I love the moments when traveling where you can’t tell what’s part of the foreign culture and what’s just a misunderstanding. At least, I love them afterwards.

( misunderstandings and misadventures )

I continue to <3 Language Log, though I no longer keep up with nearly all the entries (I was managing for a while in 2006 and 2007). This morning, my internet connection wasn't working, and I was sitting around introspecting about the phrase "yeah, no", which I have recently noticed myself using. I was wondering what I meant by it (I had several ( Read more... )

I was reading a paper on children learning adjective meanings, and the paper kept talking about children learning words through ostension. I didn't recognize the word, but almost figured it out from looking at the contexts where it was being used -- which turns out to be very nearly what the word means (ostension, in this case, is essentially " ( Read more... )

I am completely loving the LSA summer institute! The regular classes are way better than the presession classes, even! And I've been inspired to do lots of work while I'm here, because it's gotten me excited about my work again! Profligate scatterings of exclamation points!

( descriptions of my classes )

I thought I was done with classes a while ago (although it turns out I might have been wrong about that -- I might need to take one more at MIT after all due to some confusion about which classes count for what requirements), but here I am at the Linguistics Society of America's summer institute, taking more classes. And it's fun so far! Though ( Read more... )

I'm reading through lots of transcripts of parent-child conversations (though right now I'm only reading the parent bits ( Read more... )

I'm currently searching through a parsed version of the British National Corpus, gathering data for a computational analysis. Among other things, I'm looking at verbs and the nouns that are their objects. For instance:
I watered the plant might be one of several instances of the pair WATER-PLANT. Right now all the data I'm looking at are of the ( Read more... )