In response to: Pullum, G. K. (2018). Intuition and decidability in grammar and number theory. In K + K = 120: Papers dedicated to László Kálmán and András Kornai on the occasion of their ...
Get your free copy here .
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/12/contact-magazine-vol-404-now-available.html
The odd choices of example sentences that sometimes show up in these "teach yourself to speak..." type books along with phrase books has been rightly mocked in the past. In fact, the subtext of t...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/11/useful-examples-for-language-learners.html
I asked Mark Liberman to have a look at what I wrote yesterday since I was struggling to get my head around the probabilities. He was kind enough to write the following guest post: Maybe a be...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/10/on-meeting-otiose-twice-again.html
Well, not in the same day, but certainly within a 24-hour period. As I was lying in bed last night, reading Charles Mann's 1493, I came across the phrase the otiose Percy on p. 78. As of this m...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/10/on-meeting-otiose-twice-in-day.html
This morning, I was reading this article at New Statesman, when I came across the following: > Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as > entertainment...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-title-misparsed.html
The OED gives: > B. GRAM. DETERMINATIVE ADJECTIVE, DETERMINATIVE PRONOUN, ETC. (SEE > QUOTS.); DETERMINATIVE COMPOUND = TATPURUSHA N. > > 1921 E. Sapir Lang. vi. 13...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/08/antedating-determinative.html
Over at the NYT, Alexander Nazaryan has a rather strident article about "The fallacy of balanced literacy ." Therein, he writes, "balanced literacy is an especially irresponsible approach, given ...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/07/proscribing-narrowly.html
I listen to the Freakonomics Radio podcast from time to time, and back in May they aired an episode called "the three hardest words ...," which, purportedly, were I don't know. The premise was th...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/06/thinking-like-freak.html
As I mentioned, Schwa Fire is now out, and I've been quite enjoying it. Arika Okrent (whose name I have inexplicably misread for years as Akira) has written an article called "Ghost voices" about...
Back in November, 2013, there was a proposal on Kickstarter for a new language magazine. I chipped in to sponsor it and ended up on the editorial panel as a result. The first issue is now out. ...
1982 gave us the acronym AIDS formed from acquired immune deficiency syndrome. This is pronounced /eɪdz/. The fact that the final S is pronounced /z/ is notable, since a final s is typically pro...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/05/when-syndrome-is-final-s.html
PART I I've been trying to understand categories better, and one of the books I've been reading in pursuit of this goal is George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things . In fact, a few ni...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/04/its-turtles-round-and-round.html
The verb look has been used to talk about the future for a long time. Perhaps the most common use is in the expression look forward to (something). This use may be based on the metaphor that tim...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/04/looking-to-futurate.html
The word disseminate is a familiar one. It appears hundreds of times on my hard drive and in well over 20 email messages I've read or written in the last five years. But until today, I had never...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-opacity-of-etymology.html
The summer issue is now available here . Check it out.
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2013/09/contact-magazine-summer-issue.html
The newest issue of TESL Ontario's Contact magazine is now available . This is the research symposium issue, based on talks given each fall at TESL Ontario's conference. The issue is edited by H...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2013/06/new-issue-of-contact-available.html
A student wrote to me asking about the meaning and placement of then in this sentence. > The product is then designed with this target price in mind. As I was explaining that then ...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2013/05/then-meaning-changes.html
I'm now into my second year as editor of TESL Ontario's Contact magazine . You can download issues for free as far back as 2000. I've been the editor for just over a year now (volumes 38 & 39)....
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-issues-of-contact-available.html
Last year, I blogged about the first English Proficiency Index here . Education First has now released their second index , and they're getting some good publicity out of it (I'm linking to them)...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2012/10/education-firsts-english-proficiency.html
Another new and potentially useful site: > Extensive Reading Central is a > not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing an Extensive > Reading and Extensive Listening�...
Tutela has been in beta for about a year but had its official launch during the TESL Canada conference. From their terms of use: > Tutela.ca (“Service”) is a Canadian > not-for-profi...
As I wrote yesterday , there are some strange tagging decisions concerning determinatives in this corpus. It seems though, as I added in an update, that these are largely the fault of the Part-...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-google-ngrams-20-pos-tagging.html
Somehow I missed the announcement, but the 2012 LLL Award Winners for books published in 2011 have been announced .
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2012/10/language-learner-literature-award.html
As Ben Zimmer blogged yesterday , there's a new and improved version of the Google Ngram viewer . The "improved" bit has a number of elements, but one is POS tagging. This is a wonderful thing, a...
http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2012/10/google-ngrams-20-and-pos-tagging.html