October 08, 2002

Extrapolation

I don't know how well you can see this, but this is a map of what word people use to ask for a soda/coke/soft drink. Just in case it is too small, blue is "soda", green is "pop", red is "coke", and purple is "other". How do they do these studies? I took Intro to Linguistics from a woman who as her master's thesis had exactly duplicated a similar study (with many more words and phrases) that was done in the South 30 years ago. She went to the same towns and found people who were representative of the people studied earlier (according to socio-economic class, etc.). It took her years. Simply amazing, in that the amount of legwork done will always fail to find the true complexity of language that really exists.

October 8, 2002 06:27 PM