The Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (1996) featured one of the very few scholarly investigations into the origin(s) of the expression “Willy-Nilly” Author Paula Kadose Radetzky (University of California, Berkeley) notes that although “Willy-Nilly” originally meant ‘unwillingly’, […]
Tag: Linguistics
Much ado ablaut flim flam
Flim flam gets a wordy going over from Professor Steen Schousboe, of the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His article, entitled “Linguistic flim-flam?” gets down to the nitty gritty of linguistic ‘Reduplication’ – and it’s pell mell chock a block with super duper, hunky dory reduplicative chit chat. There’s […]
A confusing study: Chinese Sports Reports
Non-specialists may find the following study to be delightfully confusing. Here’s the citation, and a snippet from the whole thing. (Click on the image to see an enlargement of it. Click on the title link to obtain a copy of the entire article.): “A Study of Chinese-English Code-switching in Chinese Sports News Reports,” Chun-xuan Shen, […]
Ni phrases (It’s not just knights who say…)
If you thought that a ‘Ni phrase’ was simply an example of finely crafted absurdity from the creators of Monty Python – think again. For linguists, Ni-phrases literally span the globe – performing important functions not only in Japanese and Hindi, but also in Russian. Example publication : Ni-Phrases by Klaus Abels (Journal of Slavic […]