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Showing posts from March, 2016

International Women's Day - Joan Bresnan

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Today is International Women's Day. Here at HWRG we're celebrating it by highlighting an important female linguist. Today we're honouring Joan Bresnan, who together with Ronald Kaplan, founded the theoretical formal grammatical framework Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and has written numerous influential papers. Trading card of Bresnan by Parkvall . She is still active as a Professor Emerita in Humanities at Stanford University and also a Senior Researcher ( Spoken Syntax Lab ) at Stanford's  Center for the Study of Language and Information.  Her research and LFG is much informed by a wide knowledge of linguistic diversity, in particular of Australian and Bantu languages. LFG is still a popular framework in linguistics and continues to develop.  Here is a quote by Bresnan that illustrates her ideas and experience of formal linguistics very well: I began to realize that we theoretical linguists had no privileged way of distinguishing the possible formal

Play fish communication game!

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PLAY FISH COMMUNICATION GAME! Some mates of mine are doing an experiment involving a very short online task where you learn fish songs. You need android or Firefox if you're on a desktop computer to play. Play it and spread the word! For other games advancing science, check the "games" tag.

Hopefully helpful for linguistics students and junior researchers

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Hello everyone,  One of our aims here at this blog is to be of use for and spread information to the global community of linguistics students and junior/starting out researchers. To that end, I'd like to highlight some resources and posts from this blog relating to that, hope you enjoy it! Guide to linguistic terminology and reflections on typoloy and framework-neutrality   This is a text with helpful tips and advice on where to turn and what to think about when trying to navigate the rather jungle-like field that is linguistic terminology List of Open Access publishing venues in linguistics  This is a list for finding research, and also venues for publishing your own research Open Access.  Free online tutorials and manuals for tools for linguists   This is a great list of tools and tutorials and manuals for said tools that can truly revolutionise your work. Free Online Linguistic Databases A list of posts we've made introducing different cool online free databa

Got language descriptions? Scan and share 'em!

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Have you got language descriptions lying around that could be made accessible in digital format?* Scan and share 'em! Here's a video of me cutting up and feeding a book page by page into the automatic scanning feeder. Ah, such joy! In video: Hedvig, editing: Hedvig, camera: Suzanne (fellow co-founder of HWRG),  Music: Stereo Total & Hang On The Box Don't hesitate to send a copy to hedvig.public ™gmail (dot) com if possible! Get in contact with your library, perhaps they'd be keen to have digital versions of their material, just that they don't have time to scan it themselves? This is often the case. We need to make linguistics less WEIRD , promote the knowledge of endangered languages and broaden our understanding of linguistic diversity - this means making more research accessible to more people. Happy scanning everyone! * Naturally, consider the rights and permissions surrounding the document in question and use your judgment.