History of English in 10 minutes

Has this one hit the language blogs?



Big tip of the era-appropriate headwear to John from the Literacy Blog.

NSF Lingiustics Program under threat

Many readers of this blog are members of the Linguistic Society of America, so will have gotten this already, but it warrants posting, if only as a reminder. Just unbelievable, the depth of this attack on scientific research of all kinds: trying to eliminate the entire directorate for Social, Behaviorial and Economic Sciences at NSF.


Dear Colleagues,

The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice & Science (CJS) is considering changing the 2012 appropriation to eliminate the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate at the NSF, which includes the Linguistics Program. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), a coalition to which the LSA belongs supporting Federal funding for the social sciences, is encouraging its members to write to their House Representatives and Senators, urging the House to continue to support the human sciences at NSF. Having had the privilege of serving recently as one of the Assistant Directors of the NSF, heading up the SBE directorate, I want to endorse COSSA's request, believing that eliminating SBE would be disastrous for the human sciences in the US and for linguistics in particular.

So the LSA is now encouraging its members to write to their House Representatives and US Senators, ideally before the CJS Subcommittee meeting on 7 July, or before the full House Appropriations Committee meeting on 13 July, and at least before the floor discussion scheduled for the week of 25 July. You may want to copy Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf R-VA and Ranking Member Chakah Fattah D-PA and perhaps other members of the Subcommittee (http://www.appropriations.house.gov/Subcommittees/Subcommittee/?IssueID=34794) and Appropriations Committee Chair Harold Rogers (R-KY) and Ranking Member Norm Dicks (D-WA) (http://www.appropriations.house.gov). You can find contact information for your representative using the “Write Your Representative” feature at https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml, and you will find a list of Senators, sortable by state, at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

We all lead busy lives and if you prefer to send something more or less ready made I suggest something along the lines of the letter available at http://www.lsadc.org/info/NSFSBEletter.pdf. You may copy and paste the text from this letter (make sure the formatting has copied appropriately) and if you have the opportunity to elaborate and to tell your representatives something about our field, you may want to address one or more of the following points:

• a. some of us study language as a branch of biology (biolinguistics), in such a way that the field has become a lead science within the cognitive sciences more broadly and within emerging neuroscience.
• b. much work in linguistics feeds work on applied linguistics, which is the basis for the major worldwide industry of second language teaching.
• c. with the development of new communication technologies, work in computational linguistics has been playing an increasing role in the development of new technologies as we seek more effective automated techniques of text analysis, including machine translation.
• d. work in linguistics has become important in developing therapies for aphasia and language disorders in patients suffering from strokes, Alzheimer's and other diseases.
• e. study of language variation has been instrumental in thwarting the extermination of some endangered languages and in addressing social and political issues in matters of language use.
• f. work on the acquisition of language, both first and second language acquisition, has played a leading role in the learning sciences generally.
• g. linguists have been funded by directorates such as Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education & Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering, large-scale cross-directorate programs like Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), and more focused inter-directorate programs like CreativeIT and Social Computational Systems (SoCS); none of this would happen without SBE and the Linguistics Program.

Support will be particularly valuable if your representatives are from the Republican party. Furthermore, you might strengthen your argument by pointing to NSF-supported work being conducted at a university in the representative's area.


David W. Lightfoot, PhD
Past President, Linguistic Society of America
Professor of Linguistics,
Director, Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science,
Director, Communication, Culture & Technology Program, Georgetown University

[N + V-ing]

As I was reading an article in today's NYT, the following sentence got me thinking about constituents of the structure [N+V-ing]: "Women driving remains a sensitive issue in Saudi Arabia." In true N+V nominal compounds in Germanic languages, as far as I'm aware, the noun is (nearly?) always an object; SUBJ+V compounds sound odd (almost certainly due to subject-object asymmetry and the structure of the VP). Prosody is helpful here to show that apparent compounds like "women driving" are in fact not compounds at all; cf. ['women 'driving] (two phonological words) vs. ['truck driving] (one). So the -ing form in a constituent like "women driving" must be a complement or adjunct modifying the head noun (as in this very sentence). It's cool when a subtle clue from outside syntax sheds light on a syntactic structure. Image is from here.

