: driver’s licenses and subscriptions to their own magazine. Enough people who didn’t drive or subscribe to

 Literary Digest

voted, and they voted for Roosevelt. The magazine’s editors’ faces were red, and they had the humility to put that on the cover.

Is your face red?

A few years ago I wrote about incorporating sign linguistics when I taught Introduction to Linguistics at Saint John’s University. The other course I taught most often was Introduction to Phonology. This course was required for our majors in Speech Pathology and Audiology, and they often filled up the class.

Teaching intro sign phonetics

I think it was an important move for linguists to divorce our field from aesthetics. There can be a science of taste, but science itself is not the arbiter of taste. It is not the place of linguists to judge accents or languages. Just as biologists study animals and plants that many people consider repugnant, linguists may study words and phrases that alarm or disgust people.  That said, objectivity doesn’t mean you have to like everything.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Pittsburgh

I’ve talked in the past about two kinds of category fights, one involving accusations of bait-and-switch tactics, another where the accusation is free riding. Often these aspects of the fight are obscured or denied, and the conflict is instead presented as between a right way and a wrong way to think about the categories.

Sometimes bugs are not insects

I’m very excited about a new face mask I designed.  You can order it online! I was inspired by two tweets I saw within minutes of each other on July Fourth.  First, Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a professor at Aix-Marseille, posted a picture of  his colleague Pascal Roméas wearing a “triangle vocalique” T-shirt designed by the linguistics YouTuber Romain Filstroff, known as Linguisticae.

Show your vowels and support Doctors Without Borders!

Over the past few years I’ve realized that there are a lot of scientists who have a different view of science than I do, and most of them don’t even know about my way of thinking. But my way of thinking about science   Instrumentalism – is cool! I’m writing this post to explain what Instrumentalism is, and why I prefer it to other ways of thinking about science.

I’m an instrumentalist. Are you one too?

John Murphy of Georgia State published an article about using non-native speakers, and specifically the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, as models for teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) or as a foreign language (EFL). Mura Nava tweeted a blog post from Robin Walker connecting Murphy’s work to similar work by Kenworthy and Jenkins, Peter Roach and others.

Speech role models

Woman Laughing Alone with Word Salad

In the wake of the death of Marion Barry, the former Mayor of Washington, DC, one of the most striking revelations was how many people had believed at one time that he was actually a husband-and-wife couple named “Mary and Barry.” Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, tweeted about this misconception and then discovered that lots of other people had also mentioned it.  The sociolinguist David Bowie mentioned that as a child he thought

The positional neutralization of Marion Barry

I got a paper rejected from a generativist conference a few years ago. A generativist friend of mine said, “Why did you bother submitting your paper to that conference? You knew they were going to reject it.” I said, “Well, the conference was in town, so I figured I’d send something in anyway.”  My friend proceeded to tell me a story from her early grad school days about reviewing papers for her school’s signature conference.

Nobody’s Boy

Since July 2016 I have been working as Associate Application Systems in the Teaching and Learning Applications group at Columbia University. I have developed several apps, including this Photo Roster, an LTI plugin to the Canvas Learning Management System. The back end of the Photo Roster is written in Python and Flask.

The Photo Roster, a web app for Columbia University faculty

Soft or hard “g”? It’s been in the news lately in relation to the file format “gif,” which is currently enjoying a renaissance as a new generation discovers its usefulness in creating annoying animations. This week the “creator” of the Graphical Interchange Format weighed in that he’s always pronounced it with a soft “g.”  Arika Okrent gives some historical context on the sources of “g” words in English.

The politics of soft “g”

I enjoyed Miriam Posner’s keynote address at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference. It was far from the only talk last week that was animated by a desire for justice and compassion, and it was good to see that desire given such prominence by the organizers and applauded by the attendees. As a linguist I also welcomed Posner’s focus on categorization and language diversity.

Challenges for radical categorization

There’s a stereotypical “Southern” accent you’ll hear in mid-twentieth century movies and television, that owes more to Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh’s artificial accents than to anything that ever came out of the mouth of any real-life Southerner. It may bear a passing resemblance to the accents of real Coastal Southern gentry like Fritz Hollings, but it’s been used to portray people from all regions and social classes of the South.

America’s Loveliest Accents: New Orleans

Shortly after I posted the first of America’s Loveliest Accents, Matthew Harrison tweeted, “This really is lovely. I hope you do some Southern accents!” As I told him at the time, the last seven of these sixteen cities are in the South, if you define the South broadly enough to include Baltimore (#16).  It’s hard to tell whether New York accents get more hate than Southern ones, but it’s close.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Tallahassee

One concept that I’ve found extremely valuable in recent years is the notion of “punching up.” I first encountered it in the context of rape jokes, but it applies to jokes about race and ethnicity, and really any joke that affects different groups of people disproportionately.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Minneapolis

Earlier this year I talked about Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, which Rosch interpreted as radial categories. I’ve also talked about how categorization is used in arguments, with a layer of “category fight” superimposed on an underlying conflict, and often obscuring that underlying conflict. I’ve used this in class with my students when we’re studying semantics.

