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linguist
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  • A born linguist, Molly began to learn a Senegalese local language, Wolof, and then signed up for the Peace Corps in Senegal.†   (source)
  • I refused to become a princess but adopted the titles of Court Linguist and Cook's Helper.†   (source)
  • These cats do their best, but they're not linguists.†   (source)
  • Charles W. F. Dumas was a Dutch radical and friend of Franklin, a schoolmaster, linguist, and man of letters.†   (source)
  • Linguists would challenge Prince Charles on two grounds: First, the concept of "words that shouldn't be" is alien to the freedom inherent in English.†   (source)
  • I am a linguist of the field.†   (source)
  • The island blacks of South Carolina are famous among linguists for their Gullah dialect.†   (source)
  • I was finishing my training when a notice came around inviting linguists to apply for specialist service abroad.†   (source)
  • "Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says.†   (source)
  • What linguists call speech rate — the number of speech sounds per second — equalizes.†   (source)
  • Sometimes these stories were what linguists call temporal narratives.†   (source)
  • Linguist Carmen Fought has been studying Chicano, one of the street talks in Latino Los Angeles.†   (source)
  • His fellow linguist Dennis Preston stressed how hard it is for a person to change his dialect.†   (source)
  • Linguist Walt Wolfram, an expert on dialects, was traveling with us.†   (source)
  • As we have already noted, linguist William Labov sees this vowel-fronting as a national trend.†   (source)
  • Linguist Walt Wolfram sees a lessening of the colonial linguistic mentality.†   (source)
  • H. Samy Alim, a linguist at Duke University, has studied what he calls Hip Hop Nation Language.†   (source)
  • Linguists draw their own maps to mark different dialect areas.†   (source)
  • So it is on pronunciation that linguists have focused their search for change and its causes.†   (source)
  • That is a common assumption, except among linguists.†   (source)
  • At the end of this book is a list of all the linguists we have consulted, with their affiliations.†   (source)
  • The Korean linguist Ho-min Sohn writes: At a dinner table, a lower-ranking person must wait until a higher-ranking person sits down and starts eating, while the reverse does not hold true; one does not smoke in the presence of a social superior; when drinking with a social superior, the subordinate hides his glass and turns away from the superior;… in greeting a social superior (though not an inferior) a Korean must bow; a Korean must rise when an obvious social superior appears on the…†   (source)
  • Master Linguist?†   (source)
  • Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam.†   (source)
  • The term used by linguists to describe what Klotz was engaging in in that moment is "mitigated speech," which refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said.†   (source)
  • Western communication has what linguists call a "transmitter orientation", that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously.†   (source)
  • The linguists Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu once gave the following hypothetical scenario to a group of captains and first officers and asked them how they would respond: You notice on the weather radar an area of heavy precipitation 25 miles ahead.†   (source)
  • Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers.†   (source)
  • The transcripts — 122 in all — were then analyzed by a group of linguists and psychologists led by Katherine Nelson of Harvard University.†   (source)
  • Sheidlower is the young Brooklyn-born American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and a descriptivist linguist.†   (source)
  • Linguist Dennis Preston says it used to be that, outside the South, "if you liked country music you were hopeless."†   (source)
  • Aside from a person's physical appearance, the first thing someone will be judged by is how he or she talks," says linguist Dennis Baron.†   (source)
  • Stephen Levy, a linguist at Queen Mary University, London, states that popular notions of like merely as a "filler or fumble" are inaccurate.†   (source)
  • Linguist: Barbara Johnstone, whom we met in Pittsburgh, studied the language of ten prominent Texas women, one of them Molly Ivins.†   (source)
  • The linguist told the producer he was barking up the wrong tree, but he wouldn't take no for an answer.†   (source)
  • We played back some of our recordings of the Irvine teenagers for Carmen Fought, the linguist who has been studying the emerging California dialect.†   (source)
  • John Baugh, a Stanford University linguist, himself African American, said that these "are the very origins of contemporary African American English."†   (source)
  • Linguist Guy Bailey said that, before World War II, regional varieties of American English differed in folk vocabularies: "I'll give you an example.†   (source)
  • Linguist Crawford Feagin made a detailed study of accent change— and the disappearance of "r"-less speech—in her hometown, Anniston, Alabama, a small city in the foothills of the Appalachians.†   (source)
  • Linguist Dennis Baron, who heads the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that, like it or not, people are always going to stereotype people by their speech.†   (source)
  • John McWhorter, another Stanford University linguist, who is also African American, calls black sound, especially after the 1960s, "the cross-racial bedrock of the American musical sensibility."†   (source)
