With Facebook unveiling additional emoji options, linguist Tyler Schnoebelen talks about how emojis are changing the way we communicate.
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What makes someone on Reddit posting about conspiracies sound particularly paranoid? How do corporations detect employees committing fraud? When consumers file complaints against financial institutions, how do they tell their stories? Rationality and causation are themes that unite these three questions.
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The human skull has 14 facial bones and 35 muscles wrapping around these bones. That anatomy works together to form everything from grimaces, to grins, to mouths agape. Beyond the face, there are all kinds of cues that you can use to understand someone: voice contours, body language, and eye contact, to name a few.
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There may not be anyone who knows more about emoticons than Tyler Schnoebelen, a man who literally wrote his Stanford doctorate thesis on the subject. He found, for instance, that older people tend to use emoticons with noses, such as [:-)], while younger people are more likely to drop the proboscis. He discovered that roughly 10% of all tweets contain an emoticon. And he observed that the phrase f*** you rarely appears with an emoticon, because those playful little symbols can trivialize feelings like totally hating someone’s guts.
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(Download my dissertation here)
To understand human beings is to understand the variety and complexity of emotional experiences they have. Understanding how language is both shaped by and used in creating and coping with these experiences is the focus of this dissertation. It offers three case studies about affective linguistic resources, advancing a theoretical framework (positioning) and a series of quantitative methodologies that grow out of information-theoretic approaches to language.
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This page is notes for the vast majority of classes I took while I was a grad student at Stanford. Most of them are in the linguistics department, but there are also some in design, anthropology, and sociology.
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One of the most well-studied questions in child language acquisition is what type of knowledge children possess to guide their syntactic production.
Some posit that children are able to construct abstract representations to facilitate the acquisition of specific items, whereas others take the specific items as primary, claiming children learn each construction individually as anchored to a specific lexical item.
A less frequently pursued question is what is the range of influential factors which weigh upon a child’s production choice. Understanding which factors potentially motivate children’s production choices will broaden the context in which one can pursue questions about children’s acquisition of syntactic production capacity.
For instance, it is becoming increasingly clear that adult production is sensitive to multiple factors, including both discourse and grammatical factors (see representative studies by Wasow (2002), Szmrecsanyi (2005), Jaeger (2006), Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi (2007) and references therein). It is thus important to test whether such factors play a role in children’s syntax, so as to gain a better understanding of what factors are at stake in the acquisition process.
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