Watch your language about promiscuity, suggest Elgar, Jones and McNamara — and watch out for other people’s language. Their study explains: “Promiscuous Words,” Mark A Elgar [pictured here , above left], Therésa M Jones [pictured here below, right] and Kathryn B McNamara, Frontiers in Zoology, 2013, 10:66. (Thanks to Ed Yong for bringing this to our […]
Tag: language
They seek a language for cheese
The 21st century, at its birth, saw cheese researchers in something of a frenzy trying to solve the industry’s great language problem. The problem is this: say what you will, the taste of a cheese is hard to describe. This cheese – this one! – is better than the others, you insist. But how can you say why? Which […]
Huh here, Huh there, Huh everywhere?
It is universally appropriate to respond to news of this study by saying aloud the word “huh”, a close reading of the study suggests: “Is ‘Huh?’ a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items,” Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, N.J. Enfield, PLoS ONE, 8(11), 2013, e78273. The authors, at Max Planck Institute […]
Reversal linguistics in explorations
“Geoffrey Sampson defends the extraordinary claim that there is no theoretically significant non-quantitative linguistic difference between a sentence of English and a string composed of the same words in the opposite order. Let me put that a different way. Order opposite the in words same the of composed string a and English of sentence a […]