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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in linguistics' LiveJournal:

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    Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
    2:25 am
    [in_alaska]
    Survey -- with link!
    Please take my survey on "Attitudes towards nonsexist language in the U.S.".

    It'll take you 5 -10 minutes and you'd really be helping me out with my research.

    Feel free to spread the link. Thank you!
    Monday, June 9th, 2008
    7:37 pm
    [julleri]
    career/job suggestions for linguistics degree
    Hello

    I am a recent graduate of Arizona State University and have my bachelor's in English, concentration Linguistics. I must admit that my linguistics knowledge is VERY rusty, but I'm in a bit of a pickle. I haven't really done anything with my degree, I am in a job that is unfortunately going nowhere, but I haven't any idea where to look and what to look for with a linguistics degree. Does anyone have any suggestions? I hope that I'm not the only one who, when asked "ah... linguistics... so, what do you want to do with that?", pauses and replies, "I ... well, I really don't know."

    Here is some specific information about my situation:
    - 26, living in Phoenix, AZ
    - employed with a bank in small business lending data entry, something I did as part-time work while in college, but have now done for three years (it is time for a change)
    - majored in English, chose linguistics concentration as I enjoy science of language more than reading novels (which is something I don't really like in the first place)
    - languages studied: quite a bit of Spanish, a modicum of French. Skills have deteriorated.

    I know that this kind of post in these journals may be seen as ridiculous. To those who feel this way, I'm sorry, but I really need some solid advice.

    Regards,
    Jason 
    Thursday, June 5th, 2008
    4:49 pm
    [monkeykong]
    Not for sensitive eyes
    After a nerdy discussion with my friend earlier today, I've been wondering if there is a word for not-quite-smilies like, um...

    (I apologise for this)

    OGC

    You know, when you tilt your head to the left and there's a picture of a stick man... engaging in a certain recreational activity... enjoyed by roughly 50% of the population from time to time (or so I hear). Or perhaps he's just holding an ice cream, very carefully, as he does his John Wayne impersonation.

    Or to give a more tame example: \m/ -- this is a hand gesture known as the "devil horns" which you might display to encourage a friend, your favourite band, or some guy on the street you feel deserves this particular gesture, to "rock on."

    I thought that it might be an ideogram made up of letters (people on the internet are resourceful folk), but it doesn't sit quite right.
    Monday, January 12th, 2004
    4:15 pm
    [lylyly]
    a student's survey on cultural-oriented linguistics - pls help!

    Hi guys,

    I am Vietnamese student. I am doing a survey for my graduation paper from my university. The theme is to compare the way to compliment between English speaking countries and Asian countries. I am desperated to look for as much as possible English speaking people (in Western countries better) to fill in my questionnaire. It is not too long, you can do it in around 4 minutes. But it means so much to me.

     

    I send here the file (Word) of my questionnaire. If anyone from English speaking countries passing by and see it, pls help me.   I really appreciate it.

    Thanks a lot and sorry if this is not allowed.

     

    After that, pls send it back to me on my email : bewitchedman@gmail.com

    Here the link:

     

    http://www.mediafire.com/?3bvbjnomi2g

     

    (link from sunflower1343 - who is so kind to help me post on her journal)

      
    For those who don't want to download, I post the questionnaire below. You can copy it to Word.

    Thursday, May 8th, 2008
    6:38 pm
    [tsukikage85]
    N vs. D
    Does anyone know of any tests to determine whether a word is a N or D?
    Or if not, does anyone simply know whether wh-words are Ns or Ds?
    (I'd love to have the answer to both questions.)
    Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
    9:52 pm
    [exeyel]
    Linguistic Anthropology - W, J, and V in German
    I'm trying to track down some specific information (or general even) regarding how certain Latin characters came to be used for particular sound in German and some more information that goes further back into the history of the language.

    When are the first recorded uses of the Latin character W for German words traced back to? Was this always used to represent a sound similar to the English V or, as some linguists from about 100 years ago suggest, that it represented a UU sound (not sure on the exact pronunciation)? As far as the spoken language I have never encountered any cases of an actual English W (as in would) apart from loan words, is there/was there historically any sound similar?

    Similarly, when were the characters J (as an English Y sound) and V (as an English F) sound adopted?

