Two recent posts at Invented Usage (on like usage and Yoda grammar) got me thinking about expressivity, which can be defined as the use of different constituent ordering, omission of words, stress, etc., to give an added dimension to the utterance.

Continue reading »

As Kathy at CPU reminds us, it’s TV Turn off Week. One full week (April 24-30) without the tube. Some might say, shitty weather (at least in Montréal) for that; others might find it difficult not to watch da game. But hey, it wouldn’t be a good exercice if it were too easy, now would it.

Personally, I find it kinda fun to fight this reflex to turn on the TV in the evening. And I actually have time to do things I set out to do (like learn Flash), see people, and enjoy the bad weather. Then again, I now have to fight the temtation of spending that time in front of the computer.
A colleague of mine was talking about TV Turn off Week last week (her daughter recently subscribe to Adbusters), to which another colleague exclamed “A whole week!!!” Shows who’s addicted . I remember saying to (other) colleagues, three years ago, that I wasn’t watching TV all week, and they just couldn’t understand it. Then again, I’ve been branded “wierd” a few times and have come to accept it.
So, enjoy this week free of the hypnotic control of television.

I just realized that I forgot this week’s Wednesday Linguistics post. Fact is, it was a beautiful day; I woke up a bit bluesy and decided that a day in the sun would do me more good than spending time in an office, so I took a mental health day. And, not that I consider blogging to be work, but I kind of didn’t feel like doing anything other than enjoy the day.

This month’s theme was April’s fool. So here I am, on a beautiful sunny day in Montreal, working…

As a follow up to the last post, my friend introduced me to the work of Craig Marshall, including his award-winning Touch Me Now.

Well, they’re not exactly easterish. They’re just reaaly cool at re-enacting movies in 30 seconds.

Via Life Is Funnier when You’re Lonely.

I was saying, last week, how sentences are built from the word up. That words incorporate requirements, both in terms of semantics and syntax, that allow for the construction of meaningful, grammatical utterances.

Before we can dig into how that is done, there’s a few concepts to introduce. First one is the distinction, within parts of speech (word classes), between predicative (or notional) ones and non-predicative (or transpredicative) ones. The former comprises (in English) nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. All parts of speech that “mean something” (in a strict sense), open-ended classes where it is always possible to add new members. Non- predicative words include prepositions (to, of, from), conjunctions (and, or, but), determiners (the, this) and others. These are the more grammatical words.

Continue reading »

An important principle of the linguistics school I adhere to, is that it is not just sentences or phrases which are analyzable wholes, but words as well, one of the main postulates being that in order for a word to appear in syntax, it must first be constructed. And that is why we need to understand the meaning of the different building blocks involved in their construction.

Continue reading »

This month’s theme is supposed to be “April’s fool” but I decided to be a little ironic about it. So this is a self-portrait of me walking in the nice April weather.

Continue reading »