http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060809_word_sounds.html
Interesting. Thanks for posting the link!
Such studies are cmpletely worthless. Maybe it’s true for some cases and in the cmplex of a specific language (in this case English), but only as a pastime activity to satisfied one’s curiosity to what one can prove using statistc tools in a wrong way.
Why is the research worthless? I for one was bothered by the lack of detail in the article I read about it - in other words, what exactly does this nounness or verbness sound like? - but it is potentially a useful object of research. Potentially, I say, since the article was vague.
I’m just curious about why you’re so disgusted by the project, Thomas.
David
The first two paragraphs contradict each other. Even the graph at the top disqualifies the results of that study. I do not see any correlation of verbness between verbs and nounness of nouns. They trace both same distances, whatever those linguists think that might be. In short, all this article tends to be no more than a sensational one, creating impressions that do not exist. If one wants to make such studies, the English language is not the best field to do that, since there are many words that serve both as verbs and nouns, differentiated only by spelling and in some cases not even that is true. Better make studies in different languages and compare the results. Something that has been already done by conventional linguists and grammarians using old-fashoned tools like grammar of prefixes and suffixes and sound changes witheen a word.
I agree that the surplus of words or sound clusters in English that can be both nouns and verbs (like “meet/meat,” “sigh/sigh”) must make the survey problematic. I’m not so sure, however, that traditional linguistic means could really accomplish the goal of the project.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to pursue this question at the moment.
Regards,
David