- Who are you callin’ ungrammatical? — a good article by Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe. The topic is, you guessed it, whom.
- American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift — an interview with the linguist William Labov by Robert Siegel on (US) National Public Radio. Via Mark Liberman at Language Log; he also reports on the sad news concerning the public access to Prof. Labov’s research, though.
- Le mot de la fin — this is a four-times-a-week radio editorial by the lexicographer Alain Rey. (His is the name on most of the Robert dictionaries.) About 3 min each, and available as a podcast.
- Speaking in Minor and Major Keys [.pdf] — via Argonaut, a research paper by Maartje Schreuder, Laura van Eerten and Dicky Gilbers, who have found a correlation between musical minor/major keys and sad/happy emotional speech: “In order to investigate emotional intonation, we recorded and analyzed the performances of five professional readers reading passages from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in Dutch. In pitch contours of all speakers we found intervals between tones indicating minor modality in passages in which the sad character Eeyore is speaking and intervals indicating major modality in passages in which the happy, energetic Tigger is speaking.” A similar study had apparently been done already for Japanese.
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Technorati (tags): language, langue, lexique, linguistics, linguistique, media, phonétique, phonetics
Hey, great new look! Congratulations!
Apologies for taking this space, but I couldn’t find a way to contact you directly. I just wanted to mention that “Language News”, a website to which you link from you site, has changed both its name as well as its home. I would greatly appreciate it if you could update the link to point to Lingformant: The Science of Linguistics in the News (or “Lingformant” for short).
Congratulations for your blog’s look, by the way! Looks positively and charmingly chaotic. :)
Thank you, both.
Vili, I have corrected the link — thanks for the heads-up.