The nature of the lexicon

So last semester when I was as busy as you can get, I wrote a paper. I think it's kind of interesting. The idea here is that I'm looking to do my thesis on the nature of word frequency in people's heads. This paper is a bit of foundation for the differences between L1 and L2 speakers and their mental lexicons. This paper will probably be the back third of the literature review section.

Lexicon and automaticity by sipes23

Determiner in Latin

So we explored English determiners in syntax class last week. Dull dreary stuff, but completely necessary to the machinery of language. One of the rules in English is that you can't put two determiners onto one noun. That is

*this the cat

is no good. And it set me to thinking. Latin obviously has neither definite nor indefinite articles. But it does have demonstrative adjectives and other similar sorts of things. Which further set me to wondering whether Latin had a rule against two determiners on one noun. Some very cursory searches have led me to realize that

nullus ille

isn't an attested construction. But

ipse ille

is attested, though really uncommon. I'm wondering if I can fiddle with the results enough to see if the pronomial sorts of things aren't in complementary distribution.

Yet another thing to think about for future research.

Milestones in FLA: Modals

Yes, today Little Boy (2;11—22 days shy of his birthday) made a jump. Or at least the first time I heard him use it and made note of it. Today he made use of an English modal: could.

We were picking up Little Girl from school, and I asked him if he wanted to play at the playground. It was blustery and cold, so he said

I wish I could.

They grow up so fast. 

Summer's over

That's right. The fall semester started up this week. I'm taking two classes.

Sociolinguistics is the first one. It's going to be one of those mixed-feelings classes. On the one hand, it's going to be filled with cool stuff about how people use language in (sub)cultures. On the other, it's got a project which is geared toward those of us who are extroverts. I am not. (In case the blog title didn't give it away.)

The other is multiple language acquisition. Due to some academic acrimony from before my arrival at Northeastern, the linguistics department did not have a class in second language acquisition. Well, the prof figured a way around that problem. Second language is verboten? We make it multiple language. Problem solved. This class should tie in nicely with the vocabulary acquisition class I took over the summer.

Semantics don't apply to me

A dialog at home:

Little Girl (to Little Boy): You're a child.
Little Boy: I'm not a child, I'm a <his name>.

I've also heard this which kid substituted for child. There are two interesting things here. One, Little Boy seems to have figured out that kid and child refer to the same set of people—and that set does not include him. I'm not sure if ego-centrism plays into this situation or if it is some odd generalization problem with the word. The other thing I noticed is that he is "a <his name>". I wonder why he's using an indefinite article there.

eBook preview for Utopia

Since I knew you were dying to see it: here's a preview of the eBook for More's Utopia. Right now I'm charging $1.99 for the PDF, which strikes me as lame and necessary at the same time. Lame because paying for files sucks. Necessary so that I can get a handle on how much interest there is for this idea. All that said, I tried to set a pretty high preview percentage—30%, which is more than Scribd had it set at—so that you can get a pretty solid idea of what it is. And so that if you need it for research purposes or something, it's there for you. You can still get hardcopy at Amazon. But I'll tell you how to get a free copy below the preview.

Utopia by OpenSourceClassics

Ok, so if you're still reading, you want in on some sweet free book action. Here's the deal: first five people who live in a country served by Amazon (North America or Western Europe if memory serves), who e-mail me will get a copy to review. Here's the hitch: you've got to have a blog OR be willing to put your review on Amazon (and I'd really prefer that OR be and AND). You can get in touch with me via my profile which is somewhere on the right-hand side of the blog.

Utopia: shameless self-promotion

I really hate self-promotion in general, which is why I try to avoid it. On the flip side, if I can't self-promote here, where can I?

So why today? Well, I'm working on a cool project that has to do with language, so it sort of pertains to the blog. This particular book has Latin in it, so it double applies.

Anyway. If you head over to Amazon, you can help pay for lights and heat at my place. If you don't you'll have to wait a few days for the free ebook (which I'll link to from here).

What is so awesome about this book? Thomas More's Utopia (though Amazon thinks it's Vtopia—silly them) in Latin and English. Oh, yeah. And it's priced to sell. Even better, I've got some concordance type information at this site. And that's free.

