ghoti

Analyzing corpus linguistic data

I have come to realize that if I cannot sleep the best thing to do is analyze corpus linguistic data. It’s better than counting sheep.
When feeling discouraged

A good supervisor will keep you going with words of encouragement. He or she will believe in you. Step by step one needs to start the course physically of progress. That is the sign of a good guide.
Collecting papers

My colleague organizes his print copies of papers by subject. But often a paper does not fitinto neat categories. It makes sense then to organize them by author. Also by author then we see their thread of thinking.
The fixed syntax of English

English syntax today is comparatively fixed than to the past. Every statement form adheres to the seven sentence patterns with two being variations of the five base sentence patterns. Once understood, the speaker has in their grammar arsenal the tools necessary to make beautiful sentences. The seven sentence patterns are: All English sentences will adhere…
Sign, signifier, signified, “objects”

The word “word” is ambiguous. Sometimes we mean the form that we see, the surface form. Other times we mean the definition or meaning or concept of the form. Both are correct in some ways. They highlight the fact that words have two components — the form and the meaning. Saussure made this clear with…
Antconc 4.2.0

If you haven’t already heard a new version of Antconc has been released. Woohoo! Click here to get it.
Hello ghoti

I had decided it was about time I updated the blog and give it new life with a name and domain change – ghoti at ghoti.blog. If you don’t already know ghoti is pronounced fish. But for clarity just call it ghoti as it is spelt. The old content is still there. With the refresh…
Developing a more functional function word list

Here is my paper on developing a list of function words for use in corpus linguistics. It consists of 387 word types and covers 43.3% of 43.4% (or 99.9% coverage and differentiation) of all function and content words (tokens). I am working on a slimmer list of 196 words at the moment which will hopefully…
Triangle of meaning

This year, at the urging of a friend, I presented at the APU Asia Pacific Conference. I was rather impressed with the panel organisation and level of research done there. While my paper did not fit perfectly into the type of research done there, it was enough to fit in with concepts and ideas presented…
Phonemic atomism

SOCRATES: Is a proposition resolvable into any part smaller than a name?HERMOGENES: No; that is the smallest. (Cratylus, Plato) In language there are levels of units. These are sentence, clause, phrase, word and phoneme. Here Socrates narrows down the meaningful unit to the word or name. A phoneme in itself has no meaning as such.…