I think many of Boroditsky's findings are overstated.

But I've never read an abstract that ends in an emoticon before.

What were your thoughts, Geoff?

I agree, Goofy, about the emoticon, and there were so many parentheses that I was distracted while reading it. I don't know Boroditsky's work, so I can't comment on the his findings, but I wouldn't be surprised if his work was overstated.

I found his description of the "concretes" a bit anti-intellectual:

quote:

(My “concretes” explain in down-to-earth terms the contents of my papers, as opposed to the paper’s “abstract”, the purpose of which is to befuddle the reader, and convince the reviewing committee that the author knows how to speak “academese” properly.)

I do think gender languages (is that what it's called) very interesting. I've wondered if the gender assignments to nouns tend to make those nouns more male/female in the speakers' minds, if that makes sense.

The page that Geoff linked to is part of the author's personal site and doesn't form part of the actual paper. That is linked to from the page (in pdf format) and has a quite normal abstract. In fact, the abstract is rather shorter and simpler (one, albeit lengthy, paragraph) than many such I've seen, possibly because of his low opinion of abstracts in general academic literature.

His "concrete" serves as an informal introduction to the paper and as such isn't bound by the usual rules a academic writing. As such, his emoticon, while unusual, is probably not unique.