Ted Allen has a new show called “Food Detectives” and it aired for the first time last night.  It’s a relatively entertaining show, although I think there have been some shows like it in the past that answer some of its “mysterious” questions, one being Myth Busters.  Anyway, the point of this post…

One of the myths being tested was that ginger can prevent motion sickness.  The way they go about testing their hypotheses is relatively satisfactory (i.e., a control group and an experimental group), but this one had one huge glitch.

When testing, they properly gave some participants a placebo, which is great, ergo preventing false positives.  When the teacup ride was over (8 minutes, I believe), the group that had taken the ginger pills were not as sick as when they performed the control (where no one had taken anything).  The conclusion: taking ginger before motion-related events does indeed prove helpful and will make you less sick.  Not quite…

What they failed to do was test other spices and/or other perennial plants (I can’t say for certain which ones as I’m not very familiar with its similar species aside from what’s listed in the Wikipedia entry).  All they had done on the show is prove that ginger could potentially help with nausea produced by motion sickness, but it wasn’t conclusive that ginger is indeed the main factor in attenuating the nausea.  In my opinion, this is a huge flaw in the show’s scientific reasoning.  

Similarly, in my thesis, I must prove that complex morphological decomposition does occur and that the effects are not due to semantics (e.g., deduction-deduct), morphologically apparent words (e.g., hideous-hide), or orthographic overlap (e.g., brothel-broth).  I must use such conditions or else my results cannot be conclusive.  I cannot just, say, use morphologically complex words (e.g., stupidity-stupid) and a non-related control (e.g., pepper-friend) and conclude that complex morphological decomposition does indeed occur in early stages of lexical access/processing.  

Not only would this be silly of me and my claim, I would look like a fool.  But I suppose if it’s good enough to be on television, people must believe it.

Ironically, in reference to my recent post, I noticed today’s cartoon from the New Yorker…

As many of you know, prescriptivists have it out to preserve our language, as if people are “killing” it.  What exactly are they, the people, “killing?”  And how is this thing, language, being killed?  These are, unsurprisingly, the same people that say that “black English is bad, poor, and unsophisticated English.”  Ironically, these people can’t tell you when English was “perfect,” so to speak.  The 50’s?  40’s?  30’s?  1800?  Because guess what?  I’m almost 100 percent certain that in those mentioned dates, people were saying the exact same thing: “Oh my child is speaking this nonsense and improper English!  Where on earth are they getting this?  I’m trying my best to teach them proper English!”  Surprise.  What a beautiful concept.  Language evolution.  

This stems from a recent prescriptivist blog I accidentally came across: language and grammar.  This guy (Paul, I presume) has this idea that wanna speakers are lazy and that

Wanna isn’t a word; it’s a verbal laziness, same as the non-wordgonna. It started as only a spoken error,…

I need clarification of what “being a word” means.  Is it in the dictionary (and I’m referring to a REAL dictionary, i.e., Oxford English Dictionary)?  A quick look tells me it is (NOTE: a quick Google search on both words, wanna and gonna, both reveal an average of 222,500,000 hits  Moreover, when you do the search, there is a link at the top that allows you to go to a definition.  Go figure).  So, I guess we can scratch that out.  Is it spoken and understood by more people than just your local friends?  Seems to me to be the case.  Can we produce some awkward sentences with this “word”?  Yes sir we can.  

1. Who do you want to feed the dog?
2. *Who do you wanna feed the dog?
3. I’m going to New York.
4. *I’m gonna New York.

These examples show we know something inherent about this word and its usage possibilities.  It’s not so “haphazard” and/or “lazy”, as Paul (and many other prescriptivists out there!) seems to suggest.  

Prescriptivists will stick by their decisions because they claim they’re “saving our language.”  From what?  Furthermore, I don’t care what they claim because the most annoying thing about them (yes, I’m referring to ALL of you) is the following: I will bet every penny I have and all of my possessions that if you were to follow a prescriptivist all day–and I mean you are right there next to him/her listening to every word from sun up to sun down–they will say MANY constructions that they are so vehemently against.  Why do you think that is?  Simple.  Because language is so engrained in us that we use it without thinking back to what we “learned” (I’m using this term VERY loosely) in Freshman English class.  We have such a vast knowledge of language that it requires no thinking.  And when I say we “know” a language, I’m referring to everything about a language–the semantics, phonology, syntax, et cetera.  And for those who know anything about linguistics will know that reasons for constructions such as wanna and gonna are hugely phonological in reason.

