Humans Who Read Grammars

Big Think recently published an article titled "Half of All Languages Come from One Root Language. How it Spread Is Something of Debate" by Philip Perry .  This is a nice article that provides an introduction to the stormy debate on the origins of the Indo-European languages family to the public. It is always appreciated to see current research debate covered in popular press! T he article informs the reader that "half of the languages spoken today by some 3 billion people come from a single root language".  This is unfortunately  misleading, I'll provide some context here.  TL;DR Only 6% of the 7,000-ish languages alive today are Indo-European. However, 46% of people speak an Indo-European language. Languages are not evenly distributed across the population, i.e. not half of the world's languages are Indo-European even if almost half of people speak it. The writer is referring  to the Indo-European language family, the most studied and well-k...

December is traditionally a month for looking back. I have been looking back quite far for an abstract on causative motion for a conference in Paris next year . During my PhD, I collected data on both non-causative motion (Robin ran out of the house) and causative motion (Alice threw the book out the window), but I never did anything with the causative data. If the abstract is accepted, maybe I can finally do something with it. Coding things up for the abstract lead me to go even further back. Among the causative motion sentences selected from my parallel corpus, I included a resultative: " A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red . " (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) To paint something red is a resultative construction :). Resultatives were the topic of my MA thesis completed now seven years ago, and they have always kept a spe...