    Thank you, and any books/articles/web sites/comments/thoughts would be appreciated as well.
    7:35 pm
    [smartypantsnyc]
    Links for Me
    Hey there,

    One of my biggest pet peeves is "on accident." Don't ask me why, but it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. I've never read of any specific rules, though. Is there a rule system for correctly assigning prepositions to nouns, that is, when it's not spacial? If so, please share?

    Ryan

    Current Music: Dom G
    Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
    7:02 pm
    [frek_snork]
    Eglish-Russian grammar research

    Hello,


    I'm a student of Moscow City Pedagogical University (Russia) and major in English and Cross Cultural Communications. Currently I am conducting a research where I compare some aspects of English and Russian grammar. These are there is a need, it is necessary and we need . The crucial point is whether these constructions can substitute each other in sentences.


    It is not time-consuming.  What is needed - is simply to fill the form in the web-page


     http://mgpu2.awardspace.com/


     

    The results of the research will help to better understand the structure of the language.


    Thanks a lot.


    Sveta

    Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
    8:31 pm
    [tsukikage85]
    HELP!
    Guys, I'm going kind of crazy here:
    In the sentence John left the university., what Case does "the university" take, what assigns this case, and where is it located syntactically?
    Because it's optional, I want to say that it's an adjunct to "leave", and therefore doesn't take the accusative, but my textbook only talks about the nominative case (specifier to finite T), accusative case (sister to transitive V), and "prepositional" case (assigned by a preposition). My German is suggesting that this might be dative, but that still leaves me with the question of what's assigning it. I'm so lost, and this assignment is due tomorrow (even though I started working on it last Saturday, two days after it was assigned).

    [EDIT: * I left the university and she did so her house.
    Boo-f-in'-ya! That bugger is a complement, baby!
    *feels stupid for not having thought of using the do-so test until now*]
    Sunday, April 20th, 2008
    4:18 pm
    [tsukikage85]
    Crazy introductory syntax homework.
    "Mary appears to know that she will be fired tomorrow."
    What is going on syntactically with "tomorrow" in this sentence? Whatever it is, it seems like the phrase dominating tomorrow is an adjunct of the VP first dominating "fire", but I wonder if maybe "tomorrow" is actually an Adv in this sentence, or if there's something weird like the DP being a complement of a PP adjunct to the VP with a null P? I dunno... This whole tree is an insane, overly-complicated mess.

    ( My present guess at the tree under the cut: )

    Current Mood: confused
    Current Music: Anime Pulse - Episode 43: Fairy Princess NANA is sent into the Fushigi Yuugi by Kamisama’s Kazoku
    Saturday, April 12th, 2008
    8:00 pm
    [lilbrattyteen]
    book recs for a newb to linguistics.
    First post :) I've been lurking for a while though.

    My first exposure to linguistics - a small class at my CC called "Modern English: Function and Grammar" - fascinated me. After my final exam a few weeks ago, I went to the library and picked up some spring break reading:

    Eats, Shoots and Leaves (not because I got the idea that this is a scholarly work, but because my heavily descriptivist prof made fun of it so much that I had to read it. I wanted to throw her snobbery at the wall after 50 pages.)

    Language and the Internet by David Crystal - fascinating (though now-dated; I read the first edition) study of how new forms of communication have affected English and what "Netspeak" really is. I'm definitely going to read more of Crystal's stuff: Language Death and The Fight For English are at the top of my list.

    A few topics for book recs:

    1. The general subject of the internet and language and literacy, and how it is affecting/has affected intellectual discourse. I already have The Gutenberg Elegies; what's a good companion volume that takes the opposite view?

    Another thing that Crystal discusses in his book is the rapid change of Netspeak slang. What's a good intro to research into how words are created and why some survive and some die?

    2. Has there been much study of linguistic registers in religious contexts? Since many fields and areas of society have their own registers (medicine, law, etc.) it seems likely that religious institutions and professions (e.g., the clergy) would have a register as well.

    3. What's a cheap, easy book that gives an overview of discourse analysis? Something along the lines of "A very short introduction to _______" would be great.
    Friday, April 11th, 2008
    12:51 am
    [tsukikage85]
    thematic roles
    I know that thematic roles can be kind of... tricky... to assign, but what would you say would be the theta role of the subject in "These books sell well"? I guess I've just been defaulting to "theme", or occasionally "theme/experiencer" for a lot of these sentences when I can't think of anything more suitable, although I can't say I'm comfortable with "experiencer" in this particular case...

