John M. Lawler

  Welcome.   I am a linguist, a general practitioner of linguistics, and I have a rather expansive definition of what that includes.

  Over the last 4 years I've been participating in the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange, where I answer questions about English grammar, usage, etymology, and so on. As I say on my user profile there, I enjoy answering questions. I was surprised to realize recently that I've accumulated over a thousand answers on English grammar and usage.

  A New page -- New as of April Fools' Eve, 2012, at any rate; this is a Beta version, subject to change in the future, of which this is the first and only notice -- about doing something to ameliorate the "anxious cluelessness" about language that is the end product of modern Anglophone education.

  A fairly recent page created for the 2011 NorWesCon 34 Fantasy/Science Fiction convention. It's got my credentials, the handouts from my talks there, and some other links to the stuff I talked about. And a link to my NorWesCon talks from 2010.

  Another fairly recent page, consisting of teaching materials in historical linguistics and etymology, from my UM freshman class A World of Words, and my HyperCard stack (remember HyperCard?) of the same name. Graphics, lists, exercises, poetry, texts, etc. about Greek, Latin, English, and Proto-Indo-European.

  And here's a newly reorganized page showing all of the files hosted here for my colleague Haj Ross, including Ross 1967 (the complete MIT dissertation: 24 Mbytes, 500 pages, downloadable by chapter), his other papers on both syntax and poesy, and Selected Short Subjects, in electronic form, newly compiled by recent popularity.

  As of June 1, 2009, I am retired from the faculty of the Linguistics Department and of the Residential College, at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor, and have "gone to join the Emeritooni", as our Departmental elders call it. I was on the faculty at Michigan from Fall 1972 thru Spring 2009, for a total of 37 years of professoring. I'm still alive and healthy, however, living in Bellingham, WA, and I still teach the odd visiting course at Western Washington University there. This web site and my email address are permanent (or at least as permanent as I am), so feel free to use them to contact me, and drop in if you're in the area (here's a link to my business card, with local contact information).

  One of the things I did to prepare for retirement was to finally get around to scanning all of my publications that weren't already in electronic form and putting the lot on the Web. There are a couple more I still have to find copies of, but pretty much everything I've ever written is now available, free (with a money-back guarantee, subject to the usual disclaimers) right here. Enjoy (if possible).

  From now on I will be spending most of my time in Bellingham WA, getting a rain tan, writing sporadically, travelling when we can (photos of our recent trip to Hawai'i here) and publishing or reading papers on this and that, here or there, now and then, masha'allah. While I'm on the subject, here are a couple of bitmaps of pictures that I've taken of Bellingham and the Northwest, suitable for screen wallpaper:

• Winter Solstice Sunset over Chuckanut Bay
• Berberis aquifolium (also known as Oregon Grape).

  I've moved URLs several times, so if you've gotten here unexpectedly by trying to find the LSA Ebonics Resolution, the Language and Gender Syllabi, the Chomskybot, my grammar pages, monosyllable database, Gödel, Escher, Bach, A World of Words, Grimm's Law, Haj Ross's papers, or anything else that's not my home page, then look below and, insha'allah, you'll probably find what you're looking for. Some of these pages are linked behind the scenes, in various ways and to varying degrees. Some navigation aids are provided, but what you make of it is up to you, as usual (in case you're confused -- or even if you're not -- here's a list of my most-requested pages over the last ten years).

Things I told you you could find on my Website:

• Software and Linguistic Computing:
  
  • From our book: Using Computers in Linguistics,
    edited by John Lawler and Helen Aristar Dry
    Routledge 1998.
    • Table of Contents
    • Introduction (entire text online)
    • Chapter 5, "The Unix^TM Language Family" entire text in PDF format, with live links
    • The Glossary of all technical terms used in the entire book, with live links
    • The Bibliography for the entire book
    • The Page Index for the whole book; also available in Word-97 format
    • Some online appendices:
      • Linguistic Research Software
      • Linguistic Educational Software
      • The Unix^TM Language Family

  • My text generating programs
    • The Chomskybot  (online)       What it's all about (The Foggy FAQ)
    • Mac version (Hypercard)         Windows (DOS) version
    • Lisp source      Pascal source    Perl source
  • Download links to my other software (mostly linguistic)
    • English Monosyllable Database Archive. View archive README file
      (Newly updated, with complete bibliography and related literature, as of 4/20/08. Windows [DOS]}
    • A World of Words etymology courseware
      (Mac; Hypercard and Macintalk; turn off sound on System 7 & 8)}
      Online demo of Grimm's Law from this program}
    • Myers-Briggs personality tester (Windows [DOS])
    • Linguistic Society of America Computer Survey, 1992 (Mac [Hypercard])

