Psycholinguistics
mixingmemory | July 8, 2008I have this friend from New York who, most of the time, speaks in a normal (that is to say, southern) accent that she's acquired as a result of being surrounded for so long by people who speak the King's English ('cause Elvis was a southerner). Occasionally, though, usually after she's been talking to someone back home, she slips into her old Jamaica Queens accent, and when she does, I spend the first thirty seconds or so just trying to figure out whether she's speaking English, and I don't even bother trying to understand the meaning of those strangely accented words she's uttering. After…
mixingmemory | November 3, 2006I promised some further posts on the topic of metaphor, and on the conventionalization of metaphor in particular, but in order to get to that, we need to get some things out of the way first. Let's start with polysemy. If you don't know what polysemy is, then you need to study up on your Greek roots. Kidding, of course. Polysemy refers to a single word having multiple related meanings or senses. "Bank" is a good example of a polysemous word, especially since using it will help later in the post. Bank can mean the banking company, like Fifth Third Bank (that name has always cracked me up), it…