Trent Reznor Prize, RNR Divsion- April 5, 2008 The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding (Right-Node Raising division) goes to Andrew Ilachinsky, author of "Exploring self-organized emergence in an agent-based synthetic warfare lab", Kybernetes, 32(12): 38-76, 2003: 4.84 Universal grammar of combat. Finally, what lies at the heart...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005531.html Mailbag: comparative communication efficiency- April 5, 2008 In yesterday's post on "Comparing communication efficiency across languages", I compared the sizes of the English and Chinese sides of parallel (i.e. translated) text corpora, and observed that English seems to require 20-40% more bits to express the same information,...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005530.html Yet another "yeah no" note- April 4, 2008 Following up on "Yeah no" and "'Yeah no' mailbag" (432008), Russell Lee-Goldman writes: I was actually about to send a long email to you about yeah-no, but decided just to put it on my blog. That's "Yeah-no and no-yeah again",...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005529.html Textbook ambiguities- April 4, 2008 Many -- indeed, most -- linguistic expressions have more than one meaning. An apparently trivial observation, but one that leads to all sorts of puzzles in linguistic analysis and theorizing. The central question is how meanings are associated with...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005528.html An infuriating Cupertino- April 4, 2008 Audrey Devine-Eller writes in with the latest entry for the Cupertino files. This spellchecker-induced gem is from the Student Personnel Services page on South Brunswick (NJ) High School's website: In early August, all rising sophomore, junior and senior students will...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005527.html Comparing communication efficiency across languages- April 4, 2008 In response to last week's post on comparative vocabulary size ("Ask Language Log: Comparing the vocabularies of different languages", 3312008), a number of readers sent observations about a related but different topic, namely the comparative efficiency of communication. At least...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005526.html "Yeah no" mailbag- April 3, 2008 I've gotten a number of interesting messages about this morning's "Yeah no" post, and I also found the time to transcribe and discuss one typically complex example that turned up among the 5,000-odd hits in the search I did on...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005525.html Saying it wrong on porpoise- April 3, 2008 Grant Barrett is now doing a weekly language column for the Malaysia Star, and this week he talks about saying things the wrong way on purpose — intentional errors like the Internets and coinkydink. The column got picked up by...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005524.html Yeah no- April 3, 2008 Matt Hutson writes: There's a phenomenon that has interested me for a while, and I noticed a extreme example last weekend. When people mean "yes" they sometimes say "no, yeah" or "yeah, no" and when they mean "no" they say...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005523.html "Ampersand asterisk star lightning bolt, you percent sign spiral thingy ministers!"- April 3, 2008 That would be the comic strip version, anyhow, of the scene evoked by the headline of Augustine Anthony's Reuters story, "Musharraf swears in Pakistan cabinet full of foes", 3312008. Hat tip to Andy Hollandbeck...http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005522.html |