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English Phonetic Chart

Here is an English phonetic chart I had created based on Adrian Underhill‘s Sound Foundations. I highly recommend this book as a workbook for teachers.
A Simple Guide to Using AntConc now in French

A Simple Guide to Using AntConc is now available in French! A big thanks to Stefania Solofrizzo for doing the translation on her own volition and nice enough to send it to me to share with you. A Simple Guide to Using AntConc (English) Un Guide Simple Pour Utiliser AntConc (français) translation by Stefania Solofrizzo…
collocation

the node has centre stage as always, egotistical to no end handsome as a lover heavy as a smoker frequent to haunt joints come keep him company for loneliness is an eyesore
Neighbours, highlighting and hiding

Consider this conversation: Tom: This is my neighbour, David. David: Hi. I’m his neighbour. Call me Dave. Harry: Harry. Nice to meet you, Dave. David is Tom’s neighbour from Tom’s perspective. So the focus of the conversation is with Tom. But in reality we tend to forget (or in Lakoff and Johnson’s term hide) the…
The importance of evolutionary embodiment – clues from the fingertips

Western philosophy has a tough time in dealing with the relationship between the body and the mind. In particular, identity has been all too often separated from the physical, all characteristic of ‘being’ invested in the soul. So it is no surprise that we have ignored the function of the fingerprint as part of our…
Advances in neuroscience and imaging

Here is a great short video on how we have mapped the structure brain with the latest scanning technology. As part of the a project called the Human Connector Project 1,200 Americans have been scanned in order to analyse differences between behaviour and the brain’s structures. Highly interested to see how language and the mind…
International Mother Language Day

21 February is International Mother Language Day, a day to remember, protect and promote the world’s mother languages. The death of a language is the death of a culture, and the death of a way of thinking.
Two new books on metaphor

Two recent books on metaphors worth looking at is Raymond Gibbs and Herbert Colston’s Interpreting Figurative Meaning and Benjamin K. Bergen’s Louder Than Words. Gibbs and Colston approaches metaphorical meaning from psycholinguistics and neuroscience while Bergen looks at meaning from the cutting-edge perspective of neuroimaging. Both are worth a look. The Gibbs/Colston is harder to…
Happy New Year

May 2014 be filled with more words of joy and happiness and less of anger and sorrow.
Tie Fighters and cultural unconsciousness

I spend a lot of time thinking about language, even when buying presents for my kids. This year I got the Lego Tie Fighter for my son (deep down the toy is for me but I believe we have kids so that we can continue our childhood into adulthood). For most of my life I…