Category Archives: Linguistics

Of dicks and doves: Team America cognitive semireview

YouTube – Team America Finale Speech PhatGun (3 months ago) HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA SO TRUE!!! Tomster22 (19 hours ago) Neo-Cons = Dicks, Peacenicks = Pussies, Islamo-Fascists = Assholes AerisRocks (2 months ago) lol! Thats a great metaphor they used…assholes want us to … Continue reading

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Analogies in public discourse: Negotiation of Frames and Hypostasis of Channels

Buzz Out Loud: CNET’s podcast of indeterminate length on CNET.com [click here to listen to clip] recently featured this fascinating discussion of analogies. A caller suggests an analogy and the hosts discuss both the aptness of the analogy itself as … Continue reading

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Local grammars and space exploration

One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,â€? they heard him say as he dropped from the ladder of his spacecraft to make the first human footprint … Continue reading

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Language awareness as part of linguistic competence

‘Google’ becomes an official verb – ZDNet UK News Though you may have been “googling” people for years, the verb you were using was technically slang, until recently. In fact, many regularly used tech words are just now getting the … Continue reading

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Rationality and immigration

English is Spoken Here – Yahoo! News The second dumbest statement in the debate over Senate legislation establishing English as the national language came from Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), who said it was needlessly divisive. ADVERTISEMENT Wait. A law that … Continue reading

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Linguistic nationalism and the USA

CNN.com – ‘National’ or ‘common’? Senate ponders what to call English – May 19, 2006 WASHINGTON (AP) — Whether English is America’s “national language” or its national “common and unifying language” was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate. The … Continue reading

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Prejudice, shared meanings, local grammars and Google as a resource for research

The Prejudice Map The Prejudice Map According to Google, people in the world are known for… Here’s an interesting ‘mash up’ of Google’s API that supposedly answers the question above. It uses a very simple Google query as in http://www.google.com/search?q=”germans+are+known+for+*” … Continue reading

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Self-organization of iconic linguistic items

The Aargh Page # Not surpisingly, “argh” is much more frequent than any of the alternatives, and the items with fewer ‘a’s or ‘r’s are more frequent than their longer neighbors. # However, there are high-frequency islands, even way out … Continue reading

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Nature of the predictions genre

On The Media– NAMING RIGHT The key variables that differentiated the titles that had been number-one bestsellers from the titles that had failed to be were whether the title was literal or figurative, the word type of the first word, … Continue reading

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News reporting as a cognitive (speech) act

ABC News: Sharon Reportedly Moves One of His Hands The headline is the only thing of interest here. It is an example of several things. On the one hand, it shows how easily a person’s personal tragedy can be abstracted … Continue reading

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