http://christinecassidy.blogspot.com/2009/12/hoshigaki-dried-persimmons.html

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FatfreeVeganBlog/~3/BOyAPmlHu4Q/creamy-creole-eggplant-casserole.html

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2001

Today's Cathy:

A two-syllable "Mom" is commoner, with the parts supporting a downstepped sequence of distinct pitch targets. And of course the same intonation can be used with any other vocative. The extra syllable(s) only arise if the vocative doesn't have at least two syllables to start with: thus "Mo-ther!" can bear exactly the same pattern, without the need to subdivide any syllables.

I've often wondered whether this particular intonational gesture — here expressing exasperation — is the same in all English varieties, including those (for example) where the unmarked intonational pattern is rising rather than falling. (For background discussion, see "Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008; "The phonetics of uptalk", 9/13/2008; "Uptalk vs. UNBI again", 11/23/2008.) In Glasgow and Belfast, for example, do daughters produce an exasperated "Mo-ther!" on two rising pitch levels?

And what about other languages, including pitch-accent languages like Japanese, or various types of languages with lexical tone?

Another interesting question is what distinguishes this intonational gesture from the similarly stylized two-step fall used to call to people who are not already in contact (the "vocative chant"). The two gestures are pragmatically and emotionally very different — and are likely to be associated with different facial expressions, voice qualities and so on — but the pitch contours involved seem at least to come from overlapping distributions.

[Update — if commenters will send me audio clips of the patterns that they write about, I'll post them in an accessible form. Any audio format is OK: .wav, .aiff, .mp3, .aav, etc.]

http://xkcd.com/681/

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091227.html

Three thousand light-years away,

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2000

Lest anyone should think that the Animal Communication desk at Language Log Plaza is asleep, let me just note that we have indeed taken note of recent reports about how Campbell's monkeys have complex syntax. Among these Ivory Coast primates, according to one report: "males have a repertory of six types of alert calls (Boom, Krak, Hok, Hok-oo, Krak-oo, Wak-oo) but only rarely use them in isolation, preferring to produce long vocal sequences of an average of 25 successive calls (each sequence being made up of 1 to 4 types of different calls). Furthermore, Campbell's monkeys combine calls in order to convey different messages. By modifying a call sequence or the order of calls within a sequence, the messages are changed, and can relay precise information about the nature of the danger…" You read, you decide. The original research paper has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but I have not yet seen it. At present Language Log has nothing to say, except to utter a long series of about 25 successive alert calls warning you that anything concretely tied to present dangers apparent in the immediate spatiotemporal environment cannot bear a very strong relation to natural use of a human language. The things we say are not just long sequences of "Watch out!", "Fore!", "Timber!", "Stop thief!", "Hey!", "Ouch!", and so on. (At least, not for me; not on a good day.)