  • But linguist John Fought says there is a "flattening of the hierarchy" even in publishing, a lot less layering of proofreading and copy editing and fact-checking, because the process is too expensive.†   (source)
  • John McWhorter, a linguist at Stanford, entitled his latest book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care.†   (source)
  • Then he showed MacNeil's face speaking the same sentence but with the voice of John Baugh, the linguist we had encountered earlier, also a Stanford professor.†   (source)
  • Cecilia Cutler is a linguist who has studied the appeal of hip-hop for "white male teenagers who are in the process of forming their identities as young men."†   (source)
  • Linguist Dennis Preston says, "It's completely ungrammat-ical to me, and yet I grew up around Louisville, only a few miles south of the area where that's perfectly grammatical.†   (source)
  • According to linguist Geneva Smitherman of Michigan State University, bad-mouthing came from the West African language Mandingo: dajugu meant "slander, abuse," literally "bad mouth."†   (source)
  • We hold strong opinions about accents different from our own, and linguist Dennis Preston, of Michigan State University, has made those opinions his special study.†   (source)
  • Linguist Dennis Baron says that "linguistic discrimination remains publicly acceptable in the United States, while other forms of discrimination do not."†   (source)
  • Linguist Dennis Baron has studied the gender issue in language and says that feminism has also had its impact on which words women choose to use or not to use.†   (source)
  • Our language reflects our society; "not a system separate from the people who speak it," it is the expression of the people who use it: "The people are prior to the language," says linguist Connie Eble.†   (source)
  • In one of his commentaries on NPR's Fresh Air, Stanford University linguist Geoffrey Nunberg said, "What's different now is that conversation isn't a private affair anymore—it has become the chief vehicle of entertainment and public information.†   (source)
  • That tendency for newcomers to pick up features of Texas speech has been noted by Guy Bailey, provost of the University of Texas at San Antonio, and his wife, Jan Tillery, also a linguist, who have studied recent changes in Texas dialects.†   (source)
  • For years Stanford University linguist John Baugh has been studying what he calls "linguistic profiling," as real in black lives as the "racial profiling" whereby skin color alone makes police suspect criminality.†   (source)
  • John Baugh, a Stanford linguist, believes that mainstream media dialect is well understood by speakers of American English from almost every background, but that media influence on actual speech patterns is not great, because those speech patterns are really shaped locally.†   (source)
  • Dennis Preston, the linguist who sampled Northern reactions on the train from Philadelphia, notes that a lot of historical things have happened, including the election of recent presidents from the South.†   (source)
  • This change is so extraordinary that it merits another example, provided by one of Labov's colleagues, linguist Sharon Ash: the vowel sound in tock shifts to tack, tack to tech, tech to tuck, tuck to talk, and talk back to tock.†   (source)
  • Labov's theory has been elaborated in the research of Stanford University linguist Penelope Eckert, who studied language changes originating among high-school students in a predominantly white suburb of Detroit.†   (source)
  • Geoffrey Nunberg, the Stanford linguist, said in one of his NPR commentaries that people writing software programs for computer spell-checkers "seem to pander more and more to all the infantile schoolroom prejudices that people have about usage."†   (source)
  • Linguist John Fought says that the consequences of not paying attention to your English teacher in America are much less than they might be in other countries, because the culture at large has a more relaxed attitude about these tilings.†   (source)
  • Linguist John Fought says that if you went to Atlanta, for example, and tried to set up a practice that involves face-to-face interactions with people, you'd be at a disadvantage if you didn't have the right regional usage: "There's a standard, a social expectation that is defined for each group of people, in computer science or brain surgery."†   (source)
  • Linguist John Baugh wrote that Labov's research, "The Logic of Non-standard English," "was the single most important article ever written that debunked the pervasive linguistic fallacies associated with cognitive-deficit hypotheses"—that is, the fallacy that speakers of Black English were somehow mentally backward.†   (source)
  • This phenomenon is so recent that linguists don't know how it will affect Black English—or white English in the South.†   (source)
  • It avoids what linguists call the intrusive "r," pronouncing saw as sawr or, as John Kennedy did, Cuba as Cuber.†   (source)
  • To help us translate their work, many of America's leading linguists have lent their skills to our project.†   (source)
  • The freedom and inventiveness of American usage reminds some linguists of how the English language was in Shakespeare's day.†   (source)
  • More recently, linguists began marking dialect areas not by different vocabulary but by how differently words were pronounced.†   (source)
  • Linguists say, however, that the current generation of inner-city youth relies more heavily on black vernacular than ever.†   (source)