Law language and hyperformalism

Been corresponding with colleagues in the Law School, who are wondering whether …

there is a special word for talking about hyperformalism in law .... you know, where the law gets so technical that it is actually undoing what it was put in place to do.

I don't know the answer, but I bet our readers (1) will and (2) can invent better answers.

Let the games begin!

British English Dialects in the Popular Media

Regular followers of this blog include a lot of folks interested in patterns of regional variation in language, including English. The Economist has an interesting article on the robust health of British English dialects (at least on the phonetic level). It also refers to the sociophonetic work of Kevin Watson and Paul Kerswill at the University of Lancaster. The very nice graphic at left is taken from the article.

Wisconsin politics

Here's a good recent statement about where our state is at politically. It's partisan, to be sure, but smart. Going to be an interesting day, week, summer ...

Lexical Morphology Joke!!!

Last semester I taught intro to morphology, and one of the things we do in that class is go over the basics of Lexical Morphology. And in the course of that we talk about fun stuff like bookstore vs. *books-store, mice-infested vs. *rats-infested, and so on. So I was sitting around with a bunch of non-linguists, and we started talking about how every place has a place that they make fun of. e.g. the US in general has Polack jokes, although where my cousin Kate grew up in northern Wisconsin they were all Belgian jokes (really). And of course Canada has its Newfie jokes. One person said that when they lived in Pittsburgh, everything was West Virginia jokes. And he proceeded to tell us the following West Virginia joke (apologies to anyone from W VA; this is mention, not use): Q: How do you know that the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia? A: Because otherwise it would be called a teethbrush. !!! I just sat there with my head exploding for a while, and then offered to give them a half-hour lecture on the topic, which to my shock, they turned down.

lol update

I was kinda starting to miss lol, without quite knowing it, until a young linguist, Tanner S., took a look at the development of acronyms and initialisms in recent American English (unpublished manuscript). Some of the data on lol and related terms is pretty cool:

lol-worthy, lolable, lolacaust, lolcano, lollercoaster, lolrus
roflcopter, roflsaurus

A few compounds I knew about (lolcat, etc.) and I'd heard some of these blends (though I googled lolrus to see what parts of the story I might be missing). And I had heard it as a verb and as an interjection, but hadn't particularly thought about it as a noun:

A picture is worth 1000 lolz.

Gee, maybe it hasn't ruined the language after all.

Image from here.

Fitzwalkerstan Liberation Movement

I get that send around or posting pics of people isn't always a good thing, but one of our contributors passed along this, the latest from Walkerville, the thriving tent community around the Capitol:

The movement will soon take over the state, I hope. Back to linguistics soon ...

Old Norse translations like you probably haven't thought about Old Norse translations

It's been quite a while since we trumpeted the übergeekish effort to put Star Wars into Old Norse (here, if you are the rare human being who doesn't have Tattúínárdœla Saga bookmarked.) That site is now up to new and equally innovative (though probably not as wildly popular!) work: They are providing translations of Eddic poems into the form they would have had when they were composed.

Wow.

The intelligence establishment and metaphor research

We're all used to defense money going to language-related work ... language learning/teaching, speech recognition, corpus stuff, and on and on. You might not have expected work on metaphor there, but that's getting funded too, according to this piece in the Atlantic, by Alexis Madrigal.


In fact, here's a call for proposals out there from IARPA:

The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture. In the first phase of the two-phase program, performers will develop automated tools and techniques for recognizing, defining and categorizing linguistic metaphors associated with target concepts and found in large amounts of native-language text. The resulting conceptual metaphors will be validated using empirical social science methods. In the second phase, the program will characterize differing cultural perspectives associated with case studies of the types of interest to the Intelligence Community. Performers will apply the methodology established in the first phase and will identify the conceptual metaphors used by the various protagonists, organizing and structuring them to reveal the contrastive stances.

I guess my point is just that you NEVER know where funding will pop up.

(Image from the article.)