If you're curious about the insides, it looks somewhat like a Loeb, but as a trade paperback. Or a knockoff I Tatti. Your pick. The big reason for doing this is that other Latin-English editions are really expensive (like $60). I'll probably do Erasmus's Praise of Folly next. Got any suggestions for what else?

But whatever you do, buy fifty million copies of it over at Amazon. I want to go to Istanbul.

New words for me

So I had to learn 100 new English words for the lexical acquisition class I took. Here they are, warts and all.

English

1. polysemous – adj – about word that has several meanings (e.g. bank₁, bank₂)
2. tumbleblog – n – a multimedia blog that isn't as text heavy as a more prototypical blog, a blog in the style of tumblr.
3. fameball – n – "a derogatory term for someone who has an unquenchable desire for fame" from nytimes.com
4. magnetar – n – neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field, the decay of which powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays
5. social steganography – n – the practice of users of social media, often teens, to cloak messages with double meaning. (A status update of "Always look on the bright side of life" seems innocuous, unless you know the context of the song and that the author of the comment is making allusion to it. It allows for outsiders to see one reading and insiders to see another. Example from this paper.)
6. bibelot – n – tschochke, geegaw, but with the overtones that explicitly French borrowings bring to English
7. postern – n – a door or gate that isn't the primary door or gate
8. proddie – n – a protestant, use is derogatory and Irish
9. saccade – n – the jerking motion of the eye across the field of vision
10. swag – n (possibly adj too) – style, Urban Dictionary has a lot of interesting info on this word, which in some communities may have positive connotations and negative connotations in others. An are-you-joking origin: an acronym for "Secretly We Are Gay", but UD suggests a much more plausible origin in Scots English. More likely origin: an abbreviation of swagger.
11. incel – adj (also n) – involuntarily celibate
12. teknonym – n – a name taken from a child (e.g. Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the PLO, is also known as Abu Mazen, which refers to his first son Mazen)
13. Einzelgänger – n – the opposite of a doppelgänger, unique
14. ambilingual – adj – a fully fluent and balanced bilingual, the Platonic ideal of bilingualism
15. arseward(s) – adj – perverse (obsolete), screwed up; I had assumed that back asswards was some sort of play on ass backwards, but no.
16. intersubjective – adj – occurring between two minds (e.g. When two people use a word, it is intersubjective because they both know the word and agree on its meaning.)
17. moil – v – to work hard; often collocated with toil – toil and m.
18. progymnasmata – n – a curriculum of rhetorical development in antiquity
19. phatic – adj – words that pertain to social relationships rather than their strict meaning
20. decolletage – n – a low cut neckline in women's fashion
21. poorism – n – tourism in poverty stricken areas (rhymes with tourism); probably a journalism word as I heard it on the radio (NPR, Worldview, 4 June 2013)
22. binge watch – v – watching a whole season or series of movies in a very short time, possibly even one sitting: synonym for marathon, though I'm not sure what the exact difference might be
23. crepitus – n – medical term for cracking knuckles (or any other joint really)
24. survivorship – n – the state of being a survivor (thanks Wiktionary, I'd have never guessed that)
25. stanchion – n – an upright bar or post that provides support to something else; the vertical bar in a a leadlight
26. leadlight – n – a decorative window made with small panes of glass separated by metal bars (though I'm not sure how this is different from stained glass except maybe there's no color in the glass of a leadlight?)
27. raceway – n – an electrical conduit that is a decorative element rather than hidden behind a structure
28. spiv – n – a criminal (specifically a con man or black marketeer) who dresses in a flashy manner; probably obsolete
29. paresthesia – n – pins and needles feeling in a numbed or "asleep" body part
30. doodlesack – n – bagpipes; possibly obsolete
31. ergodic – adj – applies to dynamic systems whose average behavior is the same over time when compared to average phase states; applies to Markov chains and thermodynamics
32. comedo – n – a blackhead
33. be spoiled – v – to have spoilers told to you
34. bogie – n – the wheel unit of a train, typically with two axles
35. journal – n – the part of the axle that lies on bearings
36. dinkum – n – hard work (regional to Derbyshire)
37. dinkum – adj – good, excellent, honest (regionalish to Australia)
38. ology – n – a science; a backformation, its use probably indicates low social status on the speaker's part
39. pinion – n – gear type either within another gear with cogs on the inside or the gear that meshes with the rack
40. rack – n – a bar with cogs, as if it were a gear built flat instead of round
41. threequel – n – a second sequel, probably in distinction to part three of a trilogy 
42. bargainous – adj – an outstanding deal, opposite of spendy
43. dee – n – police Detectives
44. slashdot – v – to overwhelm with messages
