fnordian's New Writeups

SIL International (thing)

2005-01-04T21:25:03Z

SIL International, also known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is the only major organization conducting linguistic field work on an ongoing basis. Most linguists doing field work have the goal of first, documenting the language so that it may be preserved, and second, to discover new things about how language works in general by examining a (usually) yet-to-be-studied language. To this end, they generally publish articles in peer-reviewed journals and present papers at academic conferences. SIL, on the other hand, conducts their research with different goals.

From the SIL website (http://www.sil.org/sil/):
Founded 70 years ago, SIL International is a faith-based organization that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world's lesser-known languages. SIL's staff shares a Christian commitment to service, academic excellence, and professional engagement through literacy,…

Otomanguean (idea)

2005-01-04T08:30:52Z

The Otomanguean (also spelled Oto-Manguean) language superfamily (often called stock) includes about thirty major indigenous Latin American languages (and many more minor languages and dialects.) This family extends throughout Mexico and into Nicaragua. Like most Mesoamerican language families, the name Otomanguean comes from combining its northern-most language, Otomí with its southern-most language, Mangue.

Because this is a super-family, like Indo-European, there is a lot of variety within the languages, and generalizations are difficult. However, one interesting feature is that (almost?) all Otomanguean languages are tonal.

Most languages in this family are endangered, meaning that there are fewer children learning the languages than there are speakers of it dying, though there are still 261,000 speakers of Otomanguean languages. Many of the languages are moribund, where children are not learning the language and the…

Haight-Ashbury (place)

2005-01-02T05:50:45Z

The Haight (pronounced like hate), as SF residents typically call it, is today actually two distinct neighborhoods, the Upper Haight and the Lower Haight.

The Upper Haight is the neighborhood that was once referred to as Haight-Ashbury, and the part of Haight Street that people will assume you're talking about if you say just "the Haight". Though the Upper Haight was once a bastion of peace and love, visitors who come to the neighborhood hoping for a hippie experience will be disappointed. Though there are a few neo-hippies, and it's still a place you can go to score the streets are crowded with tourists and gutterpunks. Though the area is still home to various subcultures (including punk, goth and rockabilly), the corner of Haight and Ashbury has been home to a Gap store for the past ten years or so.

The Upper Haight is a nice place to shop, but I wouldn't want to live there. Some highlights (that…

Critical Discourse Analysis (idea)

2005-01-02T03:52:54Z

This node has been brought to you as part of the node your homework effort. This synthesis of Critical Discourse Analysis was originally written for my Discourse Analysis seminar (in Fall of 2004).

As its proponents admit, Critical Discourse Analysis (commonly called CDA) is not, in itself, a theory. Rather, the idea behind CDA is that discourse analysis should be approached keeping certain principles in mind. The principles can be boiled down to the ideas that discourse is a way of enacting power (which is discursive) and that discourse analysis must be done keeping in mind the social context (i.e., according to CDA theorists, the power context). CDA aims to explore the relationship between discourse practices and social structures; the ways in which power is realized and is recreated through discourse. Additionally, CDA aims for interdisciplinary research, wanting to combine various social sciences in order to get the fullest view of social problems possible.

CDA looks…

competence vs. performance (idea)

2005-01-02T02:23:26Z

A distinction developed by Noam Chomsky beginning in his 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in which he outlines what he believes the goals of Linguistics should be.

A quote from the book:
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who know its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)

Chomsky argued that linguists should study only the underlying representations of language, and specifically of their own language (he believed that until linguists understand their own language, they cannot understand language in general; this is why he devoted so much of his career to the analysis of English syntax.) In order to…

compound word (idea)

2005-01-01T07:32:21Z

In morphology (a subfield of linguistics), a compound is a (relatively) new word created by the word formation process of (surprise!) compounding. Usually, compound is short for compound noun, because the compound word is a noun, though the other word may be of any lexical category.

How do compounds differ from noun phrases?
Compounds are any combination of words (generally two in English) that have come to be represented as one word in the mental lexicon of the speakers, unlike noun phrases, which are thought of as a combination of multiple words which can be switched around (i.e., noun phrases are productive.) The same words can be used as a compound noun or a noun phrase (see examples below), so telling the difference between these two things is often difficult (and something a number of my Introduction to Linguistics students always get wrong) when the compound is a combination of an adjective and a noun. When you have a noun-noun compound (like ench…