Chapter 8 Web Links

Virginia Woolf’s essay on words

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter24.html

In this essay, author Virginia Woolf articulates her intuitions about words, their ambiguities, and their mental representations. Many of these intuitions have been scientifically confirmed, long after this piece was written. By following this link, you can also hear an excerpt of Woolf herself delivering the essay as a spoken lecture.

The grammar police and the bogus problem of ambiguity

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=209

People who insist on certain standard rules of usage often justify these rules on the basis that they help to avoid potential ambiguity. But as we’ve seen, languages are riddled with lexical ambiguity, with relatively few ill effects. In this blog post, linguist Arnold Zwicky dismantles prescriptivist arguments for the “proper” use of the word hopefully.