ghoti

The linguistic sign

Saussure pointed to that language is mistakenly thought of as a matching of a thing to a name. To him the link is between a concept (signified) and a sound pattern (signifier). The signified is its meaning and the signifier is the “container”. The two together makes the linguistic sign. The linguistic sign has two characteristics.…
The origin of English words

Source: Thomas Finkenstaedt; Dieter Wolff (1973). Ordered profusion; studies in dictionaries and the English lexicon. About 85% of words in the English language are from three languages – Germanic, French and Latin. 12% are from Greek and other minor languages like Chinese and Japanese. About 4% are proper names. Different languages had influence on English…
Active vs. passive sentence structures

One of the reasons (there are many reason but this is just one) why we would like to change an active sentence into a passive one is because we would like to bring the object of the sentence into focus. Consider these sentences: My brother was hit by a car. A car hit my brother.…
Actants

In any English sentence there are either zero, one, two or three actants. Actants are the “participants” of the sentence. They are either people or things. In (1) below the action of “to rain” itself is the “zero” actant. (1) It is raining. “It” is the dummy subject. In (2) and (3) the subjects “Peter” and…
Solution for error message in R for pasting Excel data from clipboard (pipe(‘pbpaste’) )

One of the quickest ways in R to get data into it is to copy to the clipboard then paste it into a variable. This can be done in Windows by read.table(“clipboard”, header=T) The exact same function can be done on a MAC computer with read.table(pipe(“pbpaste”), header=T) However, in the MAC a red warning message…
Clipboard hack for R in MAC

When I first started using the statistical software R for statistics I had started on a Windows computer. For here the copying and pasting function is read.table(“clipboard”, header=T) The exact same function on a MAC computer is read.table(pipe(“pbpaste”), header=T) Simple as that. I’d someone had told me this much earlier.
In praise of lexicogrammar

Lexicogrammar is not a word you hear much but those of a certain following – cognitive linguists, functional grammarians, etc – use this word to describe what is traditionally call vocabulary and grammar as one system rather than being two separate systems. As a researcher in prepositions this is a big deal. It means I…
Form and meaning in linguistics

Form in linguistics and language refers to the symbols used to represent meaning. Each form has a particular meaning in a particular context. This cannot be stressed enough. It implies that a form can have different meanings in different contexts. However, the range of meanings for a form is usually limited to a prototype or…
Sometimes the adverb is obligatory and unmovable

Consider this sentence: (1) He put the bag down. The parts of the sentence are He (S) / put (V) / the bag (O) / down (A). The removal of A (adverbial) would render the sentence incomplete. In other words, the A is obligatory. Some teachers call this sentence SVO but that would make “the…
Finding the subject of a sentence

Perhaps the biggest problem with understanding long sentences is that they seem to be a lot longer than the basic syntax unit. Today we accept that there are seven basic sentence pattern types, where the possible number of obligatory units is between 2 and 4 (SVOC, SVOO and SVOA). Yet a sentence with, for example,…