ghoti

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…
Language Acquisition Device or shared common reality?

There are three claims that Chomsky makes about the existence of Language Acquisition Device (LAD). The first claim is that children can understand all kinds of sentences without having to have heard or learn them before. To this we can say the same thing about adults as well. In fact, every time I open a…
Constituent, adverbial, and the prepositional phrase

Consider the following sentence: (1) He is at the station. We could ask (2) Where is he? and we may also ask: (3) He is at what? or (4) What is he at? However (3) and (4) are marked in the linguistic sense. (2) seems the more natural question form. Consider (5): (5) He is…