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Climb it, film it, share it: multimodality and the Leaning Tower of Pisa
Doing the Pisa PushImagine you`re on a holiday of a lifetime, standing in front of a world-famous site, say the Tower of Pisa. So what do you do? What a silly question, you might think: climb it and...
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Sensationalism unmasked: how to design newsworthy headlines
Have digital media made news headlines more sensational?Once upon a time, when the press was the queen of the media, professional standards demanded news reports to be an accurate, objective and...
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"Uh-huh. Mhm. Wow": How Backchannels influence the Story
Reproduced with permission: http://portermason.com/johnny/1998/01/26/credit-card-offer/ When we hear someone telling a story or narrating an event,...
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The truth about British tag questions
why do we use tag questions?I bet you`ve heard about tag questions (TQs) before, haven`t you? But, apart from knowing what kind of question they are, have you actually thought about what these TQs...
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Article 24
Season's Greetings to all our readers.We will resume our weekly summaries on January 6 2014. We look forward to your continued interest in 2014.Best wishes from the Linguistics Research Digest team
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Go on – Flex those linguistic muscles at the 2014 Olympiad!
In their article ‘Linguistics at School: The UK Linguistics Olympiad’,Richard Hudson and Neil Sheldonexplain why a Linguistics Olympiad (LO) can be beneficial to us all. So, to get your students...
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Can Eastenders affect your language?
‘Stop saying ‘innit’! You sound like you’re in Eastenders!’How many times have you heard television being blamed for a decline in the language standards of young people? Sociolinguists have...
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C'mon, give us a smile
As we know from our everyday lives, a smile can indicate many things (amusement, irony and agreement, to name a few). However, Timo Kaukomaa, Anssi Peräkylä and Johanna Ruusuvuori were interested in...
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Give it me!
...or give me it!...or give it to me! ?IImagine you are Harry Potter facing Voldemort with the Philosopher`s stone in your hand. The Dark Lord is overwhelmed by a desire to get the stone, so he says,...
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Young, old or just ‘emerging’? How does age affect language change?
As times change so too do people’s life stages. Traditionally these were thought of as child > adolescent > adult, but this idea is now called into question with the addition of an ‘emerging...
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Everybody loves somebody? In America, not in New Zealand
Happy Valentine's Day!Surprising as it may be, according to the study carried out by Alexandra D`Arcyand colleagues, a New Zealander would probably sing ‘Everyone loves someone’. The meaning is still...
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Learning the ropes with a metaphor
Every company or organisation has its own jargon and its own way of doing things as well as talking about them. If you are new to a company, it might take a while to get your head round work-related...
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Tweeting ‘sorry’: a guide to corporate apologies
Nowadays social networks have become ubiquitous and are used to communicate almost anything. For example, you can post a complaint about your leaking kettle directly to Argos` Twitter account and make...
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‘I thought’ I knew you so well…
Language is such a crucial part of our lives that the way we use it can even reveal something about our relationships with other people. Michael Sean Smith* explains that people come to a conversation...
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The truth about grammar books: do they actually influence language use?
Everyone is familiar with prescriptive grammars – books containing ‘the rules of correct language use’. But have you ever wondered whether these volumes have any actual impact on the way we speak and...
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It's her personality man's looking at
I don't mind how my girl looks.. it's her personality man's looking at London English has a new pronoun. Young people living in multicultural areas of the inner city use man as an alternative to I....
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A little blog about the vlog
You might think the internet consists mainly of cat videos (see our earlier post on Lolcats), but I would like to draw your attention to another online genre which has received much less attention –...
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OMG! Is texting wrecking our language?
How many times have you heard someone say that texting is ruining your spelling? Or, perhaps even more dramatically, the whole English language? It’s a point of debate that has only intensified with...
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Naughty boys and sexy girls
21st Century = equality, right? Cathrine Norberg decided to investigate, using the New Model Corpus, a 100 million word corpus of current English drawn from the web, to see if there were any...
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Good morning customer, how may I help you?
If you’ve ever gone to get a takeaway drink from Starbucks, you’re probably aware that they like to take your name and write it on the cup. If you’re someone whose name is even vaguely unusual or...
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