linguistics and lexicography
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 02, 2012
In Kate Atkinson’s recent novel, Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), there’s an exchange between two of the characters. When one of them mentions a large sum of money, we read that Kelly, the other character, ‘suddenly meerkatted to attention’. Does this mean we have a new verb on our hands, to meerkat? Should it be [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on January 30, 2012
Humans never outgrow a fascination with new playthings, but after a certain age it is unseemly and unrealistic to expect a steady stream of surprise gifts from doting parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. One consolation for this loss is new words: clever coinages come along all the time to supply our craving for novelty. A [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 06, 2012
In a recent post, we saw that the word jargon – while more or less synonymous with terminology – has a much more negative feel. As always, you can tell a lot about a word by the company it keeps, and a comparison of the adjectives that frequently collocate with these two nouns is revealing. [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on December 30, 2011
One of the best things I learned this year (from my friend Sylviane Granger) was that a lot of teachers use our blog as a source of inspiration for lessons and assignments for their students. But this isn’t really surprising, when you look at the huge range of material contributed by so many great writers. [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on December 14, 2011
‘Prepositions are funny’, concluded the author of The Economist’s language blog in a recent post. You can see what he means, and any teacher (or learner) of English will sympathise. Choosing the ‘right’ preposition (or more broadly, the right particle) can be a challenge, and for some, the whole business seems so arbitrary that the only [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on December 05, 2011
In a comment to my post about confusing word pairs, I said that as a child I called a pen a “biro” and a vacuum cleaner a “hoover”. I knew the terms pen and vacuum cleaner, but only later did I learn that biro was named after the Hungarian inventor László Bíró, while hoover comes [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 30, 2011
My colleague Finn Kirkland has mentioned his problems with the word serviette. I have a battered copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary dating back to the 1920s, which includes this entry: serviette n. (vulg.) table-napkin Note the ‘vulg.’ label (short for ‘vulgar’). The dictionary’s Introduction explains: “This qualification implies that the use of the word [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 17, 2011
At the recent eLEX 2011 conference in Slovenia (for earlier posts, see here and here), the discussion focussed on the future of dictionaries – or, more broadly, on the various ways in which reference needs might be catered for in years to come. What often happens in this field is that people working in universities [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 11, 2011
More news from eLEX2011, the conference on e-lexicography currently taking place in Slovenia. The conference got off to a rip-roaring start as Simon Krek (one of the organizers) outlined a radical vision for a future in which a range of intelligent language tools would be freely available to make communication easier. The functions Simon mentioned [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 09, 2011
Today’s post comes from the beautiful Slovenian city of Bled, where I’m attending a conference called ‘eLEX2011’– or ‘Electronic lexicography in the 21st century’. Regular readers will be aware of how completely the job of producing dictionaries was transformed in the 1980s by the arrival of large language corpora. Those were pioneering times, and the [...]
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