An inventory of postings on this blog — I’d have liked to include Language Log as well, but even sticking to this blog the project was tremendously time-consuming — about this sort of play. The focus is on poetry and song lyrics, but there’s some material on music and on visual art. The comics are especially well represented.
Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category
Burlesques, parodies, playful allusions
March 8, 2012Blogs and resources II
July 27, 2011Geoff Nunberg to ADS-L on May 15, about my list of blogs and resources:
Subject: Re: Query on Language Columns in Media
Just to comment on Arnold’s point and on the impressive list he’s assembled, I think the shape of discourse about language has really changed in the last few years, as the space that has opened up between what were formerly distinct public and private spheres has filled with a range of new voices. LanguageLog is probably the most pointed example. Its audience isn’t nearly on the scale of the NYTimes or NPR, but in certain ways it — and in particular Mark Liberman — can exert more influence on public discourse than either of them, for example in countering the million-word march, the Obama pronoun hokum and the gals-just-talk-more flim-flam, as searches readily show. I’ll grant you those canards haven’t exactly been driven into the sea. But it’s so much easier for linguists to diffuse their views both within informed opinon and to the media than it was even fifteen years ago, when linguists would have had no recourse but sit by the phone hoping the press would call for comments or publish books that with a few exceptions wouldn’t have gotten much of a readership, and that in any case wouldn’t have appeared until years after the fact.
That said, Arnold, I assume you’re going to put this list somewhere where it won’t scroll out of sight as you post new things!
Well, I’ve added a link from my website and from the top page of this blog. With notes that the list is constantly being updated (most recently, this morning). Beyond that, I don’t know what I can do.
Inventory of libfix postings
June 11, 2011(Long promised, but now delivered: an inventory of postings — including a few still in my “to blog on” list — on English libfixes, arranged roughly in the order of their appearance.)
Several postings look at the relationship between portmanteaus and libfixes, and several point out that many libfixes behave very much like elements of compounds rather than ordinary affixes. Several also note that many (though not all) of the libfixes are playful in character.
This is not an inventory of libfixes and things that might be libfixes, but an inventory of ones that have been posted on. Michael Quinion’s affixes site (here) has a number of others not covered here, and there are still more.
Blogs and resources
May 15, 2011On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro posted:
With the demise of the much-lamented “On Language” columns in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune [I think that modifier got displaced: “the much-lamented demise of the…”], what are remaining language columns in major newspapers or other media such as magazines, radio shows, or major blogs? Some that I know of include Boston Globe (Jan Freeman [and Erin McKean]), Visual Thesaurus (Ben Zimmer), and “A Way With Words” radio show ([Martha Barnette and] Grant Barrett).
Extra -S
April 13, 2011This is a summary of ways in which (varieties of) English have come to have a separable (or arguably separable) final element -S (pronounced variously as /s z əz/ and spelled variously as S ES ’S), not always with clear semantic content. I’m posting it here for reference in postings to come and as a demonstration of how phonological/orthographic content, like -S, is “just stuff”, with no unified semantic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, or stylistic value common to all of its occurrences.
This is just an outline, with a few passing comments on some details, though most details (like those concerning alternation or variation between -S and zero) are not covered here; it’s a very complex world.
LINGUIST List (2010)!
March 17, 2010[Also posted on Language Log.]
It’s that time of the year again: the LINGUIST List’s annual fund drive is under way, for the month of March; the drive is about halfway (about $32,000) to its goal of $65,000 (the money goes to support the student staff). From the list’s site:
The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world.
LINGUIST maintains a website with thousands of pages and runs a mailing list with tens of thousands of subscribers worldwide. LINGUIST also hosts searchable archives of over 100 other linguistic mailing lists and runs research projects to develop tools for the field.
The LINGUIST mailing list provides a space for open discussion, reviews of publications, job listings, information on conferences, and much more. LINGUIST also runs an Ask A Linguist service, where people can get answers to questions about language and linguistics.
The list is an incredible resource for linguistics, deserving of your support. Small donations are welcome, by the way.
(Information for donors is on the site, along with special features like a “linguist of the day” writing about how they got into the field. This year’s writers are Claire Bowern, Dafydd Gibbon, C. T. James Huang, Pius ten Hacken, Anna Wierzbicka, and Anthony Woodbury.)