Am I making myself clear?

The other day, I came across a poster online and it got me thinking about several things.

http://www.facebook.com/HealingwithArt

From a teacher and linguist point of view, I started thinking about ambiguous sentences.

So I had a look around for sites with ambiguous sentences and came across several.

On the Fun with Words site, there is an amusing collection of ambiguous headlines, for example:

2 SISTERS REUNITED AFTER 18 YEARS AT CHECKOUT COUNTER

INCLUDE YOUR CHILDREN WHEN BAKING COOKIES

HOSPITALS ARE SUED BY 7 FOOT DOCTORS

RED TAPE HOLDS UP NEW BRIDGE

http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguities.html

And I came across this sentence on Paul Butler's blog:

The complex houses married and single students and their families.

Most learners of English might know the word 'complex' as an adjective, but not a noun.  This is what English Profile reports about this word:

complex

 /ˈkɒm.pleks/Outline view

Word family:

Nouns: complexity

Adjectives: complex

▶ ADJECTIVE

B2 involving a lot of different but connected parts in a way that is difficult to understand

Dictionary examples:

a complex network of roads

a complex procedure

The film's plot was so complex that I couldn't follow it.

 Learner example:

It took us two weeks to modify the results in a very complex operation.

First Certificate in English; B2; Spanish

▶ NOUN

BUILDINGS

C1 a group of buildings or rooms that are used for a particular purpose

Dictionary example:

a sports/housing complex

 Learner example:

A visit to any local shopping complex suggest[s] people between 14 to 35 years of age are the [most] frequent shoppers.

International English Language Testing System; C1; Malay

MENTAL

C2 a mental problem which makes someone anxious or frightened about something

Dictionary example:

an inferiority complex

 Learner example:

He began to feel like that character in "Psycho", afraid that the hotel manager would turn out to be some kind of maniac with an Oedipus complex.

Certificate of Proficiency in English; C2; Catalan

And of course, the word 'house' is known to learners very early on, whereas the verb 'house' meaning 'to give a person or an animal a place to live' is not reported as being used by students in the Cambridge ESOL exams till C2 level.

While looking around, I learnt that such ambiguous sentences are known as garden path sentences.  Didn't know that till now!

It's like those pictures you were shown at school and asked what you saw in them, like this one:

http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-lit/ambiguity.html

Well, I hope my post today was clear and unambiguous!!!!

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Google Lab's Ngram Viewer

Sorry not to have been with you for a week but my week has been a bit busier than usual!  (= awesomely busy!!!)

'Awesome' is not a word I normally use regularly.  How long has the word 'awesome' been around?  10 years?  100 years?  How can I find out?

One very quick way of checking is to visit the Google Ngram Viewer:  http://books.google.com/ngrams/

If you feed in the word 'awesome' like I did, you get a graph like this:

From this we can see that the word 'awesome' does not appear to have been widely in use before 1870, and became very popular and frequent around 1980. The graph shows how a word which has existed for hundreds of years but has always been very rare can suddenly acquire a much more general meaning and become a part of the everyday language when it gets picked up by teenagers. 

So what exactly is the Google Ngram Viewer?  Well, around 5.20 million books written in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian were digitalised.  This produced a database containing 500 billion words which had appeared in these books (published between 1500 and 2008).  

On the Ngram Viewer website, you can feed in a string of up to 5 words, click and within seconds, a graph charting the frequency of use of the word or string of words appears. 

For more information (and some fascinating examples of how world events and trends can influence the use of words), I thoroughly recommend the following TED talk. You'll see why I chose to use the word 'awesome' at the start of this blog post!!!

http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html

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