Language-related 2007 Ig Nobel prizes [Was: Domo arigato...]

[Joel S. Berson]

The Literature Ig Nobel was won this year by a book indexer:

Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study
of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for
anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
REFERENCE: "The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index
Entries," Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp.
119-22.

Joel

At 10/6/2007 02:57 PM, Dennis Baron wrote:
>There's a new post on
>the Web of Language:
>
>Domo arigato, Dr. Roboto: Researchers prove rats can't understand
>Japanese backwards.  Can you?
>
>The 2007 Ig Nobel prize in linguistics has been awarded to three
>researchers who successfully demonstrated that rats can't distinguish
>between Japanese and Dutch sentences played backwards.
>
>The Ig Nobel prizes, co-sponsored by the Annals of Improbable
>Research, are awarded each year for real research shortly before the
>actual Nobel Prize winners are announced.  While this is the first
>time that a prize has been awarded in linguistics, two earlier prizes
>in literature have been given for language-related research.  John
>Richards, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, won in 2001
>for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences
>between the plural and the possessive.  And Daniel Oppenheimer, of
>Princeton, won in 2006 for his report, "Consequences of Erudite
>Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using
>Long Words Needlessly."
>
>A write-up of this year's winning research on rat foreign language
>backwards sentence recognition appeared in 2005 in the Journal of
>Experimental Psychology.  Drs. J. M. Toro, J. B. Trobalon, and N.
>Sebastian-Galles, cognitive neuroscientists at the Parc Cientific de
>Barcelona, trained a group of 64 Long-Evans rats to press a lever and
>receive food when they heard Dutch and Japanese sentences that they
>had never heard before (remember, these were Spanish-speaking rats).
>Researchers then played the sentences backwards to see how that
>affected the rats' comprehension. They concluded that sixty rats had
>no idea what was going on (P < .05), while four rats "failed to
>finish the experiment because of low lever-pressing rates."
>
>Read the rest of this post about cutting-edge linguistic research at
>
>  the Web of Language
>
>www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
>
>Dennis Baron
>Professor of English and Linguistics
>Department of English
>University of Illinois
>608 S. Wright St.
>Urbana, IL 61801
>
>office: 217-244-0568
>fax: 217-333-4321
>
>www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron
>
>read the Web of Language:
>www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
>
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