ghoti

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
Why syntax over morphology

Over the years of teaching and writing I have noticed how much more emphasis had been given to words (morphology) over sentences (syntax). Perhaps it is because sentences are mistakenly thought of as so much harder to pin down. When people see a sentence of twenty words they think of twenty things. Rarely do they…
Beyond dialogue

With post-Periscope here we now have what can be considered not dialogue but what I shall call plura-logue. Conversations no longer static or deferred but dynamic and immediate. It is also dialogue with one and many simultaneously.
How to set up and use iPhone VoiceOver for Periscope

Do you want to drive and Periscope at the same time but feel it is unsafe (let alone it being illegal in some places)? Well, there is a solution. It is called VoiceOver. 1. Set up VoiceOver Firstly, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut and check VoiceOver 2. Start a broadcast Now…
Ben Crystal lectures in Japan

I heard Shakespearean actor, Ben Crystal, talk today. My interest in Shakespeare – which had wained with my miscomprehension or un-comprehension of it in my youth – had returned with the revelation that what I had been watching until now had been inauthentic. Ben had pointed out that modern performances had tended towards Received Pronunciation (RP)…
Published international research low by Japanese

Compared to the world growth in publishing at eighty-percent Japan is falling behind at just 14%. Figures given this morning showed exchange to America has fallen from the peak of over 47,000 students to under 19,000. Furthermore, money put into research has dropped dramatically. If Japan is to compete academically it will need to increase…
A glossary of corpus types

There are many types of corpus depending on their use. Below is a list some of the main types. diachronic – a corpus which looks at changes across a timeframe. learner – a corpus of L2 learner writing of speech. monitor – a type of diachronic corpus which may continue to grow with new texts added…
Dealing with long difficult to understand sentences

I have talked about the seven sentence patterns here. Those are all simple sentences. A simple sentence contains a single verb, that is, one clause. Complex sentences contain more than one verb, or two or more clauses. An SVO sentence theoretically can have three clauses, having one each for the subject, verb and object. It…
What is morphosyntax?

Morphosyntax is another word for grammar. Grammar can be divided into morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of words and their rules of formation. And syntax is the study of sentences and their rules of formation. Essentially, morphology and syntax are studies of the same thing – formation rules of a language – but at differing “levels”.…