  • Phonetic Fonts from the SIL
    
    ... and an MSWord file with embedded IPA to spell out the famous Michigan Linguistics logo

• Some handouts from various classes and presentations
  • How to figure out a sentence (i.e, how to unwind English syntax), with ...
  • ... an example of figuring out a sentence, featuring "Nobbut"-clefts
  • Latin Pronunciation (both Church Latin and Classical Latin)
  • The Grammaticalization Cycle, or Whatever happened to all those suffixes?
  • Cognates of Grimm's Law (yes, those Grimms) in English
  • Saddle points in game theory
  • The Prisoners' Dilemma, also game-theoretical
  • The Foundations Catastrophe (Foundations of Mathematics, that is), in two parts
  • Euler's Formula, or why e^iπ + 1 = 0
  • ST-initial PIE roots, with English cognates
  • Definitions of technical terms in phonosemantics, like simplex word, assonance, rime, coherence, and orthogonal.
  • Phonetics of Pinyin, with the Pinyin spellings of two famous Chinese philosophers
  • The Spray/Load (09.7) and Fill (09.8) verb classes, from Levin (1993)
  • Semantic Properties of Entities (aka nouns), from Frawley
  • Problem on Urdu writing system
  • Ergativity
  • Two remedial tutorials on grammar,
    starting with a (15-page) Logic Guide ,
    containing everything one needs to know about Formal Logic, to be followed by ...
  • ... a (15-page) Verb Phrase Guide,
    everything one needs to know about the English Verb Phrase.
  • List of all English irregular verbs, with principal parts
  • Elements of rhetoric, from Connolly's Rhetoric Casebook
  • Phonemic transcription problem
  • List of subordinating conjunctions
  • Examples of Funny NPs (a technical term in syntax)
  • The Cliff's Notes version of Equi vs Raising, two important syntactic rules
  • Syntax problem on Equi and Raising
  • "Garden Path" sentences
  • 3 Kinds of Word
  • Verbs of Cutting
  • Problem about "Verbing" nouns
  • Problem on Tag Questions
  
  
• Other stuff I wrote:
  • Complete publications
  • Encyclopedia articles on
    • Negation and Negative Polarity
    • Punctuation
    • Notation: Logical
    • Notation: Mathematical
  • Papers on English generic verb and noun usage (including my dissertation)
  • Papers on the Acehnese language (or Achenese, as it used to be called)
  • "Metaphors We Compute By", a hyperlecture, published in
      Figures of Thought: For College Writers by Dona Hickey (Mayfield: 1999)
        (it's always nice to get memorialized as an exemplar of good writing :-)
    --- and some correspondence with students assigned to read it by Dona Hickey
  • An example of what passes for humor in Linguistics, on Negative Polarity in Islands.
  • The latest list of Negative Polarity Items and Negative Triggers, and a syntax problem on NPIs.
  • Frequently Asked Questions about Linguistics.
  • Frequently Asked Questions on English Grammar and Usage,
    a collection of informal discussions on Usenet about English grammar. Hyperlinked.
  • The Introduction to our book (see above)
    And Chapter 5 from the same source.
  • Some recent Linguistics papers:
    1. "Space, Time, and Polarity", with Karen van Hoek
       A Mental Spaces account of Negative Polarity.
    2. "Embodying Arithmetic: Counting on Your Hands and Feet", with Eric Breck
       The role of embodied schemata (i.e, body-part metaphors) in abstract mathematics.
    3. "Remainders"   Paper   Handout
       A syntactic account of the Raising-like rule involved in the construction:
         She remains to be convinced that this is the answer. (with ancillary tools below)

