A Walk in the WoRds

In honor of the Detroit Tiger's home opener today, I thought I would share some links to posts about baseball and language. Earlier th...

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor

On the twelfth day of Christmas,  my true love gave to me  Twelve dialects humming,  Eleven parsers parsing,  Ten words aligning,  N...

I love these post-it notes that came with a book I ordered. Too bad they don't sell them; I would order a carton. And check out these fu...

zeugma Traditionally of cases of coordination in which one element would not form a construction on its own. E.g. one cannot say They said ...

And I could not have produced a video that contains so many perfectly executed examples of the reasons why. Thanks to Superlinguo for bring...

'yes-no question' One which has a simple positive or negative answer. CF . closed interrogative, polar interrogative. yod The soun...

There are not too many words or concepts in the study of linguistics that begin with the letter "X"; thus I am unable to present a...

' wanna -contraction' The reduction in American English of forms like want to or going to in I want to (wanna) do it or I'm ...

verbal dueling In sociolinguistics, a term which refers to the competitive use of language, within a game-like structure, with rules that a...

Umgangssprache German for 'colloquial language'. 'unfilled pause' An interval of silence in speech: i.e. a pause not '...

there -insertion A term used in transformational grammar for a transformation which relates pairs of sentences by inserting a there -elemen...

schwa The mid-central vowel of e.g. the second syllable of matter: in phonetic notation [ ə ] ([matə ]) . Also spelled 'shwa'. sel...

rhotic A term used in English phonology referring to dialects or accents where /r/ is pronounced following a vowel, as in car and cart . V...

quadrisyllabic Having four syllables. A word such as dictatorship is thus a quadrisyllable . quantifier floating Proposed syntactic proce...

My teenage boys have a new favorite condiment - Sriracha Chili Sauce. I was unsure about the standard pronunciation, so I looked it up and c...

pandialectal A term used primarily in dialectology and sociolinguistics to characterize any linguistic feature, rule, etc., which is applic...

Why Study Linguistics? - An informative slideshow produced by the Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. 50 Years of Linguisti...

obligatory (Element) that cannot be deleted from a syntactic or other structure. E.g. in She left quickly , neither the subject ( She ) nor...

Love these Useless Mutants .