ghoti

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,…
Let it be – words are meant to be “lost”

Charles Darwin would have made a great linguist. In his thinking of life and evolution it is not someone who decides on what survives and what dies. It the larger mechanism of existence that “decides” so. Similarly, words should survive if there is a need for it to do so, not to be forced so…
One

1. There is something to be said about linguistic determinism, and in particular relativity. Linguistic relativity says that the form or structure of a language influences the way people think, or world-view. The often quoted example is the Inuit people and the words for “snow”. Whereas in English we have snow (and perhaps sleet and slush) the…
Grammar or experience?

What is wrong with the idea of “universal” in the Universal Grammar of Chomsky? It is that what is taken as being universal is wrong. It is not the grammar in the brain that is universal, but rather it is the human experience that is universal. We all have the same set of senses and…
heaviness of rain

more than white noise the drone continues through the night in dark sleep the overflow gutters my one exposed ear until light reveals the heaviness of the rain frogs frolic wetly green suits shining and birds shelter in the eaves leaving reluctantly at my presence as warnings come over the air waves
midnight

peak of darkness the largest hour the sun is at its lowest hidden beneath the earth seemingly under ground the stars pinhole the sky wall the half-moon noticeably crawls across the black and the air falls upon me – my ominous blanket that keeps me cold