Language Log

Language Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman.

The site is updated daily at the whims of the contributors, and most of the posts are on language use in the media and popular culture. Google search results are frequently used as a corpus to test hypotheses about language. Other popular topics are the descriptivism/prescriptivism debate and linguistics-related news items. The site has also occasionally held contests in which visitors attempt to identify an obscure language.

Language Log is now one of the most popular linguistics blogs in the blogosphere. As of August 2007, it receives an average of about 9,500 visits per day. [ [http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm7languagelog Language Log's Sitemeter stats] ] In May 2006, a compilation of posts by Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum was published in book form under the title "Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log".

pecialties

Language Log was started on July 28, 2003 by Liberman and Pullum, a linguist then at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Pullum has since moved to the University of Edinburgh). One early post about a woman who wrote "egg corns" instead of "acorns" led to the coinage of the word "eggcorn" to refer to a type of sporadic or idiosyncratic re-analysis. Another post about commonly recycled phrases in newspaper articles, e.g. "If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z", resulted in the coinage of the word "snowclone". Both phenomena are common topics at the blog.

The blog has a number of recurring themes, including the difficulty of transcribing spoken utterances accurately, misuse or misunderstanding of linguistic science in the media, shortcomings in the popular style guide "The Elements of Style" by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., and the pedantry of prescriptivists, including that of copyeditors (one of the new blog's tags is "prescriptivist poppycock"). In addition, the site has critically addressed opinions or theories related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concerning the relationship between culture, thought and language. Another common topic on the blog is the handling of taboo language in the media. Regular contributor Arnold Zwicky wrote a series of posts describing which words are considered obscene in various publications, paying particularly close attention to the way these words are "asterisked" in the different media forms.

Becky Award

The Becky Award is a tongue-in-cheek award given out by the site. It is named after the sixteenth-century humanist Johannes Goropius Becanus, who claimed to have proved that the language of Eden was Dutch (incidentally, his mother tongue).

The award for 2006 went to Louann Brizendine for her bestselling book, "The Female Brain", which makes two principal claims: that women use language very differently from men, and that the causes of these differences are neurological. Language Log's contributors have spent significant energies showing that Brizendine's use of previous scientific studies is often slanted and full of errors and misrepresentations. [ [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003998.html Language Log: The envelope, please ] ] [" [http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002602.php 2006 Becky Award] ", "Language Hat", January 3, 2007.] [Nurnberg, Geoffrey. " [http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/beckies.html The Language of Eve] ", "Fresh Air", National Public Radio, January 3, 2007.]

Contributors

In addition to Liberman and Pullum, a number of other linguists contribute to Language Log:

*Adam Albright, a morphologist, phonologist, and professor of linguistics at MIT.
*Eric Bakovic, a phonologist and assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.
*David Beaver, a semanticist and professor of linguistics at University of Texas at Austin.
*Steven Bird, a computational linguist and associate professor of computer science at the University of Melbourne.
*Lila Gleitman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in psycholinguistics.
*Daniel Jurafsky, an associate professor of linguistics at Stanford University who specializes in statistical models of human and machine language processing.
*Norma Mendoza-Denton, a sociolinguist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
*John McWhorter, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in creole languages.
*Geoffrey Nunberg, chair of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
*Bill Poser, a phonologist and adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia.
*Chris Potts, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts who specializes in semantics, pragmatics, and syntax.
*Philip Resnik, a computational linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
*Roger Shuy, Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus of Georgetown University and a specialist in language and law.
*Sally Thomason, a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan who specializes in contact-induced language change and Salishan linguistics.
*Benjamin Zimmer, research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and consultant to The Oxford English Dictionary.
*Arnold Zwicky, visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford University and emeritus professor of linguistics at Ohio State University.

References

External links

* [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ Language Log archive (old site)]
* [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ Language Log new site]
* [http://www.wmjasco.com/0555/055-5.html Publishers' site for "Far From the Madding Gerund"]