ghoti

earring

Also ear ring. A humming sound the middle-age hear (“here”) that seem to come from no particular direction (“here”).
KWIC

Short for Key Word In Context. It is a way of looking at a search term (type) in a concordance program with the keyword centred so as to see the patterns created by the other words, its context. Below is an example of a concordance search of the term ‘violence’ in a corpus. The words…
Five or Seven Sentence Patterns?

While the seven sentence pattern description is the norm in English linguistics today there still persists the use of five sentence description in some non-English speaking countries like Japan which teach English as a foreign language. Essentially the seven sentence pattern is a five sentence pattern with the extra two pattern as extensions of SVA…
type

The unique form of the tokens (words) in a corpus. Often accompanied by frequency data. Meaning is treated as secondary. Corpus linguistic analysis does not directly reveal the various meanings of a word. This must be inferred from its usage. In corpus linguistics this usually done by concordancing, collocations, clusters, etc.
token

The individual forms (words) of a corpus. The sum of the tokens is the size of the corpus. The term contrasts with type in order to distinguish how we are observing the form, whether as one instance in the corpus (token), or as combined instances relating to its frequency within a corpus (type).
How to listen without ears

Once in a while piece of new research will remind you that some things that seem a given are just not. Take for example this paper on a species of earless frogs listen with their mouths. As incredible as that may sound these frogs do indeed react to mating calls. In other words you don’t…
metamorphosisyphus thesis

push along push up  boulders ever bolder   no end in sight  a page at a time   every single word   is laborious   as long as i am   not rejected   i will continue
incorrect syntax

the grammar police are here and now i must ask for forgiveness for my syns. that i have to pay for in syn-tax.
Va Va Black Sheep – difficult sounds for Japanese learners of English

The ‘v’ sound is perhaps one of the hardest sounds for my Japanese learners of English to master. It doesn’t exist in the Japanese language. And it is approximated with the ‘b’ phoneme. Recent research has found that if the sound ‘va’ is matched with a video showing another sound made in the similar region…
‘Noli timere’ (Don’t be afraid)

Seamus Heaney’s last words – a text message – to his wife. Only A Man of Pure Character, like Mr Heaney, could have written such beautiful poetry and say such gentle words even at the end. He will be missed by all but most by those who survived him – his wife and children. Thoughts…