45. half handle – n – one of the two pieces of a knife handle that are not the metal part of the knife
46. tang – n – the metal part of the knife between the two half handles
47. bolster – n – the thickened metal part of a knife just past the handle
48. heel – n – the portion of a knife's blade that extends below the handle
49. guard – n – the taper on the metal between the blade and bolster
50. back – n – the edge opposite the cutting edge of the knife
51. skimmer – n – a kitchen utensil with a handle and a round, perforated dish on the end that is used to take food out of liquid or skim things off the top of soups
52. slot – n – the space between the tines of a fork
53. demitasse – n – a small cup for coffee, usually used for espresso
54. ramekin – n – an oven to table dish that is used for individual portions
55. cork ball – n – the inner cork portion of a baseball
56. yarn ball – n – the outer wound portion of a baseball
57. cover – n – the leather outside of a baseball
58. shrift – n – the act of confession, related to shrive
59. emulous – adj – ambitious, though possibly without the negative connotations (hard to say what connotations ambitious had when RL Stevenson was writing)
60. coquetry – n – effort to attract attention, often directed from a woman to a man
61. risk – v – to take a risk (heard in a live interview on the radio, is this a nonce form caused by the ease of zero derivation in English?)
62. chuff – v – to make a noisy puffing sound like a steam engine (heard every day thanks to Thomas and Friends, defined thanks to class) Source: oh, the horror, http://ttte.wikia.com/wiki/Roll_Along
63. chuff – v – to deliberately and obviously fail a standardized test
64. chuffed – adj – pleased
65. shunt – v – to move a train from one track to another or move cars from one train to another (again courtesy of Thomas and Friends)
66. head – n – the flared load-bearing part of a railway rail
67. web – n – the thin(ner) part of a rail between the base and head
68. fishplate – n – the piece that joins two railway rails together
69. safety line – n – the textured and colored strip at the edge of a train station platform
70. trough – n – long, narrow area of low pressure, named because of its shape
71. cornice – n – portion of roof that overhangs the main structure for rain protection
72. pilaster – n – rectangular column that sticks out of a wall but is structurally insignificant
73. fore edge – n – the edge of a book opposite the binding
74. square – n – part of book board that overhangs the block; a book cornice
75. action – n – the part of a piano that transfers motion between the key and hammer; possibly generalized to (musical) keyboard function
76. nacelle – n – /ˈnæsl̩/ at M-W, /nəˈsɛl/ at Wiktionary – the boxy part of a windmill between the hub and the mast (and just what is the difference between a mast and stanchion?)
77. swart – adj – dark; related to swarthy
78. percy – adj – personal (of a drug stash), which has led to a meaning of unreal or legit
79. bpw;dr – initialism – behind pay wall; didn't read
80. avidity – n – greed, intensity of desire
81. catholicity – n – universality; appears to relate to catholic and Catholic
82. cheval-glass – n – a full length mirror on a stand that allows the mirror to pivot
83. arras – n – tapestry, since Arras (a city in France) was a major source of them
84. tippet – n – a shoulder covering garment, an animal skin draped on the shoulders is a typical example, a scarf worn loose around the neck is another example
85. bartizan – n – (also bartisan) a wall with projecting battlements like the Spanish fortifications in Cádiz or San Juan (though the word is Scottish in origin)
86. retronym – n – a term modified to make the original sense explicit as in acoustic guitar, natural turf or white milk; apparently coined by Frank Mankiewicz
87. annuitant – n – someone who gets an annuity
88. absquatulate – v – to run off; a joke coinage from the 19th century
89. hangry – adj – anger caused by hunger; a joke portmanteau of the 21st century (not the only portmanteau of hungry I've seen, just that this one was new)
90. nyctophilia – n – a love of the night
91. cat vacuum – v – to be doing something other than the writing you ought to be doing (like collecting words rather than preparing a book I ought to be)
92. adiabatic – adj – involving no heat transfer into or out of the working fluid of thermodynamic processes; highly associated with process
93. hegemony – adj – a notion of a power structure involving domination of one group over another; more narrowly a power structure that is not questioned—how Things Are The Way They Are and why they stay that way
94. memristor – n – passive electrical element (resistor, capacitor and inductor are the other three) caused by imperfect metal-metal contact; portmanteau of memory resistor
95. coherer – n – radio detector that predates crystal detector; some are memristors
96. articulated bus – n – one of the really long busses with two halves
97. slug – v – to carpool informally but not as informal as hitchhiking;, usually to take advantage of HOV lanes (similar to the expresses on the Kennedy, but for cars with multiple passengers) or lower tolls
98. slug – n – the person who gets a slugged ride; not the driver
99. tender – n – another name for coal car
100. tank engine – n – a steam engine that does not have a tender, but carries all fuel and water on-board

