Recently, I wrote a term paper on the subject of "presidential pronouns". The paper was largely inspired by Mark Liberman over at Language Log, who has been writing about the topic for a over two years. First, a short recap: In 2009, claims rose that Barack Obama uses very high numbers of first person pronouns, especially "I", which apparently shows his high self-involvement, and his detachment from the people, among other things. While it is generally accepted that 1P sg pronouns can mean things, they are by far not restricted to that. The other point is, as Liberman tirelessly points out again and again, that nearly all quantitative analyses, i.e. counting pronouns, have shown that Obama overall uses fewer pronouns compared other American politicians. Weiterlesen »

I have been reading Clients from Hell pretty much from the beginning, and for the most time have been amused by them. Some of them are outright funny, some very weird, and others facepalm-worthy. Recently, however - since the site has been expanding, and the number of stories has increased - I find it difficult to understand some of the postings. "Understand" in the sense that I don't think they should have been posted, because they are not really by Clients from Hell. Weiterlesen »

It all started when I noticed I needed to update some of my modules here on Narretz.de, since they had security issues. Immediately, I desisted the painful process of downloading every relevant module from drupal.org, unpacking them, and uploading them onto the server. Additionally, I had to test everything locally, of course. What a slack!

So, like every once in a while, I thought of Drush, the tool which let's you do all this and much more way faster from the command line. Even though I can't ssh to my server at the moment, I figured it would save some work locally. Swiftly I navigated my internet roaming device to the Drush project page on Drupal.org, just to see that Windows support was still on the "meh"-side. Weiterlesen »

Im letzten Beitrag nahm ich den Text zu The Handshake von MGMT unter die Lupe. Dessen verschwurbelter Text ermöglicht einige sehr interessante Interpretationen, und macht eine eindeutige Deutung völlig unmöglich.

Dass das auch mit Liedern geht, die auf den ersten Blick völlig eindeutig erscheinen, zeigen die heutigen Beispiele. Kürzlich las ich den Wikipedia-Eintrag zu Didos Don't leave home. Der Song hatte mir schon beim ersten Hören außerordentlich gefallen, obwohl er (sehr tief) in die Kategorie Liebeslied gefallen war. Der Inhalt: ein recht besitzergreifender Liebhaber bittet seine Geliebte (oder anderesherum etc.) nicht zu gehen, da er oder sie andere Freunde überflüssig macht. Weiterlesen »

Liedtexte. Zu 90% geht es um Liebe und Herzschmerz, mit ähnlichen Vokabeln und Floskeln, aber ab und zu gibt es Songs, die sich einer einfachen Interpretation entziehen. Existieren verschlüsselte Botschaften zu Ehren des Satan in Led Zeppelins Stairway to Heaven? Gaben die Beatles in Texten und Bildern Hinweise zur Vertuschung von Paul McCartneys Tod und seiner Ersetzung durch einen Doppelgänger? Weiterlesen »

Bei der doch schon anderthalb Wochen alten Fußball-WM fiel es wieder mir auf: Fußballkommentatoren haben es nicht leicht. Als die Spiele noch in Schwarz-Weiß auf kontrastarmen Minibildschirmen übertragen wurden, war die Erklärung von Spielzügen und das Nennen von Spielernamen nahezu unentbehrlich. Heute lassen HD-Auflösung und riesige Displays den Zuschauer so manche Situation besser einschätzen als den Kommentator selbst, was diesen im Gegenzug Zeit lässt, Statistiken und Ankedoten zu zitieren, Prominente auf der Bühne zu identifizieren, oder auch mal 20 Sekuden lang gar nichts zu sagen. Weiterlesen »

Jerry Seinfeld as a linguist, or even a cognitive linguist? The actor probably best known for his role in the sitcom of the same name, and for his appearances as a stand-up comedian? Some celebrities have took up very different careers later in their lives, but going from comedian to scientist? Surely not! Of course, Jerry Seinfeld did not become a linguist, but while seeing a video of one of his shows on Youtube, I noticed he made a an observation that matches with results from cognitive linguistic research.

But first, what is this cognitive linguistics? It is a field of language studies that specializes in examining what concepts underlie the use and structure of language – it also encompasses thought processes, arguing that thinking and using language are based on the same processes and concepts. I have come in contact with Cognitive Linguistics through the studies in Conceptual metaphor, and so has Jerry Seinfeld (although probably unknowingly). So let us take a quick look on what metaphors have to with Cognitive Linguistics. For most of the time scholars dealt with metaphors, they regarded them to be a purely ornate, poetic device of language, doing nothing more than saying something with other words. Weiterlesen »