Language Log
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Language Log is a popular collaborative language blog maintained by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman.
The site is updated daily at the whims of the contributors, and most of the posts are on language use in the media and popular culture. Google search results are frequently used as a corpus to prove points about the language. Other popular topics are the descriptivism/prescriptivism debate and linguistics-related news items. The site has also occasionally held contests in which visitors attempt to identify an obscure language.
Language Log is now one of the most popular linguistics blogs in the blogosphere. As of June 2006, it received an average of over 5,000 visits per day.[1] In May 2006, a compilation of posts by Liberman and Pullum was published in book form by William, James & Co., under the title Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log (ISBN 1-59028-055-5).
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[edit] Specialties
Language Log was started on July 28, 2003 by Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. One early post about a woman who wrote "egg corns" instead of "acorns" led to the coinage of the word "eggcorn" to refer to that sort of sporadic or idiosyncratic re-analysis. Another post about commonly recycled phrases in newspaper articles, e.g. "If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z", resulted in the coinage of the word "snowclone." Both phenomena are common topics at the blog.
The blog has a few bugaboos or pet obsessions, including the difficulty of transcribing spoken utterances accurately, the writing style of Dan Brown, shortcomings in the hugely popular style guide The Elements of Style by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., and the pedantry of book copyeditors. In addition, the site has undertaken a veritable campaign against the notion, related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that vocabulary patterns within a language have deep psychological significance for the culture that speaks that language. Their constant debunking of the original snowclone mentioned above has been rather effective in this regard. Another common topic on the blog is how taboo language is handled in the media. Regular contributor Arnold Zwicky has recently written a series of posts describing which words are considered obscene in various publications, and he has paid particularly close attention to the way these words are "asterisked" in the different media forms.
[edit] Contributors
In addition to Liberman and Pullum, a number of other linguists have contributed to Language Log:
- Adam Albright, a morphologist, phonologist, and professor of linguistics at MIT.
- Eric Bakovic, a phonologist and assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.
- David Beaver, a semanticist and professor of linguistics at Stanford University.
- Steven Bird, a computational linguist and associate professor of computer science at the University of Melbourne.
- Lila Gleitman a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in psycholinguistics.
- Daniel Jurafsky, an associate professor of linguistics at Stanford University who specializes in statistical models of human and machine language processing.
- John Lawler, a University of Michigan-based general linguist who is perhaps best known for his role in creating the Chomskybot.
- Norma Mendoza-Denton, a sociolinguist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
- John McWhorter, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in creole languages.
- Geoffrey Nunberg, chair of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
- Bill Poser, a phonologist and adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia.
- Chris Potts, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts who specializes in semantics, pragmatics, and syntax.
- Philip Resnik, a computational linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
- Roger Shuy, Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus of Georgetown University and a specialist in language and law.
- Sally Thomason, a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan who specializes in contact-induced language change and Salishan linguistics.
- Benjamin Zimmer, Research Associate, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and consultant to The Oxford English Dictionary.
- Arnold Zwicky, visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford University and emeritus professor of linguistics at Ohio State University.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Language Log
- Language Log alternate site
- Publishers' site for Far From the Madding Gerund
- An article discussing Language Log at The Economist .
