Humans Who Read Grammars

How to deal with languages that do not fit our limited compositional view of parsing?  I was just reminded of the wonderful existence of Reut Tsarfaty  and the beautiful little video that she made together with Noa Tsarfaty  for the PhD.  Just watch it, it's very good. Full reference: Tsarfaty, Reut. 2010 "Relational-Realizational Parsing". PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam. ILLC Dissertation Series DS-2010-01 ISBN:978-90-5776-205-5 Links:   txt-file of abstract here ,  entire fulltext here Extract from abstract : Statistical parsing models aim to assign accurate syntactic analyses to natural language sentences based on the patterns and frequencies observed in human-annotated training data. State-of-the-art statistical parsers to date demonstrate excellent performance in parsing English, but when the same models are applied to languages different than English, they hardly ever obtain comparable results. The grammar of English is q...

My friend Calle drew my attention to the fact that the well-renowed linguist Lyle Campbell has written an article on how to spot that a speaker is actually faking knowledge about a language. Interesting, huh? And, you can read this article for free online!  Full reference: Campbell, Lyle (2014) How to "fake" a language. Estudios de Lingüística Chibcha (ISSN 1409-245X) 33: 63-74 Link to free online PDF of official version Link to in press-academia version (in case the above one has problems) Excerpts: In the course of several years of fieldwork in Central America and Mexico seeking potential speakers of endangered languages, I encountered on several occasions individuals who attempted to fabricate a language, to create spontaneously what they hoped I would take to be an indigenous language. The number of cases in the sample considered here is not large; nevertheless. the goal of this paper is to attempt to make some general observations about how these individual...

I'm editing some wikipedia articles on Akan and neighbouring languages and dialects, as a part of #lingwiki . Wikipedia editing is fun, easy and you should do it too. Don't be scared, there's lots of help  - you are not the first beginner of wikipedia editing. If you just search for "Akan" on wikipedia you get to a disambiguation page where they list several articles matching that search. There you find a link to the pages on Kwa languages and on Central Tano languages. That's relevant, as the Akan language is a part of those higher level groupings. However, it is not a good idea to have them both be described as "a stock of dialects spoken by the Akan people". Now, of course. In some sense all languages are collections of dialects - heck they're all collections of idiolects . But... Kwa is a really, really large group. Central Tano (which is part of Kwa) even includes another subgrouping, Akanic, which in its turn includes a macro language ...

If you wanna keep updated on new exciting research there's several things you can do. And it's not that hard, and if you balance it and filter the feed correctly you won't get swamped. You can subscribe to certain blogs, tumblrs and twitter feeds of particular linguists or institutions. I'll create a list of suggestions soon. You can also subscribe to people on academia or find RSS feeds of departments or other research institutions. However, one of the easiest ways to keep track are mailing lists. Linguist List is a non-profit organisation that among other things gathers a lot of interesting mailinglists, you can browse them all  here.  You can set it to giving you digests instead of everything all the time. The most interesting list is probably "lingtyp" (according to me that is), but you gotta be a member of Association of Linguistic Typology to get in there. Linguist List also keeps two general lists, LINGUIST and LINGLITE . These are freely availa...

Here's another one of those recommendations to go read something that is interesting, important, freely available online and quite accessible to non-scholars. Now, that we need to study diversity might be a rather trivial observation to many readers of this blog which is a lot about linguistic diversity , but it apparently still needs to be said and elaborated upon. This time it's Greville Corbett who has kindly uploaded his paper "Why Linguists Need Languages" to the social sharing platform for academics: academia.  This is sometimes known as blue open access, social sharing platform open access. Free online PDF here Full reference:  Corbett, Greville G. (2001) Why Linguists Needs Languages. In Maffi, Luisa (Ed) On Biocultural Diversity. Linking Language, Knowledge and the Environment. Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 517-530. Quote from the paper: To an outsider, it must seem self-evident that linguists would have a key role in any ...

Soon it's time for our collaborative wikipedia linguistics editing session! Here are the most important things I want to tell you come join it'll be fun and good for the world ^^! read what Gretchen wrote here   don't worry if you're not a linguist regular wikipedia user native speaker of English able to participate at exactly that time slot (4-6 AM GMT/UTC) twitterer it'll be fine have a look at this page for resources where you can find answers to linguistic questions tweet with the hashtag #lingwiki if you've got questions or comments or just excitement contact us here if you've got questions or comments and don't got twitter tweet @grammar_swag with the hashtag #lingwiki  just to let us know you're excited too ^^! The time for the LSA session is Saturday the 10th of January at 20-22 Pacific Standard Time (4-6 AM GMT/UTC). You can also edit before or after that time, that's cool too. The hashtag for twitter is #lingw...