  • Accents in northern California were studied by a team of linguists led by Leanne Hinton at the University of California at Berkeley.†   (source)
  • Carmen Fought raised a feature that especially puzzles us—the habit of rising inflections—or uptalk, as some linguists call it.†   (source)
  • The linguists we interviewed believe that the media can be useful in spreading vocabulary and causing innovations to be picked up and spread faster.†   (source)
  • Linguists regard this as a hoary myth, because the "old-time" words or expressions offered as evidence do not add up to what is claimed.†   (source)
  • Even as it borrows, however, white America continues to bad-mouth the source, the dialect that linguists call African American Vernacular English.†   (source)
  • Whatever the disagreements between the political scientists and the linguists, one statistic is indisputable.†   (source)
  • In the 1980s, a few elderly people still spoke Gullah, a dialect linguists trace back to the African slave trade.†   (source)
  • She says that all of the linguists who have studied the subject, without exception, say that by the second generation born here of Mexican-born ancestors, Spanish is 50 percent gone.†   (source)
  • Two other linguists, Cecilia Cutler and Renee Blake of the Linguistics Department at New York University, studied the attitudes of teachers in six New York high schools.†   (source)
  • A great deal of attention has subsequently been paid by linguists, especially after World War II, but the origins of black speech have only been partially uncovered.†   (source)
  • Former Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton saw no need to lose his Arkansas accent, partly because he could change it—or code-switch, as the linguists say—at will, depending on his audience.†   (source)
  • Labov believes this vowel change is "terribly" important: "From our point of view as linguists we want to understand why people should become more different from each other.†   (source)
  • As we know, linguists believe that movies and television do not change people's language, but the Clueless film and the TV series it spawned may be exceptions.†   (source)
  • Linguists Bailey and Tillery, with colleagues from Texas A & M and Oklahoma State University, have been "mapping" Texas speech by dividing the state into a grid with 116 squares.†   (source)
  • These linguists also found some chain-shifting of vowels resembling William Labov's Northern Cities Shift around the Great Lakes—black sounding like block.†   (source)
  • Linguists are impressed by how stable the traditional boundaries remain, between North, Midland, and South dialect regions, even with all the modern movement of people.†   (source)
  • We pointed out what all the linguists have told us, that a lot of people listening to television may have a passive understanding of standard English but continue to speak with a strong local accent.†   (source)
  • When linguists tried systematically to match English dialect forms with patterns of colonial migration and slaveholding, the Anglicist theory fell apart.†   (source)
  • But with modern bridges and roads the two sounds have migrated back and forth across the river, in what linguists call a bleedover effect, and the two dialects merge a little.†   (source)
  • He went on to blame the media, political correctness, and descriptivist linguists, whom he called "a curse on their race, who of course think that what the people say is the law.†   (source)
  • "Well, that's a relief," said Fought, expressing the view of many professional linguists that holding the line on such rules as those against split infinitives, or insisting on || is I instead of the widely used It's me, is futile.†   (source)
  • Linguists Penelope Eckert and Norma Mendoza-Denton observe, "It takes time and a community to develop common ways of speaking, and English speakers have not been settled in California long enough to develop the kind of dialect depth that is apparent in the East Coast and the Midwest."†   (source)
  • The more relaxed American attitude was naturally reflected on Madison Avenue, with verbal informalities such as Winston tastes good like a cigarette should becoming so much a part of the culture that linguists now doubt that many Americans today would notice the grammatical lapse.†   (source)
  • But, like lobsters in Maine, crabs are getting scarce, the island is losing population, and there is increasing contact with the outside world— all a common recipe for dialect dissipation, as the linguists call it.†   (source)
  • To linguists that is a myth.†   (source)
  • Linguists Guy Bailey and Patricia Cukor-Avila write that in the colonial period black slaves and white indentured servants often worked together, and relationships between the races were more fluid than later.†   (source)
  • Many of the features common to contemporary Black English are absent from the "slave" tapes, for instance, what linguists call "the invariant be" as in they be working, and the "deleted copula," leaving out the auxiliary verb in they working.†   (source)
  • The more fashionable or upmarket the store, the more the salespeople pronounced the "r"s in their replies, and the linguists assumed that the speech of the staffs resembled or mimicked that of their customers.†   (source)
  • Perversely perhaps, the current younger generation tends toward a "subversive prestige" or "covert prestige," as linguists put it, in adopting the speech of less privileged minorities; for instance, wiggers are privileged white teenagers who wish to sound and dress like blacks.†   (source)
