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Alcohol and Pragmatic Inference – Avett Brothers’ “When I Drink”
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. My wife and I recently went to see the Avett Brothers. It was a great show. It was a small crowd on a Sunday night, but you could tell they just really loved to play music. I’d highly recommend going to see them if they’re ever…
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Bandicoot Cabbagepatch
Did you know clicking the link that this post was going to be about Benedict Cumberbatch? Gretchen McCulloch, a graduate student in linguistics at McGill University and blogger at All Things Linguistic, explains the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator here and here and why some of the names generated work and some don’t. I admit some…
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Happy Holy Days
Dear angry people of the internet, This is just your annual reminder that the word “holidays” as in “happy holidays” has religious origins in the words “holy days.” As a Catholic, we still have “holy days” that correspond to what some people call “holidays.” Perhaps the religious origins are less overtly obvious than “Christmas,” but…
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Bill Benzon – Lakoff’s Neural Theory with Notes
I’m really hoping to get into this this weekend. Bill Benzon has posted a video of George Lakoff lecturing on his current neural theory of language. More than that, though, he’s included some helpful notes below the video. Check out the video and notes over at the Replicated Typo blog at the link above. Lakoff…
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Pieter Seuren’s scathing retrospective on Chomsky – part 1
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John McWhorter’s New Teaching Company Course on Audible
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Collocations, collocations, and collocations
In recent reading and listening to papers, I’ve noticed that sometimes the word “collocations” is used ambiguously. Authors seem to use the word in three different ways: 1. Words that occur together 2. Words that occur together frequently 3. Words that occur together in some statistically significant manner Of course, it’s unsurprising to see a…
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“This is the day YHWH has acted”
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Headlines, pragmatics and computation
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“Holocaust” as translation value
The best SBL presentation I attended this year, hands down, was by Shira Leibowitz Schmidt. It was entitled “Translating Biblical Verses in Rabbinic Holocaust Memoirs.” One of the particular translation values she talked about was “holocaust” for some words that many modern Bible translations render as “whole burnt offering.” Many Holocaust survivors dislike “holocaust” as…