linguistlaura

I was on the telly recently! It may just have been the local station, but it's a start. Media stardom beckons! If you want to watch it, ...

In my MA syntax class this week we were talking about innit  and how it's going from being a tag question to a kind of discourse particl...

I re-watched the Minions film last night, and wondered about their language. The Minions are these chaps and their buddies (there are no fem...

Another thing I watched over Christmas was a repeat of A Touch of Cloth , a comedy detective series by Charlie Brooker. There's a charac...

I watched ITV's Harry Price: Ghost Hunter  over the Christmas break, which starred Rafe Spall as the eponymous psychic investigator/fake...

I'm watching Salamander. It's a kind of political thriller, lots of running about, photocopying and suchlike. It's also Belgian,...

This is a blog about linguistics and language, but I do occasionally stray into academia (which is where I do linguistics). This is one such...

Words get into the language in lots of funny ways. Most of them have been there so long we don't know, or we just know that we brought t...

Those of us who are interested in dialect syntax but don't make it their business to conduct experiments into it are always on the liste...

To me, a couple means two. If I say I'd like a couple of poppadoms, I want two poppadoms. It might sometimes mean about two, though it ...

Here in the Northeast of England (and in some other British dialects), it's common to hear phrases like ten year or twenty pound , wi...

Heh. The post title is a reference to Stephen Fry, so I will now probably receive hate mail for daring to criticise the sainted National Tre...

Literally  gets a lot of bad press. It's a word in a state of confusion. It's busy getting a new meaning as a kind of intensifier, b...