  • We know that now because linguists have been able to record their speech, and largely because broadcasting, especially today's television "talk shows" and "talk radio," have flooded the ether with the speech of ordinary people.†   (source)
  • Toward a Standard: Putting the "R" in "American" In the rest of the English-speaking world, probably the most characteristic sound in American English is the fully sounded "r," known to linguists as the postvocalic /r/, the "r" following vowels.†   (source)
  • In fact, many Americans can be amusingly unaware of their own accents: linguists have collected many stories of people with strong local accents, in places like Texas and coastal North Carolina, who thought they talked like Walter Cronkite!†   (source)
  • Since rules are not fixed and continually evolve, with spoken usages creeping into written language, some linguists question whether the written standards can guarantee universal understanding, and tend to dismiss the efforts of hotline grammarians for delivering too reassuring a notion of correctness.†   (source)
  • When the issue is viewed another way, as with the effort to find an accent without regional identifiers, most linguists see a bottom-line standard in written American English as the absence of certain grammatical constructions, or "nonstandard" forms such as ain't, double negatives, and subject-verb disagreement.†   (source)
  • He maintains that people like John Simon are actually complaining that linguists and dictionary writers are no longer focused exclusively on the language of top people: "When linguistic conservatives look at the way things were in the old days and say, 'Well, everything used to be very proper, and now we have all these bad words and people are being careless and so forth,' in fact people always used to be that way," Sheidlower says.†   (source)
  • I'm no linguist myself, but I know what I call Shopping and Hotel-snappy bits in French and German and Italian.†   (source)
  • Ay, there are linguists in the settlements that can do still more.†   (source)
  • Mr Plornish could not conceal his exultation in her accomplishments as a linguist.†   (source)
  • She was a perfect linguist, a first-rate artist, wrote poetry, and composed music; to the study of the latter she professed to be entirely devoted, following it with an indefatigable perseverance, assisted by a schoolfellow,—a young woman without fortune whose talent promised to develop into remarkable powers as a singer.†   (source)
  • Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?†   (source)
  • She took advantage, therefore, of the means of study the place offered her; and as she was already a musician and a good linguist, she speedily went through the little course of study which was considered necessary for ladies in those days.†   (source)
  • He examined without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature.†   (source)
  • "Perhaps she didn't understand you, woman; you are none of the best linguister; and then Miss Lizzy has been exercising the king's English under a great Lon'on lady, and, for that matter, can talk the language almost as well as myself, or any native-born British subject.†   (source)
  • If it were down on the Atlantic, now, where a seafaring man has occasion sometimes to converse with a pilot, or a linguister, in that language, I should not think so much of it,—though we always look with suspicion, even there, at a shipmate who knows too much of the tongue; but up here, on Ontario, I hold it to be a most suspicious circumstance.†   (source)
  • Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation—a meagre entertainment for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent linguist.†   (source)
  • "Look you here, old grey-beard," said Ishmael, seizing the trapper, and whirling him round as if he had been a top; "that I am tired of carrying on a discourse with fingers and thumbs, instead of a tongue, ar' a natural fact; so you'll play linguister and put my words into Indian, without much caring whether they suit the stomach of a Red-skin or not."†   (source)
  • Greek Epic in the Eighth Century B.C. We can glimpse the traditions behind The Iliad only indirectly, for it is the oldest Greek poem we have; linguists place it earlier than The Odyssey by about a generation (though our tools are not sharp enough to exclude the possibility that both poems were composed by a single, long-lived singer).†   (source)
  • I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication.   (source)
    linguists = language specialists
  • I'm an even worse linguist than he is.   (source)
    linguist = language expert
  • It will send the linguists back to India with their tape recorders, because it undermines the critical superstructure of their methodology.   (source)
    linguists = language specialists
  • It was a letter of introduction, from Abbot Alexander, commending his nephew, James Fraser, to the attention of the Chevalier-St. George—otherwise known as His Majesty King James of Scotland—as a most proficient linguist and translator.†   (source)
  • Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.†   (source)
  • This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist, and the armipotent soldier.†   (source)
  • But to the purpose; for we cite our faults, That they may hold excus'd our lawless lives; And, partly, seeing you are beautified With goodly shape, and by your own report A linguist, and a man of such perfection As we do in our quality much want— SECOND OUTLAW.†   (source)
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