Sorry for being late, so very late, but I wanted to share this with you.  Keep it and save it for next year, ok ^^? A certain Dave Sayers sent out a poem om a mailinglist for linguists just before christmas, it's a remake of the traditional poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas", Twas the Night Before Christmas (Linguists’ version), by Dave Sayers, 2014. (Shared with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence:  http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/2.5/ . Also online alongside the  original poem here:  https://www.academia.edu/ 9856733/ .) Twas the night before Christmas in the ivory tower, Not a creature was stirring at the midnight hour, Twas a problem for linguists who live to hear sounds, Monophthongs, diphthongs, open or round. We linguists were nestled all snug in our beds, While visions of fricatives danced in our heads. Snug in our gowns and our four-cornered caps, We pondered enigmas like bilabial taps. When out on the lawn there ...

Hurray, let's make the world better by improving linguistics on the internets! There will be a coordinated effort to improve articles on linguistic topics on Wikipedia. It's being formally hosted at the annual meeting of Linguistic Society of America (LSA), headed by Gretchen McCulloch  of the excellent blog All Things Linguistic . She's written more about the editing session here . It'll formally take place on Saturday the 10th of January at 20-22 Pacific Standard Time (04-06 GMT/UTC). We're especially focusing on: 1.  Linguistics stubs 2.  Under-documented languages 3. Biographies of prominent  linguists , especially female linguists and other minorities I'll be participating even though I won't be there in the flesh world. Wanna join? Give us a notification here . There's no restriction language-wise, no need to edit only English articles. Let's celebrating with some Chris Pratt grooving.

There's a quiz game where you have to match languages to their geographic distribution.  Needless to say, we all need to play it. It's fun, go go go :D! Tell me your score and comments :)! I got 24/25, for some stupid reason I couldn't get no. 17.

Tis Christmas time, so let's watch Tom Scott's video on the phonology of Hawaiian and why "Merry Christmas" become "Mele Kalikimaka". After that, let's learn how to greet each other in upon this Christian/Western Holidays of Christmas and New Years in lots of other languages, courtesy of Omniglot of course. Luxenbourgish: E schéine Chrëschtdag an e glécklecht neit Joer Ukranian:  Різдвом Христовим Standard Arabic:  أجمل التهاني بمناسبة الميلاد و حلول السنة الجديدة Quechua:  Sumaq kausay kachun Navidad qampaq Romani:  Baxtalo Krećuno thaj Baxtalo Nevo Berš Tibetan:  ༄༅།།ལོ་གསར་ལ་བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས་ཞུ། Xhosa:  Siniqwenelela Ikrisimesi Emnandi Nonyaka Omtsha Ozele Iintsikelelo Many, many more languages here! Från oss alla, till er alla: En Riktig God Jul!

A name for our linguistic diversity game has been evolved through an iterated learning experiment. Go to replicated type to learn more about this and cultural evolution!

The excellent radio/podcast show Talk the Talk just did an episode on nativeness of language that is really, really good. They've interviewed Dr Vyvyan Evans who just came out with a book about why language isn't an instinct and they ask really good questions and get really good answers. I know I'm saying "really good" a lot, but that's just because I'm very excited and this is awesome. I'll calm down in a bit. In the meantime, enjoy this gif as a display of my excitement which cannot be expressed fully in words and go listen to the show!

I have a lot of thoughts and ideas but I always like to fact-check and double check before I say anything. I thought I'd share some of the stranger ones with you for the sake of entertainment. These are not serious thoughts, just strange thoughts. This one is one of the strangest and might fit better in an edition of  the Speculative Grammarian. What can we learn by comparing mature /complex language features and junk DNA  in biological organisms? I.e. something entities that have been around for a long time acquire and have a hard time to get rid of. Mature features or frills in languages can be things that take a long time to evolve and sometimes bleaches down so much that it barely has any function anymore, except to mark group membership. Complex features is a umbrella term for lots of things, they're not necessarily the same. I don't know a lot about Junk DNA/non-coding DNA, but I do know that you can get it from not deleting copies (bleaching..?) and retrovirus...

Hello! Wanna help us find a name for a smartphone app game about linguistic diversity? I'm working with Seán Roberts (of MPI Nijmegen and the blog  Replicated Typo ), Mark Dingemanse (also of MPI Nijmegen but of the blog the  Ideophone ) and Peter Withers & Pashiera Barkhuysen at the Language in Interaction project (WP7 ) to create a game for smartphones that let's you compete in recognising and explore languages of the world. We need a name for this game and we'd like your help in figuring it out. Since cultural evolution and iterated learning is very cool, Seán's set up a very quick iterated learning game that you can play that will help us.  Help us evolve an app name! The more that play the merrier!  It's a very simple game and takes very little time. As Seán says "We’ll throw some app names at you, you try to remember them, then we throw your names at someone else." 

