Recently I watched a television programme about Auguste Escoffier, the French chef who changed eating into dining, making the food of the rich not only opulent but delicious.

The programme reminded me that Escoffier was one of the innovative artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries  considered in Jonah Lehrer’s book  Proust was a Neuroscientist. It is surprising to find a cook alongside such practitioners of the high arts as Cezanne, Stravinsky and Virginia Woolf. The book argues that avant-garde artists of that period anticipated the findings of twenty-first century neuroscience, and Lehrer describes how Escoffier elevated eating into an art form by exploring the sense of taste. He invented haute cuisine. Continue reading →

We have arrived at chapter 6 of Michael Hoey’s book Lexical Priming. In earlier chapters he showed how each word is related to others by semantic patterning, grammatical usage (“colligation”), lexical connections (such as synonymy, antonymy etc.) and textual co-occurrence.

Chapter 6 is entitled Two claims:

The first claim is that words are patterned over a larger stretch of text than the context of up to seven words either side by the mechanisms of cohesion.

The second is that words are patterned together in order to make the major meanings of discourse structure: problem / solution, general / particular, compare / contrast, time order. (These structures, first propounded in Hoey’s early book On the Surface of Discourse, are taught in Book 3 of Breakthrough to Learning.)

We look forward to seeing if, by the end of the book, Hoey has justified his claim that his theory will make linguists re-evaluate the primacy of grammar as against a semantic description of English.

With some friends I have been working through Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming (2007).

Priming is a psychological term for experiments in which subjects are presented with lists of words, one of which is primed to trigger a response in another word later. For example, the word table is given in the earlier list of words, and this primes a later response in which subjects are asked to give a word beginning TAB. More than chance numbers of subjects offer table, as a result, the psychologists argue, of the earlier priming.

Hoey “tweaks” this meaning of priming for his own purposes. Lexical priming becomes a property of the word. Each word in his analysis is primed to collocate* with other words. This information is only accessible because of the power of computers to process enormous databases and yield hundreds of examples of any word in its contexts. Continue reading →

My friends and I have been reading two papers in Language and Gender*:

Deborah Tannen: Talk in the Intimate Relationship: His and Hers and Senta Troemel-Ploetz: Selling the Apolitical

 The first describes the differing expectations of men and women in informal conversation, illustrating the subject with samples of conversational analysis. The second is a ferocious critique of Tannen’s merely descriptive approach, on the grounds that it fails to politicize the subject. It does not join the feminist battle to gain equality by changing men’s behaviour. Continue reading →

I watched Kevin Costner’s1990 film Dancing with Wolves on DVD recently. Afterwards I looked up something about the film on Wikipedia and found an interesting comment on the language used in the film.

The film is unusual in that much of the dialogue is conducted in Lakota, a Native American language, with subtitles in English. One of the Native Americans viewing the film commented:

“The odd thing about making that movie is that they had a woman teaching the actors the Lakota language, but Lakota has a male-gendered language and a female-gendered language. Some of the Indians and Kevin Costner were speaking in the feminine way. When I went to see it with a bunch of Lakota guys, we were laughing.”

I had never heard of languages which have separate dialects for men and women, and they are indeed very rare. In one of the papers in the book my friends and I have been reading and discussing* there is an example of such a language surviving in Northern Australia as recently as 1998.

According to the description in this paper each lexical item has a different prefix according to the gender of the speaker. For example wukuthu means short. Men add no prefix but women put the prefix nya in front. Yirdi means he-bring, but men speak of na-yirdi and women of niwa-yirdi.

Unsurprisingly, the elders have to be strict in demanding that children learn to conform to these dialects and other tribes are reluctant to learn Yanyuwa because they make mistakes and get laughed at.

*John Bradley: Yanyuwa ‘Men speak one way, women another’, Aboriginal Linguistics 1 (1998), in Language and Gender ed. Jennifer Coates