On H-dropping again

Feb 6, 2012 by

On H-dropping again

In an earlier post, I mentioned H-dropping as one of the characteristic features of Cockney, the lower class variety of English from the streets of London’s East End. Recall Professor Higgins’ complaints: “Hear them down in...

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The plural of virus? Latinate plurals reconsidered

Jan 19, 2012 by

The plural of virus? Latinate plurals reconsidered

[Thanks to Cynthia Typaldos for bringing this topic to my attention! The cartoon to the left is from this site] A recent article on paidContent.org by Robert Andrews states:   “Google (NSDQ: GOOG) already operates its own legal...

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Comparing Verb Conjugations in the Romance Languages

Dec 14, 2011 by

BY DEREK CZAJKA (“Languages of the World”) Readers of this blog are doubtless aware of the notion of language families. Many of the world’s languages belong to a family of related languages. When languages are said...

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Mind your manners!

Nov 21, 2011 by

In a recent series of posts on conversational implicatures (see here and here) we’ve discussed H. Paul Grice’s theory on how we recognize and interpret implicatures, including the four conversational maxims he has...

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Metaphor, synecdoche and language change

Nov 3, 2011 by

In the previous posting, I discussed various figures of speech, such as metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, which make our everyday speech more colorful, more creative, more poetic even. However, the same figures of speech are also...

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