ellen_fremedon or therealjae --

-- or, in fact, anyone else --

know of a syllable-count lexicon of english i can use as a cite in this psych paper? i have a feeling i've seen somewhere that most english words have four syllables or fewer (certainly most common words don't have more), but it'd sure be helpful to be able to point to where someone had figured it out for sure ...

the frustrations of crossing disciplines

me, in my paper's draft introduction: "Assuming that adult speakers have a preference for the minimal and maximal length in syllables of lexical words in their native languages (we may discount function words and grammatical shifters, like articles and pronouns, as these are not carriers of content and are stored differently in the lexicon, assuming they are stored there at all), at what stage do children begin to exhibit this preference?"

psych prof, in the margin next to "stored differently in the lexicon": "Cite?"

argh. argh. i mean, of course grammatical shifters and articles and prepositions and whatnot are different from "real words". of course they are. you mean i have to explain how?

for the professor who's not a linguist, yes. grr. grr.

even better.

me: "[E]ach adult speaker has a lifetime of experience (and, furthermore, a 100% success rate) at judging the acceptability of phonetic sequences in his or her native language."

him: "These are exc. pts. and somewhat intuitive, but I'd like some citations +/or descriptions of findings rel. to them."

this is what i get for spending the semester frustrated that my semantics professor thought we were all mind-readers, i guess. [repeats mantra] what seems obvious to you may not be obvious to your readers. what seems obvious to you may not be obvious to your readers. what seems obvious to you as a linguist may not be obvious to someone trained as a psychologist.[/mantra]

mail call

if you want me to send you a new year's card (since i don't ever manage to get them out in time for the religion-specific winter holidays, i've stopped pretending to try), leave your mailing address here.

[Poll #216670]