London Language

junk charts

junk charts

Sylvia pointed me to this extremely rich data source

B-)

'oldest English'?

BBC — 'oldest English words' identified

It would be interesting to discuss the nature of this evidence and how reliable we think it is...

Billy

what's new? gestures and infant speech

BBC News - gestures 'develop infant speech'

I've just had a morning of tutorials with students working on dissertations at various levels. One thing we often talk about is how surprising the results of an investigation are likely to be.

This news report is interesting from that point of view (as well as more generally). The researchers are reported as describing their results as 'surprising' since they 'contradict the folklore'. I think that's right in that some people think that the more articulate you are the less you need to use gestures. But is it surprising that toddlers who communicate more nonverbally at 14 months go on to have higher vocabularies at four-and-a-half? I suppose it depends on what hypotheses you're already assuming. So the question 'are your results surprising?' always depends on what assumptions you're already making.

B-)

does my iPhone think?

About a year ago, Erica gave me a free subscription to the London Review of Books so now I regularly feel guilty about hardly ever reading it. Every now and then, though, it has some must-reads. The new one has a piece by Jerry Fodor advertised on the cover as 'does my iPhone think?' It's a review of Andy Clark's book Supersizing the mind and it turns out it's really about whether his iPhone is part of his mind (is there a principled difference between consulting your iPhone for information and consulting your memory?)

It's a great article and I think it shows quite clearly that Clark is wrong and that there is a difference between my mind and my iPhone (or there would be if I had one).

Linguistically, its got classic Fodor style with jokes about how much philosophers get paid, two uses of 'begging the question' in the old-fashioned 'proper' sense (presupposing the answer to a question rather than just raising it), and a nice explanation of the problem with slippery slope arguments, applied in passing to the question of whether abortion is homicide.

B-)