Following on from the preceding post on listening to the languages of the world by navigating audio samples on maps, here I will introduce Phonemica 乡音苑/ 鄉音苑, a website with user-contributed audio files of Sinitic (and some other nearby) languages, mapped by pins that are (supposedly) colour coded by linguistic affiliations. Even if you are not into Sinitic languages, it is fun to listen to, and familiarise yourself with, the various Sinitic languages. (You know, just in case, e.g., the next pub quiz asks you to distinguish the Cantonese vs. Mandarin vs. Taiwanese Mandarin versions of 'Let It Go'.) Version A Version B Version C (And just for fun, unofficial versions of 'Let It Go' in Taiwanese , Shanghainese , and 26 Sinitic lects .) The level of diversity amongst the Sinitic languages is similar to that amongst the Romance languages. At around the same time that Vulgar Latin was spread around by Roman soldiers, Late Archaic/ Early Medieval Chinese...

I've got three things on constructed languages for ya. Be it for fiction, peace or just plain fun - constructed language fascinate. They vary in thoroughness and devotion of fan community, we all have our favourite. My favourite is the same as that of my teacher Mikael Parkvall, i.e. Solrésol. Here's the wiki on Solrésol , Romeo and Juliet on Solresol  and there is also a linguistic problem from the Swedish contest based on Solrésol but I can't find it right now. For your enjoyment A podcast on conlangs called "Conlangery" . Even for non-conlangers I recommend trying  their review of the classical book on gender by Corbett. World Atlas of Constructed Languages Structure - Conlang-WALS John McWhorthers TEDed-video on conlangs Imma big fan of constructed languages that do not have any aim of being optimal and improve upon communication or the world, and preferably that isn't solely based on European assumptions and categories. Do you have any pr...

I tried to figure out how many languages are spoken in the online community of Nerdfighteria once, and now I'd like to see if I can get a hold of John and Hank Green with your help. Wanna join? How is this interesting to a non-nerdfighter reader of this blog? Well, this is a good example of young people's enthusiasm for language and by encouraging it we're making the world better and possibly also linguistics better - just like the Olympiads of Linguistics or all the tumblrs, blogs, youtube-channels etc on linguistics out there on the interwebs . We in academia need to connect with the surrounding world, and enthusiastic young people are a great place to start. Imma nerdfighter, this means that I form a part of the community around the vlogbrothers , brainscoop, scishow , the Art Assignment , crashcourse and many other excellent youtube-channels. It's an interactive community formed by nerds interested in knowledge and the world in general - that's the brie...

Like I've said before, you know what I most often like better than reading grammars? Talking to speakers/signers and experts! You know, it's not a good idea to say "so, you're a linguists - what languages do you speak?", but at the same time linguists do speak and do research into a lot of languages and by collaborating we can make more effective use of our time investigating linguistic diversity. See my old posts here about "how many languages do linguists speak?". These past two weeks I've been out on a little tour doing just that. I've been to several places in Germany: Hillerse, Berlin, Potdsam, Leipzig, Freiburg and then over to the UK to meet people at SOAS. These are some of the people I've met and had time to sit down with:   Ulrike Mosel - retired professor of the University of Kiel, renowned specialist on oceanic languages, especially Samoan, Teop & Tolai, and also originally an orientalist, as it was called then, with a...

There is a site called Language Landscape where you can listen and see languages of the world by navigating audio samples on a map. They're currently offering 357 samples, both audio and video (because remember: sign language!!), go check it out and contribute your own! It's super awesome. You remember sometime ago when Jeremy Collins wrote a post here in connection with a workshop on cross-lingusitic databases and wrote that he  would like to see data points tied to specific speakers and geographical coordinates, as one possible solution. Well, guess what the Language Landscape does? Exactly that! I've just come back from SOAS in London where I met a certain Samantha Goodchild that works on Language Landscape and told me about the site . Such cool stuff, y'all go contribute, listen and watch now! While you're at it you should also go to Paul Heggarty and Colin Renfrew's site Sound Comparisions where you can hear cognate sets from lots of languages....

The tumblr The land of Maps recently reblogged a map from the 2004 edition of Ethnologue displaying the linguistic diversity of Africa. I thought I'd just add some brief commentary and information about the kind of research questions this touches upon. Now, Africa is super-diverse don't get me wrong, but this image does not show the full picture. I know Imma party pooper, I've accepted this about myself. Ethnologue © 2005 SIL International This map is based offa Ethnologue and displays each language of Africa as a polygon shape covering the area where the language is spoken. Ethnologue is a catalog of the worlds languages administrated by SIL. They're also the keepers of certain standards of languages, such as the ISO 639-3 codes for language names. The most recent edition, from 2014, does not feature maps of this kind. They do have maps of smaller areas though, like Nigeria which is one of the most diverse regions of Africa. In order to see the dive...