Humans Who Read Grammars

Hello everyone, This posts serves to show non-generativist readers of this blog things going on in the generative sphere that they might like to know about. Mainly: grand challenges, the future of the field comparisons between genetic research into human history and historical linguistics large cross-linguistic databases Sometime ago, we wrote about the conference that was held in Athens in 2015 titled: Generative Syntax in the Twenty-First Century: The Road Ahead It was a conference that gathered many people and were very important matters were discussed, matters that are relevant both to those who describe themselves as "generativists" and those of us who don't. They had a round-table discussion, and the discussants also submitted written statements prior to the event. These can still be accessed and read, and provide insights into what people consider as crucial issues. Some of the links to these files had since broken, I contacted one of the o...

Happy news, it is possible to access lectures from the Centre of Excellence for Language Dynamics (CoEDL) on any podcasting app! Now you can also look this smart while listening to lectures about linguistic diversity on your normal podcast app! For more on the map of linguistic diversity in the bubble, go here . The centre has long had lectures up at iTunes U , but it wasn't until now that I figured out how to get them out of the apple-bubble and into podcasting apps for android etc (i.e the RSS URL)*. I tried it out yesterday, I ended up listened to Russell Gray's talk on grand challenges of linguistics while grocery shopping at Aldi - a throughly pleasant experience that I wish you all! (I'm a podcast freak, every alone moment spent not working is spent listening to podcasts.) The centre has several different programmes and projects, and the lectures are organised into different "courses" or "podcasts" accordingly. Below, I've included ...

Lately I've been reading papers in diversity and evolutionary linguistics and some in biology. And I've also been creating mixtapes for friends. So, it occurred to me to make a mixtape of academic papers that go well together and that I think should be shared, and well.. here we are now. This is Hedvig's Evolutionary/Diversity Linguistics Mixtape Vol.1! It features s ome well-known classics, some perhaps lesser well-known ones. They're ordered al phabetically, but can be read ever which way. There's a link to a free PDF for almost all of the publications. The intention is not to create an exhaustive list of everything in evolutionary/diversity linguistics that is important (just like a mixtape of pop songs does not consist of all excellent pop songs), these publications have been especially selected for how they go together. They are also very suitable for new comers to these kinds of research questions, they're quite accessibly written and reada...

This image illustrates the situation that any researchers trying to understand and reconstruct the past of a current situation with related  tokens  faces - be it in biology, linguistics or another field. Only a sliver, a slice of time is available to us and from that we try to go back and reconstruct relationships. What's nice about this picture is the branches reaching across (C), thus appearing close to others (B) in that slice of time, but actually it's genealogically related to another further away token (F). It does not really illustrate horizontal influence, i.e languages (in our case) becoming similar due to contact - unless you consider the closeness across the x & z-axis' , like with C & B. Also, notice the branches that don't make it all the way up, the extinct species/languages/etc. I saw this image for the first time in a presentation by Fiona Jordan and liked it a lot. It's originally from Strickberger (1990), who adapted the...

There are more and more exciting new tools cropping up for scientist to gather data, and in linguistics one new tool such is gaming! We just had a talk here at CoEDL at ANU from a researcher working on mutual intelligibility of closely related european languages - Charlotte Gooskens  - where they've been using games to investigate this question. Apropos that, I thought I'd let you all know about some games you can play that can further our understanding of language! Go play games, for science! Mutual understanding between closely related languages-game As a speaker of a major european language, how good are you at understanding your neighbours? Really... :)? Link to game. Link to science behind (don't look before playing!) LingQuest! How good are you at correctly identifying which language you're hearing? Test yourself on over 30 European languages and other languages from all over the world. Included are many languages currently under study in the DOBES-...

Hello everyone, In this post, we will tackle the following questions: What is a language family? How many language families are there in the world? What is an isolate? How many isolates are there? How many sign languages might there be in the world? How many contact languages might there be in the world? What is the difference when it comes to these categories with respect to Glottolog and Ethnologue? Does it matter? Hopefully this might be useful to people interested in language history and/or users of Glottolog and Ethnologue. As usual, I will use headings so feel free to skim and skip things that are not interesting to you and only read what you find relevant. It's been few posts lately by me (Hedvig), will try and change that. Right now I'm out travelling in Europe, going to workshops and visiting friends and getting a lot of inspiration. Already been at two workshops:  Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics  in Leiden and befor...