Linguistics

Rediscovered notes

24. June 2012

Signage is not language. One cannot fully appreciate the meaning of a ‘Give Way’ sign without contextual knowledge of traffic rules (that there may be cars coming from the sideway direction) — it’s not simply an imperative phrase demanding action…

The Longest Syllables in English

Featuring the Sonority Principle

The Frequency-Brevity Principle

Examples of onto-morphology

A few years ago at a language-related expo, I saw a demo for a vocabulary app. It was for learning Georgian (because purportedly that was the data they had). There was a screenshot of a typical quiz:

I Would Like to Buy a Hamburger

Notes on Auditory Training

McGurk Induction

From Quantity to Quality

Bootstrapping Central Coherence

Non-trivial efforts

August 14, 2017

What does it mean to speak a language?

What is NLU in humans?

Computation in carbo

January 13, 2019

Today I was thinking about understanding in terms of information processing, circuits, and activation patterns.

Instrumental Mapping

Phrasebooks and Pragmatics

July 17, 2013

Pragmatically (i.e. in social use), syntactic construction may not predict meaning. What looks like hypotheticals or questions may in fact be imperatives. Examples:

The Semiosis Project: Part 1

Vector Line Icons as an Intuitive Medium of Meaning

Preamble

In this post I will rant about icons, then lay out ambitions for a project to build an icon library, for a particular kind of…

Genie Out of the Bottle

Acquiring or Learning a Generable Language

A speculative model of acquisition

March 5, 2013

Learning: