Blog Profile / Literal Minded
| URL : | http://literalminded.wordpress.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Linguistics | |
| Posts on Regator: | 397 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.5 | |
| Archived Since: | February 24, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
A Few Links
Stan Carey has introduced me to the new blog Caxton. I’ve been browsing through some of the more recent entries, on topics such as reflexives and whether relative that is a relative pronoun, and I’ll be putting it on the blogroll. Various news outlets have been picking up a story about how some linguists have […]
There’s Only So …
Almost seven years ago, I was cutting up some chicken fingers for Adam, and my wife dared to question my chicken-finger-cutting skills, asking if I was sure I was cutting it into small enough pieces. As I told her at the time: There’s only so small I can cut it. In the six years since [...]
Vegetarian-Fed
Doug and Adam and I watched Food, Inc. a month or so ago. I learned that the main reason for all these E. coli contamination scares and subsequent beef recalls we keep having is that a lot more E. coli grows in bovine digestive tracts when cows are fed corn instead of grass. If ranchers [...]
Bad Habits
I saw a magazine cover that had a teaser for an article by Dr. Oz. The list of things I could learn in his “Healthy-Life Handbook” included “Facts You Must Know,” “Tests You Need Most,” and this: Bad Habits to Break Let’s see, what would be a bad habit to break? Getting some exercise every [...]
Pillaged for Dead
Time for a few more right-node wrapping coordinations that I’ve been accumulating. The most recent one, the one that completed the trio I’m posting today, I got via an online issue of the University of Texas alumni assocation’s newsletter. You’ll hear it in this video created by Jon Cozart, a UT theatre sophomore. He sings [...]
Comparative Correlatives Part III
All right, so in my last post I was talking about comparative correlative structures, sentences like The more I learn, the less I know, and more specifically, comparative correlatives like this one: The fewer companies who store your credit card information … (link) In this example, the comparative phrase the fewer companies is linked (by [...]
I Got Laboved
Bill Labov came to visit Ohio State University this week. This is the guy who, 50 years ago, began to answer what was then a 100-year-old question: What is the origin of the sound changes that run through a language, changing entire vowel systems, collapsing two phonemes into one, splitting one phoneme into two? More [...]
Let’s Diagram the Oath of Office!
Just in time for tomorrow’s inauguration ceremony, but a little bit late for the actual swearing in that took place today, here is the presidential oath of office, as written in the Constitution, put into a tree diagram just for you! Over the years, I’ve used the PHP Syntax Tree Drawer to make my diagrams, [...]
Correlatively Comparatively Speaking, Part II
On Fritinancy, Nancy Friedman commented on a poster for a walk for breast cancer. Here’s the poster, lifted from Nancy’s blog post: Nancy’s reaction: As I see it, the line needs a second relative pronoun to be properly parallel in structure: “The more of us who walk, the more of us who survive.” She wanted [...]
Anti-Passive! It’s Like a Passive for Ergative Languages!
Over the weekend, I speculated on how English might work as an ergative language. Today, on National Grammar Day, I’m taking it a step further into the reversed grammar of ergative languages, to show what might happen if you tried to use the passive voice in ergative English. What would that even look like, when [...]
Ergative English
As National Grammar Day approaches, I’ve been thinking about one way in which the grammar of some languages can be mind-bendingly different from the grammar of English. Specifically, I’ve been wondering what it would be like if English were an ergative language. Imagine this. Imagine that in a sentence like She kissed me or I [...]
I Got Laboved
> Bill Labov came to visit Ohio State University this week. This is the guy who, 50 years ago, began to answer what was then a 100-year-old question: What is the origin of the sound changes that run through a language, changing entire vowel systems, collapsing two phonemes into one, splitting one phoneme into two? [...]
Man Accused of Assaulting Officer, K9 Indicted
My wife showed me a nice crash blossom yesterday. It went like this: Mentally filling in the usual missing pieces of headline syntax, I arrived at this interpretation: A Delaware County man is accused of assaulting an officer and a K9 has been indicted. My wife and I agreed that that really sucked for the [...]
Make Sure and What?
Ben Zimmer passed an interesting coordination my way, from Buzzfeed, from an article on a new website called Agency Wank, which “is collecting the wankiest, cringiest copy lines from ad agency websites”: Make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank. It’s updated daily. Something about the phrase is a little odd. Not actually bad, but [...]
Linkfest
The title of this post as it sat in my drafts folder was “October Linkfest”. But you know what? I don’t think I want to wait nine months to share these links with you, so here they are now! From the folks who brought you COCA and COHA, and created user-friendly interfaces to the BNC [...]
Let’s Diagram the Oath of Office!
Just in time for tomorrow’s inauguration ceremoney, but a little bit late for the actual swearing in that took place today, here is the presidential oath of office, as written in the Constitution, put into a tree diagram just for you! Over the years, I’ve used the PHP Syntax Tree Drawer to make my diagrams, [...]
Adjective, Participle, or Gerund?
In my last post, I talked about present participles that aren’t adjectives, in examples such as are frightening the cats or is running for his life. In this post, I’m going to follow the practice of CGEL and refer to these simply as present participles. In my last post, I also talked about present participles [...]
Very Frightening
Life, as we know, is full of tough decisions. Participles are often described as “verbal adjectives,” but recently I was called on to be more specific with a participle: was it a verb, or an adjective? (Sorry, I can’t tell you why I had to do that; it’s TOP SECRET.) In high school, I was [...]
New Development for Backformed Kudo
A couple of years ago, in a post about the backformation of the Boy Scouting-related singular noun Webelo from Webelos, I mentioned the similar backformation of kudo from the Greek borrowing kudos. Here are a couple of examples from COCA (the source of all the other examples in this post, except as noted): And there [...]
Christmas Codas
During some of the Advent church services in the past month, and the Christmas Eve service earlier this week, I’ve had occasion to be reminded of a phonotactic constraint that, evidently, wasn’t so hard and fast when a lot of our classic Christmas music was written. Specifically, I’m talking about syllables that end with [vn], [...]