Daily Archives: August 13, 2015

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project is studying a number of syntactic phenomena in North American English, such as “done my homework”, “so don’t I”, double is, positive “anymore”, “have yet to”, double comparatives, and so on. You can read about … Continue reading

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The Indo-European controversy continues – Part 2

Linguist Asya Pereltsvaig and geographer/historian Martin Lewis have a new book entitled The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In it they argue against the evolutionary biologists Gray and Aitkinson, whose article in Science … Continue reading

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Young women are language innovators

We have long known from studies of contemporary English that language change begins with young women. We now have “real-time”, historical evidence (from Early Modern letters) that young women are language innovators: http://qz.com/474671/move-over-shakespeare-teen-girls-are-the-real-language-disruptors/ Read about the work of historical sociolinguists … Continue reading

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The Canadian Vowel Shift

This short article from Maclean’s describes the Canadian Shift: http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-canadian-vowel-shift/ More details can be found in the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shift or in this article: http://www.meredithtamminga.com/documents/CLA2008_Sadlier-Brown_Tamminga.pdf

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