Humans Who Read Grammars

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...