In Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance (ISBN9780631198789) they quote the following in discussing the idea of mutual knowledge: On Wednesday morning Ann and Bob read the early edition of the newspaper, and they discuss the fact that its says that A Day at the Races is showing that night at the Roxy. When the late edition arrives,…More
Agent
Just remember this: the agent of a sentence is the one doing the action of the verb. Consider the following sentences: (1) The car struck the fence. (2) The fence was struck by the car. In both (1) and (2) it is the car that is doing striking, even though in (2) it is NOT the subject.…More
The linguistic sign
Saussure pointed to that language is mistakenly thought of as a matching of a thing to a name. To him the link is between a concept (signified) and a sound pattern (signifier). The signified is its meaning and the signifier is the “container”. The two together makes the linguistic sign. The linguistic sign has two characteristics.…More
The origin of English words
About 85% of words in the English language are from three languages – Germanic, French and Latin. 12% are from Greek and other minor languages like Chinese and Japanese. About 4% are proper names. Different languages had influence on English at different periods in history. Latin was the language of the Church. French came with…More
Active vs. passive sentence structures
One of the reasons (there are many reason but this is just one) why we would like to change an active sentence into a passive one is because we would like to bring the object of the sentence into focus. Consider these sentences: My brother was hit by a car. A car hit my brother.…More
Actants
In any English sentence there are either zero, one, two or three actants. Actants are the “participants” of the sentence. They are either people or things. In (1) below the action of “to rain” itself is the “zero” actant. (1) It is raining. “It” is the dummy subject. In (2) and (3) the subjects “Peter” and…More
Solution for error message in R for pasting Excel data from clipboard (pipe(‘pbpaste’) )
One of the quickest ways in R to get data into it is to copy to the clipboard then paste it into a variable. This can be done in Windows by read.table(“clipboard”, header=T) The exact same function can be done on a MAC computer with read.table(pipe(“pbpaste”), header=T) However, in the MAC a red warning message…More
Clipboard hack for R in MAC
When I first started using the statistical software R for statistics I had started on a Windows computer. For here the copying and pasting function is read.table(“clipboard”, header=T) The exact same function on a MAC computer is read.table(pipe(“pbpaste”), header=T) Simple as that. I’d someone had told me this much earlier.More
In praise of lexicogrammar
Lexicogrammar is not a word you hear much but those of a certain following – cognitive linguists, functional grammarians, etc – use this word to describe what is traditionally call vocabulary and grammar as one system rather than being two separate systems. As a researcher in prepositions this is a big deal. It means I…More
Form and meaning in linguistics
Form in linguistics and language refers to the symbols used to represent meaning. Each form has a particular meaning in a particular context. This cannot be stressed enough. It implies that a form can have different meanings in different contexts. However, the range of meanings for a form is usually limited to a prototype or…More
