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languageLog

Please redirect this feedMay 21

Language Log has changed servers -- please switch this feed to http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?feed=rss2...

Trent Reznor Prize, RNR DivsionApril 5

The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding (Right-Node Raising division) goes to Andrew Ilachinsky, author of "Exploring self-organized emergence in an agent-based synthetic warfare lab", Kybernetes, 32(1/2): 38-76, 2003: 4.84 Universal grammar of combat. Finally, what lies at the heart...

Mailbag: comparative communication efficiencyApril 5

In yesterday's post on "Comparing communication efficiency across languages", I compared the sizes of the English and Chinese sides of parallel (i.e. translated) text corpora, and observed that English seems to require 20-40% more bits to express the same information,...

Yet another "yeah no" noteApril 4

Following up on "Yeah no" and "'Yeah no' mailbag" (4/3/2008), Russell Lee-Goldman writes: I was actually about to send a long email to you about yeah-no, but decided just to put it on my blog. That's "Yeah-no and no-yeah again",...

Textbook ambiguitiesApril 4

Many -- indeed, most -- linguistic expressions have more than one meaning.  An apparently trivial observation, but one that leads to all sorts of puzzles in linguistic analysis and theorizing.  The central question is how meanings are associated with...