Humans Who Read Grammars

Hola, it's memes time! Not any memes, memes that are particularly entertaining and interesting to linguists and that are created by linguists. If you like 'em, spread 'em! There's two sources of memes for linguists that I'd like to tell you about: Parkvall's Lingvistiska Samlarbilder ( Book of Faces and Tumblr)    Kittens and Linguistic Diversity ( Book of Faces ) Parkvalls samlarbilder The idea behind Parkvalls Samlarbilder is quite simple, "samlarbilder" means "collectors/trading cards" in Swedish and the cards feature something that is of significant value to linguists. Below are two more examples, the Berlin & Kay results for a few languages and the cover of the first edition of Saussure's famous work (as compiled by his students) which is foundational to much modern linguistics. The above to cards features quotes by Mr Chomsky and Mr Chimpsky, two rather talented primates :). If you want to know more about the inter...

This is a blogpost about the way that different linguists see the great challenges and aims of linguistics, it's full of quotes that I hope will prove illustrative. The quotes are taken mainly from here   and here , you can also go there to read more. As usual, you're more than free to skim and scroll, there's quite a few quotes this time. On this blog we're interested in discussing  what the "Big Research Questions" in linguistics  are, and also we've been interested in getting past the functional-fenerative divide that often is very destructive.  Two of our readers even commented that the inflammatory "debates" of the Great War are "profoundly unattractive" and that they had left that part of linguistics intentionally because of it's unproductive nature. Here's Haspelmath describing the situation: It is not hard to see that linguists who work on linguistic diversity tend to fa ll into two very rough sociological g...