Humans Who Read Grammars

Some turning points in linguistic typology are easily recognised, such as the ground-breaking work by Joseph Greenberg on implicational universals entitled "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements" (Greenberg 1963). Other turning points are less well-defined, less commonly associated with a single paper, or a specific typologist, team, or place. But there was definitely something in the water during, let's say, a period  centred  around 2010  –  a change that we could call the quantitative turn in linguistic typology.  Linguistic typologists have long recognised that the languages of the world are related in various ways, most importantly, in nested arrays of hierarchical descent (genealogy) as well as in so-called Sprachbunds or linguistic areas (geography). For a long time, i.e. work reaching from Bell (1978) all the way to Bakker (2010), these interdependencies have been viewed as something of a nuisance, so...

Two weeks ago, the 13th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT) took place in Pavia, Italy. As the name says, this is the main gathering for members of the Association for Linguistic Typology , and it's on a different continent every two years. It just happened to be in Europe as I was ready to go conferencing again (now dragging two kids in tow) so that was lucky. I like ALT a lot because I can go to basically any talk and find myself interested in it. There are hardly any talks or posters where I am disappointed because it isn't really my cup of tea - it's all typology so everything is my cup of tea :)! It is where the humans who read grammars gather. This year, ALT was paired with a summer school on 'Language universals and language diversity in an evolutionary perspective', which I would have loved to attend (but, kids). For the first time in history (as far as we could find), ALT offered child care. About 5 attendees made use of this (...

Public service announcement: there are website that keep a well-curated list of things that are useful to linguistics researchers and students, including the following: Language Goldmine - catalogue of cross-linguistic databases Linguistic terminology (us here at HWRG) Platinum Open Access publishing in linguistics More Open Access Linguistics  (us here at HWRG) Online tutorials for linguistic tools (ELAN, R etc)  (also HWRG) free online PDFs of publicly available grammars  (ALT) Language universals Weird things in langauge (Rara & Rarissima) CALS (Conlang WALS) It would appear that some don't know about these lists, so now you know/are reminded :). Lists are good, and instead of reinventing them you can look through these and add to them. For more hopefully useful stuff like this, go here.

World map from Glottolog, each language is one dot and coloured by language family (or other top-genetic unit). Language families are the main way we categorise and understand the language diversity of the world. A language family is a group of languages that have been analysed as having one ancestor,  one great-great-great-and-yet-greater-grand-mother language. Indo-European is a language family, with the sub-groups of Romance, Germanic, Slavic etc. Maps are great tools for visualising information,  we're pretty map-nerdy on this blog.   Robert Forkel, one of the editors of Glottolog, kindly shared an interactive map of the world with languages plotted out and coloured by language family with me. This map is interactive, rendered in a web browser with and html and json file. This map is not available on the Glottolog site, but will later be implemented in the command-line interface.  You can see language families on the website by either selecting a co...

In a language serving a complex (i.e., real) community,  it is absence of structured heterogeneity that would be dysfunctional Uriel Weinreich wrote this in the much influential paper " Empirical foundations for a theory of language change" from 1968, and it is as true today as it was then. The paper was written by him, William Labov and Marvin Herzog. It was published and finalised after Weinreich's death, he died in 1967 at the age of 40. In the last weeks of his life, he devoted his time to discussing and writing this very paper. In the preface of the paper, his two co-authors write about him and the work behind this paper, and how honoured they are to have written this with him. They write that by section 2.4, the personal editing of the paper by Uriel Weinreich ends. While the finalisation of the paper was their work and the arguments represent their joint discussions, they underline that the conception and much of the writing was his. The paper is well-c...

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...

During the National Youth Science Forum here in Canberra I was asked a couple of times about "the language of the future", usually connected to questions about language death/endangerment, globalisation and what lots of non-native speakers and language contact will "do" to English. Actually, we've discussed these issues before - but in video format - go have a look . I believe I need to revisit those points again, there are things I'd like to add and modify, but until such a time, enjoy them videos! And as usual, the feedback box is here . If you, like me, are a fan of dystopian sci-fi that deals with human nature and future as s species and global society, and features as a language as a way of illustration these themes, I doubt I will need to recommend these two: A Clockwork Orange (1971) Blade Runner (1982) But! Have you also checked out these two? Firefly (2002-2003)  The Expanse (2015- ongoing) To read more about Be...

We've talked about this before, but I think it needs to be said again - get on mailing lists for linguistics if you want to be kept in the loop about things. Announcements of workshops, positions, conferences, edited volumes etc - they main information distribution channel for such news in linguistics is mailing lists. There are some other useful RSS-feeds and twitter personas that are good to keep track of as well, but do get on mailing lists first if you're keen to stay updated. You don't have to stay updated you know, but I know that many readers of this blog are young researchers looking to start a career and for them this is useful. Lingust List lists a lot of useful mailing lists(!), go pick things out there. If you're curious what's actually going on in the lists, go check the archives. Linguist List doesn't archive all lists they list, but a majority. archived mailing lists non-archived mailing lists There's the overall lists   LINGUIST  ...