Serious linguistic scholars don't usually write about talking dogs and street signs -- not for publication, anyway. But that is what they do on Language Log, a funny, wide-ranging blog that provides up-to-the-minute linguistic commentary written for a wider audience.

Now three years old, Language Log, at itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog, attracts 5,000 daily visitors and is now partly captured in a book, ''Far from the Madding Gerund'' (William, James & Co.), which reprints some posts by Language Log's founders, Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Geoff Pullum, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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