Categorizing people

My friend Dan Parvaz, who is a registered American Sign Language interpreter, posted yesterday on Facebook that it was Interpreter Appreciation Day. Further investigation reveals that this day is intended specifically for sign language interpreters, but spoken-language interpreters work hard and deserve appreciation too.

Appreciating interpreters

I was struck by this tweet from Lynne Murphy today:  For those who don’t know, Lynne is an American linguist who lives in England and teaches at the University of Sussex, and blogs regularly about differences between British and American varieties of English.

She is calling you “dude”

It’s well known that some languages have multiple national standards, to the point where you can take courses in either Brazilian or European Portuguese, for example. Most language instruction services seem to choose one variety per language: when I studied Portuguese at the University of Paris X-Nanterre it was the European variety, but the online service Duolingo only offers the Brazilian one.

Imagining an alternate language service

In a comment, Candy asked: Can we also please talk about how “cis” is used as a term of abuse against feminists? As in, “shut up privileged cis bitches?” It’s the bit where trans activism begins to overlap with Men Rights Activism.

In a comment, Candy asked: The use of “shut up” and “bitches” in Candy’s (unattested) example is definitely abuse, but in this dismissive context, “cis” is not functioning as abuse but

 othering

. It positions the referent as an outsider who has no standing in the group, and possibly a threat.

Othering, dehumanization and abuse

There’s an idea that dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are mutually unintelligible. John McWhorter had a nice piece in the Atlantic where he summarized the evidence against this idea. There are two factors in mutual intelligibility that McWhorter does not mention: familiarity and power. Ultimately we can place any pair of language varieties on a continuum of closeness.

On mutual intelligibility and familiarity

In my last post, I gave Prince as an example of a Minneapolis native with a lovely accent. Prince is black, and you can hear it in his voice because there are at least two different kinds of Minneapolis accent, due in part to segregation. But he doesn’t just have a black accent, he has a Minneapolis black accent. There’s also a Minneapolis white accent, and maybe a Minneapolis Hmong accent too.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Chicago

In his post about Gawker’s “America’s Ugliest Accent” series, Joseph Fruehwald notes, “Predictably, the kinds of accents and languages which get dumped on the most, and get branded the ‘ugliest,’ always wind up being spoken by socially disadvantaged people.” And that’s really the ugliest thing about this Gawker gimmick: it’s pretty much the epitome of punching down.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Scranton

I’ve written about default assumptions before: how for example people in different parts of the English-speaking world have different assumptions about what they’ll get when they order “tea” or a “burger.” In the southern United States, the subcategory of “iced tea” has become the default, while in the northern US it’s “hot tea,” and in England it’s “hot tea with milk.” But even though iced tea is the default “tea” in the South, everyone there

Eclipsing

There were a couple of years when I was tremendously confused about pragmatics and information structure. I learned a lot from reading Knud Lambrecht’s 1994 book

 Information Structure and Sentence Form

. And one of the most useful things I learned was that people use the word “topic” to mean several different things, some of which are mutually exclusive.

Know your topics

Charles Fillmore died in February. I only met the man once, briefly, but his work has been a great inspiration to me over the years, particularly frame semantics. Last week I came across this sign above, advertising a bar. The word “screwdriver” is ambiguous, because it can mean a hand tool to turn screws, or a drink made with vodka and orange juice. Fillmore’s frames help us to explore and understand that ambiguity.

Not a real screwdriver?  Frames and ambiguity

Slides from my contribution to the roundtable “Culture, Identity, Diversity: The Challenge of Multicultural Classes” at the Northeast Modern Languages Association, April 5, 2014.

Teaching Multicultural Americans about Multicultural France

Recently I’ve talked about the different standards for existential and universal claims, how we can use representative samples to estimate universal claims, and how we know if our representative sample is big enough to be “statistically significant.” But I want to add a word of caution to these tests: you can’t get statistical significance without a representative sample.

You can’t get significance without a representative sample

The American linguist Lauren Hall-Lew, currently living in Edinburgh, was musing on Twitter recently about how both

 Scotch

and

 Oriental

are considered offensive when categorizing people, but not offensive when describing alcohol or rugs. Her main point is valid and very important: as I’ve discussed before, emotions can run very high when discussing how to categorize people, this is because so much more is at stake.

The Scotch Referendum

In my post last week I talked about the importance of representative samples for making universal statements, including averages and percentages. But how big should your sample be? You don’t need to look at everything, but you probably need to look at more than one thing. How big a sample do you need in order to be reasonably sure of your estimates?  One of the pioneers in this area was a mysterious scholar known only to the public as Student.

How big a sample do you need?

