Humans Who Read Grammars

*apologies for pay-walled links ahead* I was first confronted by spurious correlations in language and culture during the EVOLANG 10 conference in Vienna in 2014, where I think I saw a poster on the relationship between tense marking and economic behaviour. If I remember correctly, this poster build on the famous findings of Keith Chen, who published a paper in 2013 on the relationship between obligatory future tense marking and various types of social and economical decisions people take. The paper was very controversial before it was even published, with posts on Language Log (see links at bottom of the page for more posts)  a reply on Language Log by Keith Chen  and a variety of media coverage that can be found here and here and here  and here . Chen found that languages lacking a distinct future tense: "save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese" (abstract). He explains his findings as follows "[...] being require...

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...