One last thing.  On the matter of “laziness,” why does the author use other contractions such as isn’t, it’s we’re?  Oh, let me take a guess: because they’re words!  And maybe because they use an apostrophe?  :-)

Define “word”.

Wow.  It’s been so long since I’ve posted here that I almost forgot about it.  Several people have left some comments and I’m sorry I haven’t replied, but I somehow don’t get the emails when someone leaves a comment.  Sorry.

Anyway, I’d like to start posting here more often in order for me to get out some ideas (or other psycho-neurolinguistic matters).  My interests have slightly changed since my last post almost a year-and-a-half ago.  I’m much more into (English) lexical processing now.  So I now do things like masked priming studies (psycholinguistics) and EEG experiments (neuro).  My thesis will be on the decomposition of morphologically complex words in English, primarily productive and unproductive suffixes.  I’d like to post more of this soon.

I hope to get some feedback from anyone on this topic either now or when I start posting some topics.  It will help to clear out my thoughts.  :-)

The mess with Dr. Louann Brizendine on LanguageLog has prompted be to accidentally fall upon this article in the New York Times Magazine, published 10 December 2006. The following quote is from a question about women using 20,000 words per day while men apparently use 7,000.

The real phraseology of that should have been that a woman has many more communication events a day — gestures, words, raising of your eyebrows.

I think it’s a pretty weak Q & A session, but that’s just me and my criticalness towards this matter. But what they hey…we’re all entitled to our opinions, whether ignorant or not. She’s very opinionated, so I, too, will be opinionated (after all, two wrongs may not make a right, but it makes you feel better). Personally, I don’t like her looks. But I sometimes judge arrogance on looks. She could be the identical twin to a philosophy professor I once knew. She, too, was arrogant. But this is not the issue at hand. I just thought I’d give my two-cents worth of opinions.

How do we know what words are? Do we need context? Or does the single lexical item suffice? That’s too broad of a question for this post, so I’ll just post a word and I wanna see if anyone knows about it. I can guarantee that this word, as is, in isolation will not be as quickly recognized as in context. There are other factors involved as well, but let’s just start here for today.

n*****as
n*******as
n***as
n****as

(yes, they are all the same word. The only question is which one is which?)

I am always annoyed by this. Maybe it’s a virus…

I think the strangest thing is when we think of an advanced degree program requirements in anomalous  ways. Take this, for example.

These degrees are supervised by Professor X, and result in a written research thesis of around 80,000 words.

Wow. 80,000 words? Okay, so that’s roughly 320 pp, so why couldn’t they say 320 pp? In this publications defense, it is from the UK. But then that makes me wonder about the way they perceive not just situations differently from the way we do here in the states, but the way that advanced degree programs are perceived. Personally, I think this is torture only because it’s harder to look at and absorb such a large number. Would you rather hear 80,000 or 320? I would choose 320. But that’s just me.

It is true that we have to keep in mind that although 80,000 is large, it is measured in words, as opposed to pages. There’s a difference. Conceptually, a page (or pages, whatever) is larger than, say, a word, since words are the things that fit onto a page. So something seems to happen when we say 320 pages as opposed to 80,000 words. Something in our mind neutralizes these numbers and they somehow become one-of-the-same. My guess is that it happens because since the concept itself is large and that includes a small(er) number,  it becomes of the same level with 80,000 since that large number is part of a small measuring unit (words per page).

So does this mean that concepts are scarier than the words? Or is it that they are the same? Do they play off of each other? Neutralize each other?

Weird. Maybe someone knows something about this.

I need to apologize for the delay in posting. There have been many, many things happening in my life, both prior to school starting and as it started.

Many of you don’t know, but I started this year at a new school in the grad program. Therefore, there is a lot to get used to (the normal things). One of the biggest adjustments for me is the way linguistics is taught (the school of thought). Not a world of difference, but enough to make me rethink a few things. So, this has paused my writing here as I try to wrap my brain around a few (new) ideas.

