Author Archive
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on April 09, 2014
Most people in Spain are Spanish and speak Spanish. Most people in Italy are Italian and speak Italian. There are many countries that give their name, plus a suffix, to both a language, and an adjective for things from the country. Of course there are lots of languages without countries, and plenty of countries that […]
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on January 17, 2013
Nouns are what the world is made of. Verbs are how you put them together. Adjectives are straightforward. And adverbs are … monsters. Try this exercise: go through a piece of writing, ideally an essay of your own. Delete all adverbs and adverbial phrases, all those “surprisingly”, “interestingly”, “very”, “extremely”, fortunately”, “on the other hand”, […]
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on October 29, 2012
In his TV documentary The Deep, David Attenborough relates how his team found a recently-dead whale at the bottom of the sea. The vast beast is food for millions. The hagfish find the corpse, and start scraping away at the skin with two rows of horny teeth. Seven-meter-long sweeper sharks dig deep holes into the […]
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on December 01, 2010
This post comes from Adam Kilgarriff, a linguist and a specialist in the area where linguistics, computers and dictionaries meet. Adam was at Brighton University until 2004 when he set up his own company, Lexical Computing Ltd. He lives in Brighton. _________ Spelling rules … if only they didn’t have exceptions. There are three words […]
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on August 02, 2010
When I was thirteen, I went to a chess championship in Southend-on-Sea. It was grey and windswept, and I was a little lonely and homesick, and as far as I remember I lost all my games. I remember just one spark of colour in this otherwise cheerless scene: my partner in one game, delighted with […]
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on June 24, 2010
Our next guest post comes from Adam Kilgarriff. Adam is a linguist, and a specialist in the area where linguistics, computers and dictionaries meet. He was at Brighton University until 2004 when he set up his own company, Lexical Computing Ltd. He lives in Brighton, and will be taking a lunchtime swim in the sea […]
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