ghoti

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.…
Linguistic determinism and relativity

In philosophy determinism is a theory of causation where what precedes a situation determines the outcome. While this is a secular theory is related to its religious cousin, predestination. Linguistic determinism is the theory that a language determines the way you think of the world. There is a weak version termed linguistic relativity where it…
Is “language isolate” a misnomer?

If you really think about it languages cannot be an isolate, that is, unless at the creation of the language it developed out of a population that had no language. It is now accepted that about 70,000 years ago our species spread from Africa into Europe and Asia. As these populations migrated they some settled.…
anata – ‘you’ in Japanese

In English, to address the person you are speaking to, you use ‘you’ (I have just used ‘you’ four times in one sentence. lol). It is impossible to call them by name directly to him or her. But that is English. In Japanese, you must use their name, or else drop the subject (which is…