As this progresses, I will write about a few problems. I’ve got one brewing right now in syntax, but I need a better understanding of this matter before I write about it. Just as a preview, it deals with T(ense) and V(erb) categories. The split between the two is slightly new to me (well, okay, pretty damn new, to be honest). I’m not saying anymore, because I may say something untrue or flat-out wrong.

So, again, sorry and there’s definitely more to come.

So when I’m a little bored and restless with myself, I wander into the Urbandictionary. It’s a nifty place to find they new hippest sayings (not that I’m trying to be hip…) defined by the people saying them (I’d hope that’s the case, but I’m sure there are many poseurs posting as well). Anyway, I came across something new (for me) as I was snooping around: for cereal. Yep. That’s it. Not sure about its origin, but it’s interesting, nonetheless, to see how youngsters are processing language these days.

This whole business with for cereal is quite transparent when you erase any relation to the breakfast food.

When someone says, Yo man, I just got $500 from my parents for nothin’! The response expected would be, for real? Now look at those two responses. Any similarities? Of course. All they’re doing is adding the prefix ce-. Now, there does not appear to be any meaning associated to it only have the effect of representing the word as the breakfast food (for champions…). This is all fine and dandy, but what still strikes me is that the definition on the Urbandictionary is:

A statement used that questions the validity of a statement. Similar to the phrase “are you for real?”.

So basically what the person who wrote that entry is trying to say is that it means for real?. Another question I have is whether semantics is becoming something that the younger generation is (completely) unconcerned about? One example is the one noted above. What could cereal and real have in common other than a consonant and a vowel preceding the word? Are kids more after the “sounds” of the language than “meaning”? this could be because they seem to make up meanings for the things they make up? Suddenly, cereal has more “weight” than just saying real in the context, for (ce)real?. Or maybe they’re just trying to be cute. Whatever it is they’re doing, it’s obvious that this new generation (what are they called now, “MTV Generation” or something like that?) is always trying to do things differently. And going along with the MTV idea, they are the ones promoting that kind of thought. Which is good and interesting to see what they do with language.Now

Now, the other route you can go with this is, (are) you serious?. The seri- and cere- produce the same sound. Of course, the latter must be said with -real and not a stand-alone cere-; a combination of are you serious and for real. The thought could be that if we expand the meaning by adding another similar phrase to this one word (either one may be chosen first), then we’ll have something that can mean more than when we only use one; we’re going to amplify the meaning. So it could also be that semantics is not out, only amplified if this is the case. It’s like with double modals…what’s the thought process behind that? Whatever it is, it seems comparable.

Okay, okay. I had to post this because I got a HUGE tip on this word AND its origin. Let me start at the beginning, so this story makes better sense.

I was watching the video today of the rapper who I first heard say yo mothas a guntha. At the beginning, she says this:

Nems murder-fest, fuck ya life president.

Needless to say, for the longest time I was thinking, “What in the world is he trying to say?” because I kept assuming he was referring to the President (Bush). But it didn’t make sense. Recently, I noticed the shirt he was wearing, it said Fuck Your Life. Ah, wait, this is a group that he’s in!

So, naturally, I Googled it and a short time later (somehow) I landed in Myspace again! Oh, this gets better. It wasn’t just anyone, I got as close to asking Nems as possible: I got to ask someone in the Fuck Ya Life group what it meant. The guy was extremely nice about the whole thing and gave me a superb definition and a little background on the word and Nems. Here is what he wrote to me:

A guntha is a whore, a slut muffin, a bitch, a scuz bucket, a tramp…..anything negative u can think of about a female all rolled in one word.

Wow. I finally got an answer from someone in contact with the guy who made the word up! Yeah, that’s right. This same informant told me that Nems is actually the creator of the word, and now, of course, Fuck Ya Life uses it in their rap. Here’s a little background: Nems is from Brooklyn and this informant is from NJ. Aha! They are an East Coast group from the Jersey area…..meaning what? That the people in NJ on Myspace using it are using it because of Fuck Ya Life.

This answers every question I had. It didn’t really “originate” anywhere. I guess wherever Nems was when he first said that word can be the place of origin, or maybe Brooklyn can claim it since he’s from Brooklyn. But it now makes sense why Myspace people from NJ say it. It is also no wonder why it’s not yet on Urbandictionary (it’s still far too new). But I suppose the above definition would suffice for an entry.

I’m terribly excited I finally got to the bottom of this.