       • The 7170 OED quotations containing remain (HTML; 2 MB)
       • The massaged minicorpus made from them (HTML; 1.5 MB)
       • awk scripts for making minicorpora from OED quotations:
         • keycount.awk
         • split.awk
         • instructions on how to use them.
    4. The handout for "Leftovers", a talk I gave in May 2002 at University College in London, based on my "Remainders" paper (see above), but incorporating more data.
    5. The Memorial for Jim McCawley that appears in Language Vol 79, No.3, Sept 2003.
       And Jim's famous list of Days in the Month of May that are of Interest to Linguists, which I didn't write, worse luck.
    6. My 1983 Language review of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (Chicago 1980), with thanks to David Wright for Adobe-ing it.
    7. "Mimicry in Natural Language', a paper I published in 1979 in The Elements, the paravolume to CLS 15; on metaphor, metatheory, and natural linguistics. It makes a nice bookend with 'Style Stands Still' (though it's not as funny).
    8. "Ample Negatives", a 1974 paper from CLS 10, on various kinds of multiple negation in English.
    9. I do a lot of research on what's been variously called Phonosemantics, Sound Symbolism, Phonesthemes, or Assonance-Rime Analysis. Here's a batch of stuff on that, including a bibliography, four papers (with handouts) and the latest list of assonances, spanning a quarter-century of research.
       (All of what's below, and more, is included in the archive file)
       • Bibliography of Assonance-Rime Phonosemantics, with links to authors and papers.
       • Latest list of phonosemantically coherent Assonances (st-, sk-, str-, fl-, kr-, kl-, etc.)
       • A finer-grained example of what the list above represents: a Venn diagram from a paper I'm currently working on, showing the phonosemantic structure of the KL- assonance. As it turns out, 62 of 84, or 74%, of the English simplex words beginning with the cluster /kl-/ are semantically coherent; in fact, 43, or 51%, of them belong to one very prominent class: Contiguous, connect, which Rich Rhodes and I simply called 'together' in our 1981 paper (below).
       • The Complete Assonance handout (includes last two items).
       • The very first paper on rime-assonance analysis, "Athematic Metaphors", by Rich Rhodes and me in 1981, from CLS 17. This is the beginning of the Lawler-Rhodes Simplex Word Database, and of my interest in sound symbolism.
       • My next paper, a very careful analysis of the BR-, PR-, and BL- assonances:
         "Women, Men, and Bristly Things: The Phonosemantics of the BR- Assonance in English",
         in P. Beddor (ed), Michigan Working Papers in Linguistics I.1:27-43, 1990. Handout
       • "Style Stands Still", a paper about the meaning(s) of style, and of style, of st-initial roots in both Proto-Indo-European and modern English, and the ST- assonance (among other topics), that appears in the literary journal Style, Vol 37, No.2, Summer 2003. Handout
       • A paper on the "rime" part of rime-assonance analysis, "The Data Fetishist's Guide to Rime Coherence", from the Festschrift Poetry, and Candy Colored Syntax: Language Presented to Haj Ross, 2006.
         Handout Data zipfile (individual analyses of each rime, suitable for student projects): rimes.zip
       • My latest (2009) presentation (a poster presented at the annual LSA meeting), "The Data Fetishist's Guide to Assonance Coherence", with statistics on 36 English assonances (median coherence is around 70%, which is way more than what the standard principle of l'arbitraire du signe would suggest). The URL above points to a zipfile containing the Illustrator CS3 file that generates a 3' x 4' poster, plus the various pdf illusrations that are located on it. Unless you're interested in very bizarre decoration schemes, the pdf files may be the useful part.
         The data files from which the pdf illustrations were derived are located here.

• Things I didn't write (but put on the Web anyway).
  The first few* are more examples of what passes for humor among linguists:
  • How to Construct a Linguistic Theory,* a satirical piece by Metalleus.
  • A Contribution to the Repertory of Examples,* by the late Charles Fillmore,
    of the FrameNet Project
  • The Ultimate Disclaimer*
  • Days in the Month of May that are of Interest to Linguists, by Jim McCawley *
  • A Word of Warning about theories, by John von Neumann.
  • A version of Good Night Moon (with no graphics, just the words) transliterated into English phonemic notation.
    Suitable for kindergarten reading fun. (Of course those in first or even higher grades could learn from it, too.)
  • The list of hedges from the handout from George Lakoff's 1972 CLS paper "Hedges".
    I went to look on the web for this list to give my lexical semantics class and couldn't find it,
    so I found my old handout and typed it in. Enjoy.
  • Alexei Panshin on Jumping to Premises, and on Nominalists vs Realists
  • Otro Poema de los Dones, a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, lightly hyperlinked, and some other poems, en Español
  • "The Earwitness", one of the 50 character studies in Elias Canetti's stunning book Earwitness (Der Ohrenzeuge).
  • "Notes on Punctuation", by Lewis Thomas.
  • Selected Papers by Haj Ross, on poetics, syntax, and educational matters.
  • The newly revised definitive bibliography of the late Dwight Bolinger now resides at http://www.cinestatic.com/bolinger.htm
  • The COSWL collection of Language and Gender Syllabi, circa 1993 (newer collection here)
  • Another of my favorite poems, a selection from David Antin's book tuning.
  • The Verb Index from Beth Levin's English Verb Classes And Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation,
    University of Chicago Press 1993. (142 KB)
    ...and a reverse-engineered list of Levin Categories from it.
  • The English language paper which was set as part of the London Matriculation examination for senior pupils in June 1899.
    (From David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language)
    This is what you used to have to know about English to get into college. In 1899.
    99% of modern English BAs would flunk it grievously, because English grammar is not taught in Anglophone schools.
    Sometimes they teach mythology under that name, but luckily it's usually ignored, except by the credulous.

