Random Quote
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
---- Thomas A. Edison
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
---- Charlemagne
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
---- Isaac Asimov
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
---- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
---- John Ciardi
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
---- Author Unknown
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
---- Albert Einstein
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
---- Doug Larson
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
---- Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)
Mutual Knowledge
I’m re-reading the course notes for pragmatics and again I came to this section with a joke that I do not get. I understand the point being made (at least I think I do) but the joke doesn’t make any sense. If someone would care to explain this to me, I would appreciate it.
Successful communication, for Green1, depends on the reflexivity of belief and intention (what Labov refers to as AB knowledge - ie A knows what B knows and vice-versa). Note, however, that it is not just knowledge, it’s crucially also belief. It’s also, incidentally, belief about belief: (as in the joke: if you believe what A believes and A believes what B believes , then is George Bush George Washington in disguise?)
1Green, G. 1989. Pragmatics and natural language understanding. Lawrence Erlbaum.
One of the online disucssions that are available (not assessed or required) is interesting:
In the context of your own most familiar culture, think about each of the following:
1. Imagine that you are overseas and you’re quite sure that a stranger whom you’ve just met is of the same cultural group as yourself. Think of an utterance (any utterance, any topic) which you will be able to say which you couldn’t say - with any hope of being understood - to someone from anywhere else.
2. Now you meet another stranger, ethnicity unknown but definitely a language teacher. Invent an utterance which you could be confident this person would understand, but which the person in number 1, above, would not necessarily understand.
3. Invent an utterance which would only make sense to someone who works where you work.
4. Think of something you could say which would only be understandable to one other person in the whole world. (This is of course private information, and we’re not asking you to report it here.If you have access to the LING904 web site, post your thoughts on these issues to the topic ‘Mutual knowledge’ in the Discussions. Read postings from other participants, and comment and give feedback
In principle I think that this is very easy as the utterances should all be someting along the lines of an inside joke or specialized Jargon. I’ll spend a little more time thinking about this before posting my responses in the forum as well as here. If you care to share anything I would find that interesting as well.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Aug 7, 2004 at 12:11 PM
general_linguistic_study | Pragmatics |