    Current Mood: confused
    Current Music: Savage Garden - Affirmation
    Saturday, April 5th, 2008
    5:59 pm
    [monkeykong]
    Online speech communities?
    Hi, long-time lurker, first-time poster -- a student of English Language at Glasgow University.

    My finals are a little over two weeks away and one of the general questions (exam questions we can prepare answers for before the exam) is on speech communities. I was doing some reading into blogs for another subject (textlinguistics) and started to wonder about speech communities online: does a certain IRC server, forum, or whatever take on traits associated with speech communities/communities of practice?

    The example that got me thinking was the countless comments on [info]scans_daily (a comics community) consisting solely of the word motto, taken to mean roughly "I agree with the above comment," referring to the unofficial community motto: "at scans_daily, it's never just you." This rarely needs explaining.

    It's possible that I've misunderstood the whole concept. Any thoughts, corrections, or anything at this point can only be helpful. Thanks in advance, all you lovely people.
    Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
    11:25 pm
    [withanf]
    ASL interpretation of Marilyn Manson
    I figured this might be of some interest to people here.  This guy interprets the Marilyn Manson song "This is the New Shit.," and boy does he ever.

    **Warning**
    If you're easilly offended, or made uncomfortable hearing explicit lyrics/ signs / men wearing heavy make-up, then don't watch this.  Otherwise, it's the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

    Sunday, March 9th, 2008
    2:09 pm
    [mwana_isimu]
    syntactic tree applications for NeoOffice
    Does anyone use NeoOffice instead of Word (or LaTex)? If so, what syntactic tree application do you use? I've been using the Draw function, and my trees are not very pretty. Any suggestions, besides LaTex? (I did use it for awhile, but had to ask for huge amounts of help all the time and got fed up with it. I need to finish my dissertation and don't want to use something with such a steep learning curve, for me at least.)

    Thanks.
    Thursday, March 6th, 2008
    1:27 am
    [tsukikage85]
    syntactic tree drawing applications
    Does anyone know of any programs for drawing syntactic trees in Windows XP that don't suck?
    I've tried TreeForm and LTC and they both drive me up the wall, so I'm resorting to using phpSyntaxTree...
    (And yes, I know that "that don't suck" is very vague, but it's quite past my bed time right now and I'm not really in the mood to form a more coherent description of my needs, so if you could just make any recommendations of programs you like.)
    Thursday, February 21st, 2008
    6:25 pm
    [hkitsune]
    Grad school admissions stuff?
    Okay, so my Phonology teacher's pretty unforgiving and I'm probably gonna get a B in his class. I want to go to graduate school and even though I'm interested in semantics/syntax/neurolinguistic methods, I'm worried that admissions groups will be like, 'Omg, she got a B in Phonology, which is like SO easy' and that I won't be able to get into good schools (OSU, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, among others). Please tell me this isn't the case. :(
    Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
    12:08 pm
    [anne_eremenko]
    Cross-cultural Study
    Greetings, everyone! I'm a graduate teaching assistant at a Russian university, Anne by name and I'm really fascinated to see so many people who love linguistics at one place! That's precious!

    I want to ask for your assistance. As part of my thesis on cross-cutural communication I'm supposed to research into national stereotypes - the way people of one nationality think of people of other nationalities - those they rarely meet in real life. I composed a survey which would allow me to describe these stereotypes in simple terms. 

    Please, take some time to fill the questionnaire at my page! Much thanks in advance!
    Friday, February 15th, 2008
    3:04 pm
    [smartypantsnyc]
    Clarifications
    Hey,

    I've heard it said that dialects and accents are not linguistic phenomena. That may very well be true, but I need to know: exactly why aren't they linguistic?

    And along those lines, at what point does a dialect become a language? Where is the line drawn? Is deep Scottish English not different enough from backwoods Alabama? Patua from French? Spanish from Italian? There must be a million possible stages in between.

    <3
    R
    Thursday, February 14th, 2008
    3:48 pm
    [shootthecore]
    help diagramming a coordinate sentence.
    I understand that in a coordinate sentence such as y verbs and z verbs that the two sentence nodes are joined together along with the CC node to a dominating "super" sentence node.

    But, what happens when there are more CCs like in:

    w verbs and x verbs and y verbs and z verbs.

    Is it like this? (My silly professor made up this sentence)


    or this?



    or

    do all S's and CC's that are linked together form their own distinct dominating S nodes (3 in total in this case) which then join together at another S node that is higher than them?

    Thanks.
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