• Home Pages for classes that I teach (... er, that is, taught)
  • Math appreciation page: Gödel, Escher, Bach.
  • Computing page: Language and Computing.
  • Metaphor page: Metaphors We Live By (an RC First Year Seminar)
  • Etymology Page: A World of Words
  • Linguistics 210, Introduction to Linguistic Analysis
    The first 4 assignments from Ling 210
    Coursepacks from Ling 210:

    • Part 1 (Morphology, Phonetics, Phonology)
    • Part 2 (Syntax, Semantics, Selected Short Subjects)

    A page of links and other attractions

    (for the Macy-MIM Science Camp)

• Other pages of mine
  • How to write HTML (a short list)
  • How to make a faculty home page (for my colleagues)
  • Linguistic resources (links)
  • The Eclectic Company. (ditto)
  • Historical background and linguistic notes for Shakespeare's Henry V,
    from my World of Words etymology course.

• Answers to Questions I get asked Frequently:
  • "How many languages do you speak?"
    (the question linguists dread)
  • "What is linguistics, anyway?"
  • "I have a Grammar Question for you..."
  • Ask a Linguist, where I am a member of the Panel of Experts (as well as the Linguist List Advisory Panel),
    and have contributed several hundred answers,
    including the very first one, which happened to be about my dissertation topic)
    You can search other (and others') answers
      (by Date, Panel Respondent, and text in Subject or Message Body).

• Professional:
  • Short Bio and Short Resumé, both with live links.
  • Education
  • Publications
  • Email address:      jlawler@umich.edu

• Stats:
      As of July 1999, I've completed a whole year at the present address, and can once again compile statistics on site usage. There were about 100,000 hits (file requests) during the last Fiscal Year (7/1/98-6/30/99) total on all the files on my site. This has grown and stabilized to around 10,000 hits per month. Here's a list of the public files on my site with their individual counts, and an Excel chart of the year's information delivery stats.

      I was flabbergasted to find out that, since this site is largely a text site (it sports one JPEG and one GIF, but that's it), the sum total of all these hits is about one and a half GIGAbytes of words, many of them of my manufacture, off the shelf, down the tube, out the door, sopping up bandwidth while hanging ten over the surf, depending on your metaphor choice. As Brooks says Ovid says, "Adde parvum parvo, magnus acervus erit" ('Add little to little and there will be a big heap'). This could serve as well as anything to show that Ovid anticipated the World Wide Web.

      Interestingly, the most frequently requested file last year was something I only helped write (along with several hundred other linguists in the room), the Linguistic Society of America's Unanimous Resolution on the Ebonics flap, with an appended Bibliography of authoritative resources.

  ---

  Addendum, 2003
      Here are the stats for Website www.umich.edu/~jlawler/ as of January 1, 2003:

                     Hits (Individual File Requests)
     -----------------------------------------------------------------
     Total 7/99-12/02  1,050,278    Latest year 1-12/02        445,923
     Mean monthly         21,600    Mean monthly latest year    37,160
     Latest month 12/02   35,504
  
                          Gigabytes Transferred
     -----------------------------------------------------------------
     Total 7/99-12/02     40.8075   Latest year  1-12/02      14.06483
     Mean monthly          0.7557   Mean monthly latest year   1.17200     
     Latest month 12/02    1.211
  

  And, here's a report of my most-requested pages in the ten years between 1998 and 2008.
  Enjoy.     The rate is accelerating, and we're now receiving around a half-million hits a year.
      Here's an Excel graph of the history, for those interested.