This weekend the New York

 Times

Styles section ran one of their periodic stories about kids growing up and moving to the suburbs, and changing both themselves and the suburbs in the process. A while back the suburb in question (more of an exurb) was Rosendale, and this time it was Hastings-on-Hudson.

In a Wittgensteinian sort of way

The spectacle of two bilingual Presidential candidates arguing in Spanish last week reminded me of the Twitter feed, “Miguel Bloombito,” created by Rachel Figueroa-Levin to mock our former Mayor’s Spanish for the amusement of her friends. I may be coming late to the party here, but Bloombito is still tweeting, and was recently mentioned by one of my fellow linguists.

The Mayor’s speech

When I wrote about my son’s use of “they” pronouns to refer to a single, specific person, I mentioned how there are people who want to be referred to with “they” or another set of gender-neutral pronouns because they don’t want to be identified by a gender. This change is also happening, but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. A few months ago I got into a small argument on Facebook.

Both of them?

In a couple of recent posts I talked about the idea of speech role models for language learning, specifically on fluent, clear non-native speakers providing more accessible models for students learning after the teenage years. I ended with a caution against “cloning” a single non-native speaker, raising the specter of a class of students who all come out speaking English like Javier Bardem.

Choose your Own Speech Role Model

In a recent post I talked about how the same category (“tea,” for example) can have different default assumptions for different people. This is actually a very big deal, one that people have lost their lives over. For such a heated topic it receives relatively little attention in semantics. These default assumptions matter because they’re an important part of the way we use categories.

Default assumptions about sesame seeds

We talk about “Southern” accents, but dialectologists distinguish at least two major dialect groups: South and South Midland, sometimes known as “Upper South” and “Lower South.” The different histories of the Coastal and Mountain South are presented in

 Albion’s Seed

, David Hackett Fischer’s accessible history of early British migration to North America.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Louisville

There’s been some discussion of prescriptivism on various linguistics blogs lately (Kory Stamper has links). The prescriptivism in question is definitely annoying, but I think everyone misses the mark a bit.

The humble prescriptivist

In my post about the Memphis accent, I discussed how the Mountain and Coastal (white) Southern dialects have very distinct origins. So why do they sound “the same” to many people? In part it’s because they’ve become more similar over the years. At first it was the Mountain South imitating the Coast.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Charleston

It’s happened to me too: I’m angry, or upset, or excited about something. I go on Twitter. I’ve got stuff to say. It’s more than will fit in the 140-character limit, but I don’t have the time or energy to write a blog post. So I just write a tweet. And then another, and another. I’ve seen other people doing this, and I’m fine with it. But for a while now I’ve seen people doing something more planned, numbering their tweets.

Shelter from the tweetstorm

I’ve written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false. If you haven’t tried this way of looking at science, I highly recommend it! But if theories are tools, what are they used for? What makes a theory more or less useful?

Theories are tools for communication

My friend Josh was puzzled to see that the City of New York offers videos of some of its documents, translated from the original English into American Sign Language, on YouTube. I didn’t know of a good, short explainer online, and nobody responded when I asked for one on Twitter, so I figured I’d write one up.  The short answer is that ASL and English are completely different language, and knowing one is not that much help learning the other.

Why do people make ASL translations of written documents?

People say you should stand up for what you believe in. They say you should look out for those less fortunate, and speak up for those who don’t get heard. They say that those of us who come from marginalized backgrounds, like TBLG backgrounds for example, but have enough privilege to be out in relative safety should speak up for those who don’t have that privilege.

On being a public linguist

I’ve got great news! I have now released LanguageLab, my free, open-source software for learning languages and music, to the public on GitHub. I wish I could tell you I’ve got a public site up that you can all use for free. Unfortunately, the features that would make LanguageLab easy for multiple users to share one server are later in the roadmap. There are a few other issues that also stand in the way of a massive public service.

How to set up your own LanguageLab

Last week I talked about how high-frequency words and phrases resist analogical change. This entrenchment happens because analogical change is driven by forgetting, and it’s harder to forget something that you’ve said a lot. In this post I want to talk about a different effect of frequency, the reduction effect, where high-frequency words and phrases get shortened and simplified.  We see reduction in all the words and phrases we say most often.

The Reduction Effect

You might be familiar with Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke tucked this away in a footnote without explanation, but it fits in with the discussion of magic in Chapter III of James Frazer’s magnum opus

 The Golden Bough

. These two works have shaped a lot of my thoughts about science, technology and the way we interact with our world.

Indistinguishable from magic

Language is not just spoken and written, and even though I’ve been working mostly on spoken languages for the past fifteen years, my understanding of language has been tremendously deepened by my study of sign languages. At the beginning of the semester I always asked my students what languages they had studied and what aspects of language they wanted to know more about, and they were always very interested in sign language.

Teaching sign linguistics in introductory classes

When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe “the pronunciation” of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.

Technology and language