Category Archives: Research

Trying to Ask About Tense

Posted on July 12, 2016 by exolinguist

How do you find out how a person interprets a sentence without just asking them? This is one of the key issues in the study of sentence meaning: how do you ask the question without triggering a sort of observer … Continue reading →

Posted in Language, Research | Leave a comment

More on ownself

Posted on April 14, 2015 by exolinguist

In my last posting, I was talking about the word ownself which appears in some varieties of South Asian English. At the end of that post, I mentioned that in Singapore English, the word has an even more distinct usage. … Continue reading →

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A New Referent-Neutal Reflexive Pronoun?

Posted on April 9, 2015 by exolinguist

Recently there have been a bunch of articles and other media comments about “singular they”, the use of one of the th– pronouns of English as a gender-or-referent-neutral pronoun as in Every student thinks they will pass. Every student completed … Continue reading →

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What a Gong Show

Posted on April 29, 2014 by exolinguist

A month or two ago, I was at a gathering with some co-workers, and the term “gong show” came up. There followed a discussion about this term being a western regionalism within Canada, which I had never thought of. Aside … Continue reading →

Posted in Canada/Home, Research | 2 Comments

A Quick Note on Doge

Posted on February 7, 2014 by exolinguist

I had told myself I would ignore doge as much as possible, but alas. So yesterday, this article came out, with a serious linguist explaining the grammar of doge. The syntactic details of this are spot on, and I like … Continue reading →

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Selfie Reflection

Posted on December 19, 2013 by exolinguist

Despite it having been weeks since the Oxford Online Dictionary made its proclamation, news stories about selfies keep popping up. This, for example, about the now famous Cameron, Thoring-Schmidt, and Obama selfie. Back when OOD announced “selfie” as word of … Continue reading →

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To underbus and to backroom

Posted on October 25, 2013 by exolinguist

So, with everyone thrashing out analysis of the ongoing drama in the Canadian senate, one minor detail of the discussion on twitter has caught my eye. It appears that on Monday October 21,  a tweet introduced a “new” verb into … Continue reading →

Posted in Canada/Home, Politics, Research | 1 Comment

Drilling Down into the Numbers

Posted on January 8, 2013 by exolinguist

I had started writing up a post describing my ponderously long 21 hour trek from Vancouver to Boston (via San Francisco and Newark), but in all honesty not that much interesting or noteworthy happened. Right now I am on a … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Research | Leave a comment

Bonferroni Adjustment

Posted on October 25, 2012 by exolinguist

Yes, I’ve been far too busy to keep up with this lately, but a bout of procrastination has led me to fill this gap in the internet: Bonferroni Adjustment of a Chef Boyardee can. You may now go about your … Continue reading →

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The twitter rabbit hole, and what you might find down there

Posted on July 18, 2012 by exolinguist

In the past couple weeks, I have definitely fallen deeper into the rabbit hole that is twitter. Initially, this was mainly because of my research: there’s a particular quirk of English that I want to study in detail (I’m not … Continue reading →

Posted in Canada/Home, Politics, Research | 2 Comments