L2 tactics on L1 vocabulary learning

Since one of the projects in the vocabulary acquisition class is to learn 100 new English words, I figured I could take a page out of L2 teaching. There are some ways of teaching that include pre-reading vocabulary instruction. Why not do the same for L1? Sure, I've got an adult-sized vocabulary, but why make this harder than necessary?

But where to find the words I don't know? Enter the Simple Concordance Program teamed up with Jekyll and Hyde. One of the SCP's tricks is that it can generate a word list by frequency of the word's use. And Jekyll and Hyde is in the public domain, so its text is already txt. So team them up to make a list showing from least frequent (one use for a whole bunch) to most frequent (1,600 uses for the). Scan the words that occur once for likely targets, and you've now got a list of words to learn. 

Just. Like. That.

(I should add that this doesn't add to vocabulary depth or catch all of the likely targets, but it speeds things up quite a bit.)

Themes in learning new words

So we’re most of the way through the vocabulary acquisition class now. It’s over next week in fact. In my reading for the class, some common themes cropped up. The following are some take away points for people looking either to improve their vocabulary in their native language or learn vocabulary in a non-native language. Learning new words:

• is a social process
• follows your interests
• depends on your level of engagement.

Let’s take a look at what I mean by this.

It’s a social process. You are somehow going to get these words and their meanings from other people. Period. (I suppose there might be an exception, but most people don’t coin new words the way Shakespeare did. So, period.) To be sure, some of those people will be face to face with you, but written langauge has a broader use of words. Slight data on this point: Of the words in my vocabulary project, only a handful were in any sort of spoken context. The vast majority were from written sources. (I’ll supply some numbers once I finish that project.) I suspect, though haven’t seen anything saying so in peer-reviewed research that

face-to-face > movies/tv > radio > reading

in terms of what format is likely to stick best.

It follows your interests. The words that I have the most trouble recalling are the words that other people gave me on a request. Ergodic is cool, but I’m not that interested in mathematics or thermodynamics. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure to remember bogey—I love riding on the train. My wife likes Scrabble sorts of games, so ai is likely to stay in her vocabulary while I’ll probably forget it because I don’t play those sorts of games.

It depends on your level of engagement. This is somewhat trickier. You are certainly more likely to be engaged when talking about things you are interested in. But you are also more likely to be engaged when you are talking face to face with a person and ask for an explanation of a new word. Likewise, explicit vocabulary instruction in a non-native language—whether from a teacher, fellow student or other speaker—will increase your level of engagement with the new vocabulary. Another anecdote, though involving grammar. On a trip to Spain, I wanted to know how to say “I’m ready to X”. So indicating to the man running the tapas bar, I told him that I wanted to pay and that I was ready. I then asked but how do I say those at the same time. I now know that you ESTAR list@ para INFINITIVE. Because I got a short explanation from him and engaged him in communication, I remember that information several years later.

Coming up: Points specific to non-native language vocabulary