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...

Representing linguistics at science forum, some links and photos. Material to inspire those interesting in linguistics and perhaps also useful things to other linguists thinking of doing the same thing. Colleagues and I at the Centre (of Excellence) for Language Dynamics , and from linguistics at t he College of Asia-Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences at Australian National University have recently been involved in representing linguistics at the Down Under National Youth Science Forum. It's organised by Rotary Down Under (Australia, Solomons, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Nauru, Norfolk, American Samoa and New Zealand)  and is taking place here in Canberra where I live. Lots of high school students attended, mainly from Australia and New Zealand, and they were very enthusiastic, to say the least :)! We got lots of clever questions and reflections, we were much impressed with the students. This was the first time linguistics was co...