Tag Archive: Linguistics

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

Real Life Applications of Cognitive Linguistics

I have said it before and I will say it again: ANYTHING that requires thought benefits from a cognitive linguistic perspective. We use language to help in making sense of the world, this… Read More

Protected: One way that speakers learn to generalize from language input

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.

How I became a Linguist: Characteristics of Intelligent Behavior

Sometime in the early nineties my mother gave me a list of Arthur Costa’s twelve characteristics of intelligent behavior.  This list actually had a lot of influence in my life as I stumbled… Read More

On Failure & Resilience in Optimization of Human Systems, Ecological Systems, and Networked Systems of Systems

I was recently watching Eleanor Saitta’s talk called “Your Infrastructure Will Kill You“.  Part of her talk outlined how optimization equals fragility (more or less).  That to the degree that something is cleaner,… Read More

An Emergentist vs. Universalist view of Language and Cognition

I wanted to present a list that outlines some of the main differences in thought about language between Emergentist and Universalist perspectives.  This is important I think because it shows how only certain… Read More

Constructional Islands and the Organization of Language in Child Language Acquisition

When a child’s multi-word utterances are formed around a particular and limited set of linguistic items (either Nouns or Verbs), Tomasello (2003) terms them “Islands” to emphasize how their structured form clustered around… Read More

Sample Sentences Using Spradley’s Nine Semantic Relations from The Ethnographic Interview

I love James Spradley’s work on ethnographic interviews, componential analysis, taxonomic analysis, and participant observation, but Spradley’s work on semantic analysis has been the most thought-provoking for me theoretically.  Here I list out… Read More

Constructions Are “Objects” that Emerge from Patterns of Usage

Construction Grammar is like DJing electronic music.  This is what I mean: in the same way that electronic music is kind of object-oriented in that it takes elements from different pieces of music… Read More

My Top 10 All-Time-Favorite Formal Linguistics Books

Occasionally I read a good Generative book to balance my thinking in linguistic theory…I am drawn to the ideas of formalism, usually when I am thinking about how to develop anthropological linguistic approaches… Read More

Correction about the Goldberg Book in CogLing 100 book list…

I got a comment today on the CogLing 100 Book List page from a person with a slightly suspicious email address that I didn’t want to publish, but the content of the comment… Read More

CONTAINER Is an Ontological Metaphor

Ontological Metaphors are metaphors that give shape to abstract concepts and even contribute to the structure of Primary Metaphors.  CONTAINER is one of those metaphors.

A Brief Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Summary…

A reasonable summary of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its tractable form is that different cultures interpret the same world differently and this has an impact on how they both think and construct meaning… Read More

Cognitive Mindfulness #14

This comes from the introduction to a book edited by Dirk Geeraerts: If conceptual perspectivization is the central function of a grammar, the typical formal categories of grammatical description (like word classes or… Read More

Language Is a System

Language makes use of ecological elements (symbolic function, communicative function, et cetera) to provide an integrated “tool” with which meaning can be expressed and understood. Being a system implies the interrelationship of components… Read More

Cognitive Mindfulness #12

We face the future; the past is behind us. In English we talk about the future being ahead of us, forward in time, in front of us, what lies ahead, what is to… Read More

Cognitive Science & Engineering by Deductive Reasoning

Here is a brief passage from my book The Art of War Against Boredom.  I wrote this passage around 8 years ago, and while it is influenced by my background in descriptive linguistics… Read More

Cognitive Mindfulness #2

“Starting from a different perspective, using relevance theory one can claim that when a meaning has been assigned to a form but that meaning is dependent on the context, then the meaning is… Read More

Multifaceted Learning for Multifaceted Living

The reality of everyday living is multifaceted in nature.  For me, in my practice as an artist and as a scientist, I feel I need to integrate the various extensions of my reality,… Read More

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