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...

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  ...