What makes someone on Reddit posting about conspiracies sound particularly paranoid? How do corporations detect employees committing fraud? When consumers file complaints against financial institutions, how do they tell their stories? Rationality and causation are themes that unite these three questions.
Read MoreThe human skull has 14 facial bones and 35 muscles wrapping around these bones. That anatomy works together to form everything from grimaces, to grins, to mouths agape. Beyond the face, there are all kinds of cues that you can use to understand someone: voice contours, body language, and eye contact, to name a few.
Read MoreIdibon chief analyst Tyler Schnoebelen describes the capabilities of Idibon's technology, and how putting the human into the loop can increase accuracy in text analytics.
Read MoreThere may not be anyone who knows more about emoticons than Tyler Schnoebelen, a man who literally wrote his Stanford doctorate thesis on the subject. He found, for instance, that older people tend to use emoticons with noses, such as [:-)], while younger people are more likely to drop the proboscis. He discovered that roughly 10% of all tweets contain an emoticon. And he observed that the phrase f*** you rarely appears with an emoticon, because those playful little symbols can trivialize feelings like totally hating someone’s guts.
Read MoreHere are 14 essays, 7 presentations, and reading notes on 57 different papers/books all having to do with emotion and language.
Read More(Download my dissertation here)
To understand human beings is to understand the variety and complexity of emotional experiences they have. Understanding how language is both shaped by and used in creating and coping with these experiences is the focus of this dissertation. It offers three case studies about affective linguistic resources, advancing a theoretical framework (positioning) and a series of quantitative methodologies that grow out of information-theoretic approaches to language.
Read MoreThis page is notes for the vast majority of classes I took while I was a grad student at Stanford. Most of them are in the linguistics department, but there are also some in design, anthropology, and sociology.
Read MoreA collection of work on African languages, with a special focus on a language isolate I worked on in Ethiopia (Shabo or Chabu...and sometimes Tsabu)
Read MoreThese are lecture slides and section notes for Lauren Hall-Lew's undergraduate language and gender class. If you're new to linguistics, they should be a pretty good introduction.
Read MoreTom Wasow's class on syntax was "an introduction to the basic concepts of modern syntactic theory through the development of a rigorous grammar of a substantial fragment of English." In particular, the class introduces the HPSG syntactic framework (Head-driven Phrase Structure). The textbook is the very readable Bender, Sag, and Wasow (2003), Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction (recommendation: use the second edition).
Read MoreLecture and section notes for John Rickford's class on African-American Vernacular English. "The English vernacular spoken by African Americans in big city settings, and its relation to Creole English dialects spoken on the S. Carolina Sea Islands (Gullah), in the Caribbean, and in W. Africa. The history of expressive uses of African American English (in soundin' and rappin'), and its educational implications."
Read MoreThese are notes from my grad school classes at Stanford. I have a hard time imagining they will be useful to anyone who isn't a linguistics grad student BUT maybe you are!
Read MoreHere's a list of 65 articles/books about linguistics and related fields that I wrote up notes for (or wrote up notes from seminar discussions on them).
Read MoreA lot of my research has been on the social aspects of meaning. Here, I've collected together a bunch of relevant course notes.
Read More(Download the paper! Or, for the presentation version of this from NWAV 2010)
Speech tempo can be deployed consciously to achieve particular effects, but it can also send cues to listeners that the speaker didn’t intend to convey. What this means for us is that tempo is a stylistic resource, expressive for both speakers and listeners— creating expectations about the speaker and their attitude toward a situation and audience. These expressions, however, don’t happen in a vacuum. The use of tempo reflects and constructs various ideologies, allowing tempo to signal emotional state, occupation, geographical origin, ethnic identification, and more.
One of the most well-studied questions in child language acquisition is what type of knowledge children possess to guide their syntactic production.
Some posit that children are able to construct abstract representations to facilitate the acquisition of specific items, whereas others take the specific items as primary, claiming children learn each construction individually as anchored to a specific lexical item.
A less frequently pursued question is what is the range of influential factors which weigh upon a child’s production choice. Understanding which factors potentially motivate children’s production choices will broaden the context in which one can pursue questions about children’s acquisition of syntactic production capacity.
For instance, it is becoming increasingly clear that adult production is sensitive to multiple factors, including both discourse and grammatical factors (see representative studies by Wasow (2002), Szmrecsanyi (2005), Jaeger (2006), Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi (2007) and references therein). It is thus important to test whether such factors play a role in children’s syntax, so as to gain a better understanding of what factors are at stake in the acquisition process.
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