All Things Linguistic

Contrastive focus reduplication is the difference between tuna salad and SALAD-salad, or between liking someone and LIKE-liking them (liking-liking? I don’t think so). The example sentences in this paper are pretty fun, although I don’t know if reading papers is really FUN-fun for most people!  

Some linguists I was having dinner with couldn’t agree on the difference between a pot and a pan, and some other common cookware terms. Contribute to science* by taking this survey! 

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/975176/Pots-Pans

*May not be actual science. May be fun anyway though. Food may have been harmed during the creation of this survey.

If you don’t think this study is relevant to linguistics, you clearly haven’t been to my department lounge. Click through for full article with fancy graphs showing teaspoon half life! 

Objectives: To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom. 

Design: Longitudinal cohort study.

Setting: Research institute employing about 140 people.

Subjects: 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months.

Main outcome measures: Incidence of teaspoon loss per 100 teaspoon years and teaspoon half life.

Results: 56 (80%) of the 70 teaspoons disappeared during the study. The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. The half life of teaspoons in communal tearooms (42 days) was significantly shorter than for those in rooms associated with particular research groups (77 days). The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons’ value. The incidence of teaspoon loss over the period of observation was 360.62 per 100 teaspoon years. At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a practical institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons. 

Conclusions: The loss of workplace teaspoons was rapid, showing that their availability, and hence office culture in general, is constantly threatened. 

One reason that Eurasian civilizations dominated the globe is because they came from a continent that was broader in an east–west direction than north–south, claimed geographer Jared Diamond in his famous 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Now, a modelling study has found evidence to support this ‘continental axis theory’.

Continents that span narrower bands of latitude have less variation in climate, which means a set of plants and animals that are adapted to more similar conditions. That is an advantage, says Diamond, because it means that agricultural innovations are able to diffuse more easily, with culture and ideas following suit. As a result, Diamond’s hypothesis predicts, along lines of latitude there will be more cultural homogeneity than along lines of longitude.

Well, this study is certainly an interesting idea. But even if they use countries instead of continents, because there aren’t enough continents for statistical significance, country boundaries are generally not arbitrary. So I’m not sure if these researchers are really doing enough to separate out the factors that might cause a country to be long instead of wide. 

I thought “cool” was a synonym for “popular.” Wouldn’t it make sense that socially-ept people would have all these characteristics? 

The previous statistic that I had heard about language learning (source) was that the learner needs to hear a word 20 times each across 20 difference scenarios (20x20=400), so I guess hearing it only 160 times is much faster by comparison.

Now trying to think of ways that language learning programs could take advantage of this statistic. A return to mindless rote repetition might technically accomplish it, but I doubt it would actually be effective.