Find me at KitchenCognition.com
I’m taking a break from SportLinguist as I try to get my food blog KitchenCognition.com up and running. KitchenCognition is my platform for exploring a psychology of the kitchen and the table, to… Read More
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Guaranteed to Heighten Proprioception: Boston’s More Than A Feeling remixed at the end of the world
In a time when genres like Dub Step (which I adore, by the way) are bringing chaotic and palpable cut & paste erraticism to soundscape, we all need a centering force to be… Read More
Multifaceted Living
On the sliding scale of time that gradiently builds and ebbs and recedes I am perpetually being re-context-ed and being iteratively re-inserted into particular frames of reference and spheres of existence. I am simultaneously (at… Read More
I was featured in a financial blog giving insight into financial crisis language
Last week I was featured in a column on the investment blog MindfulMoney.co.uk with some comments about financial crisis language like “crash” and “stagflation”. Check out the feature here. Like I have said… Read More
Motion Imagery & The Glitch Mob
I love this image from the cover of The Glitch Mob’s We Can Make the World Stop: People occasionally describe winding canyons as if they were snakes, and this image makes that language explicit… Read More
Language, Feelings, and the Construal of Insects: Differences between French and English
Since childhood I have thought that butterflies were good insects and that moths were bad insects. After all, popular thought is that moths are creatures of destruction (hence the need for mothballs), even… Read More
Gone Thesis-ing
As you might observe from the infrequency of posts, I have something else going on right now. Frankly, I am frightened that the ideas I am mulling over for my thesis will get… Read More
Les animaux dansent dans le Safari Disco Club
I am slightly obsessed with Yelle’s Safari Disco Club. I have probably heard the entire album around 100 times since the start of summer. It is incredibly poetic and full of sustainable fun…… Read More
Building Narratives with Pictures
Occasionally I repost this picture book that presents a series of images and lets the viewer surmise a probable narrative. Take the time to check it out.
Maple Keys remind me of a Taxonomy chart
I was thinking about maple keys recently. The maple key is an interesting schema of a taxonomy; the kernel is like a category node – the top-level domain. Each vein in the wing… Read More
Earth, Wind, Fire, Water…Fire wins for attention.
Last weekend when I was camping with some friends I was noticing how the layout of the campsite directed people’s attention. It seemed as if no one paid attention to the surrounding scenery… Read More
Making eye contact as one form of coordination between store clerks and shoppers
Yesterday (a busy Saturday at 4pm) I went to a clothing store with my wife. While I was shopping I was almost run into by 4 employees who I felt were not looking… Read More
Truffle to Truffle: Metaphors of Dirty Decadence
I can’t tell if I like truffles the mushroom better than I like truffles the chocolate, but one thing is for sure, truffles of any kind offer a guilty pleasure. From a cognitive… Read More
Yep…it is a broken sink.
This was a sink in my house in West Africa.
Usage-Based Construction Selection
I just posted a seminar essay that I wrote a few months ago to the Cognitive Science Network. You can download the paper here (click the button that says “One-Click Download”) and read the abstract… Read More
Why Fictive Motion Matters (briefly)
One of the interesting features of fictive motion is that the processing of fictive motion engages the mental resources used in performing the fictive motion, or at least correlates with time (saccades and… Read More
How Goldbergʼs Cognitive Construction Grammar differs from Langackerʼs Cognitive Grammar
Cognitive Grammar (CG) views categories at a level of granularity that is below the views espoused in the current edition of Cognitive Construction Grammar (CCxG); instead of using prototypes, CG relies on an… Read More
Protected: Mental Spaces and Counterfactuals in Mapping Historical Leadership Decisions in Foreign Policy
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: Haiman’s view of Iconic and Economic Motivation
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Why I Care About Ontology
In a broad sense of the term, any particular ontology serves as a framework against which we interpret information; think of it like an organized perspective that we use as a lens to… Read More
Language Change and Burritos
Driving home from class last night I spotted a new Chipotle billboard and it made me think about language change. The copy-writer used indefinite article a but not the form of the article… Read More
Schematic Construals in Favor of Ecological Transportation
If you say the admittedly odd sentence “The baby feeds on mother’s milk.” it accesses a parasitic construal for the act of eating. Pardon any offense this might cause you; I promise to… Read More
Different Uses of “If”
If we don’t pay that ticket, then I will have to go to court. [causal] It would be great if everyone just got along. [idealistic] I wonder if she knows she has jelly… Read More
Celebrate the Ides of March: Caused Motion Transitivity, Brutus and the Knife
I was thinking about examples of caused-motion verbs and realized that English has a caused-motion transitive use of the verb to run. What might an example look like? Simple: “Brutus ran a knife… Read More
How Inception Helps Me Edit Papers
When I am writing a paper that has a page limit I use the first draft to make sure that I have a complete thought, I do not worry about exceeding the page… Read More
Primitive Modals in Child Language (Hafta, Wanna, Gonna) As Functionally Equivalent to Auxiliary Modals
Modals represent a perspective of force in relation to the participatory elements of a construction. In fact, they represent an encoding of force in the relation between subject, verb, and object. Children acquire… Read More
How Children’s Overgeneralizations in Construction Use Informs Second Language Acquisition and the Negotiation of Meaning
The acquisition of abstract grammatical constructions represents the maturation of a child’s linguistic productivity. This productivity means that a child can take constructions that have already been learned and extend the application of… Read More
Intention Directing, Self-Reporting, and the Transitive Constructions in Early Childhood Grammar (preschool, 2-5 years old)
Since constructions are learned through usage, constructions are accumulated as individual entities that begin to form collections and these collections of constructions begin to exhibit type frequency. I think that this type frequency… Read More
How Novel Constructions Emerge Over Time
Reading Michael Israel’s The Way Constructions Grow taught me some things about how novel constructions actually emerge in a language. I encourage you to check out this classic article. The -Way construction in… Read More
Foundational Cognitive Skills that Babies Need in Language Development
As mentioned (yesterday’s post) three skills emerge from this acceptance of the triadic perspective: 1) Joint Attention Frame; 2)Intention Reading; and 3) Cultural Learning (Pattern Finding). Joint Attention is the ability to coordinate… Read More
Bybee’s notion of “exemplar representation”
In exemplar representation situation-specific tokens are decoded and classified as being instance-overlaps with existing exemplars and thereby reinforcing that exemplar instance, or else they are classified as having slight divergence from the existing… Read More
Doing Strategic Planning #4: Adapting Existing Organization-External Materials for Internal Use
This is part of the continuing series about Strategic Planning and outlines the process I am using with a particular organization. I wanted to briefly explain something that I think is a viable… Read More
Strategies for Multifaceted Learning/Living
In line with my post on collaboration as the central tenet of virtual city membership, and my posts on multifaceted learning for multifaceted living, I want to propose a few strategies to maximize… Read More
Stone Soup, Bouillon Cubes, and Innovation
In my childhood I think it was the fable about Stone Soup that made me start to think about innovation. As I learned to cook and came further into the world of soup-lore… Read More
Speed through Penmanship
I never realized this, but apparently cursive writing is supposed to make you write faster. [I always hated making uppercase Q...]
Doing Strategic Planning #2: Decision Making and Identifying Policy Material through Discourse Analysis
Continuing on the posts about strategic planning, today I want to share how I encourage people to develop policy. The organization that I am helping had a baseline report drafted by a committee… Read More
Inherent Narratives in Ad Hoc Collections
Part of my portfolio includes this project called Weaving Narratives: Possessions = Autobiographies, it is an exploration into how any ad hoc grouping of objects has some kind of inherent narrative, albeit a… Read More
