Language Log

Happy New Year!

As this strip suggests, we often put less effort into carrying out our New Year's Resolutions than into making creative excuses for failure. We make a cheerier rhetorical frame for failure by referring to our resolutions only on those occasions, however rare, when we make an effort to uphold them. Add irony, and this approach becomes even more usefully upbeat.

I was reduced to using this method on my Language Log New Year's Resolution for 2006, because my choice of resolution was, let's say, out of tune with reality:

"The brave new world of computational neurolinguistics" (12/27/2005): ...I've made a New Year's resolution to look on the bright side...
"The inscrutable Chinese language" (7/11/2006): ... I'm still working on my New Year's Resolution to take a positive attitude towards treatments of linguistic matters in the popular press ...
"We feel sad because we say ü" (7/21/2006): ... You'll note that I'm working hard on my New Year's resolution to take a positive attitude towards science reporting ...

Another approach is to choose resolutions that front-end the irony. My LL Resolution for 2007 was a successful example of that genre, and I'm proud to say that I haven't backslid even once:

"An early New Year's Resolution" (11/28/2006): ... when talking to the press, never mention Eskimos and their words for snow ,,,

But for 2008, I've decided to make a resolution that's serious, positive and possible. Once a week, I'll post about some interesting and relevant piece of linguistic research, with links to a preprint, a published paper, a book chapter, or something similar. This has almost been true in past years, and with a little bit of effort...

Posted by Mark Liberman at January 1, 2008 07:25 AM