Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

"... and let me call This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is." www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44122/...

A “Reform vs Not Reform” strategy is only going to work for Labour if they are seen as credibly “not Reform” by LD/Green curious voters. Every hardline intervention on immigration weakens that credibility but without persuading Reform curious voters.

Job alert! 3 tenured research positions at CNRS, France with one preferably in philosophy of language Get in touch with a lab for more information #linguistics www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORF...

HESA put the academic staff numbers in 23-24 in Essex at 1560, and given voluntary severence schemes it's likely to be lower now, so this is at least 2/3rds of all academic staff in Essex receiving risk of redundancy letters.

Today, the Academy publishes a report setting out findings from our Where We Live Next programme on place-led approaches to environmental sustainability. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications...

And yet the BBC has blocked its journalists from even reporting that @rutgerbregman.com made this same, spectacularly self-evident, statement of fact in his Reith Lecture.

my great-grandparents arrived in the UK in the 1890s with nothing. they sold pickles from the front room window, took in laundry, worked as tailors. their children were nurses, teachers, salesmen. their grandchildren were professors, designers, opticians, doctors, magistrates, entrepreneurs.

New paper just published with @evelinaleivada.bsky.social @garymarcus.bsky.social, Vittoria Dentella, Raquel Montero and Fritz Günther Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Structure Are Not Represented by ChatGPT bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bi...

Such a surprise! www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

word

This isn't a snapshot of Doogie doing a dynamic stretch. It's a static pose. He literally sleeps like that. #caturday #thedoogster

Archaeologist uncovers Ireland’s first known wildcat from 5,500 years ago 🌍 www.westernpeople.ie/archaeologis...

Welcome Shabana Mahmood to your next four years of headlines!!!

‘More than ever before, we need British diplomats, spies and soldiers to speak the language of our adversaries.’ Stark piece from a former diplomat on how loss of language learning hits our defence & geopolitical capabilities www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/proc... @timeshighered.bsky.social

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74... Please sign and share EVERYWHERE 🙏

Net migration fell sharply agaim to 204,000 in the year to June 2025, having been 344k in 2024 and 848k in 2023. But falling immigration has been the biggest secret - and it is time for the media and political debate to catch up with this change www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cn...

I'm not usually a fan of THES, but this piece is spot on. @britishacademy.bsky.social has been making this argument for a long time, but the government seems uninterested in the loss of languages in UKHE www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/proc...

@ans.bsky.social's running the Spine (268 miles up the Pennine Way in January!) and raising money for Oracle Head and Neck Cancer. If you can chuck in a bob or two to support, that would be marvelous! www.justgiving.com/page/anson-m...

Happy World Linguistics Day! Celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so... let's see how many different locations we can get world linguistics day wishes from this year!

‘Get someone from Linguistics down here!’ Happy World Linguistics Day!

At last! Open Access version of the book on MIT's site. One for the syntax nerds. I argue we need to replace Merge, that there are no Phases, and that we need to rethink the basic theoretical typology of Islands. Feel free to download with abandon! 🐦🐦 #syntax direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Just complained to the BBC about their censoring of @rutgerbregman.com's Reith Lecture, where they removed a line about Trump being the most openly corrupt president in US history. I know they are in a difficult spot, but this is pure cowardice. www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comp...

@davidadger.bsky.social's "Mereological Syntax" presents an argument for replacing Chomsky’s set-theoretic Merge view of syntax with a theory of syntax based on mereological objects. Available #OpenAccess: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255327...

Did you ever racially abuse fellow pupils? It was years ago. Did you ever racially abuse fellow pupils? Not in a hurtful way. Did you ever racially abuse fellow pupils? Not with intent. Did you ever racially abuse fellow pupils? Not genuine abuse. 😮🫣😬😱 ~AA

'Ahead of the autumn budget on 26 November, Universities UK (UUK) has calculated that funding per student for teaching in 2025-26 is at 64 per cent of the level it was in 2015-16.' 1/3

really interesting and novel point by @ryannefdt.bsky.social and Emmanuel Chemla: current LLMs have been specialized via evaluation and selection, so are by no means 'off the shelf' learners: their biases have been specifically tailored for language processing. arxiv.org/pdf/2408.09544

Replace Merge? Can’t wait to start reading this! #linguistics #minimalist #syntax

Banksy social commentary brought to you by conditional (counterfactual!) strengthening

Oops. Ooooooooooooops. I do hope that nobody has been given or denied a job/promotion based on their SpringerNature citation counts in the past 15 years. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 h/t @nathlarigaldie.bsky.social

At last! Open Access version of the book on MIT's site. One for the syntax nerds. I argue we need to replace Merge, that there are no Phases, and that we need to rethink the basic theoretical typology of Islands. Feel free to download with abandon! 🐦🐦 #syntax direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

NEW: If you have *any* interest in the Nathan Gill story, you need to look at this. We’ve put all the dates into a timeline & it’s incredibly revealing. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/nathan-gil...

“If you went back a million minutes, you would be back to January 2024. If you go back a billion minutes, you are in the Roman empire. That’s the difference between a million and a billion.”

I don't use the word lightly, but this is really just evil isn't it. "Your identity makes us uncomfortable so be gone from public spaces." Fuck off.

Advances in genomics are giving exciting new perspectives on biology of speech, language & reading. My latest peer-reviewed paper is a tutorial, guiding readers from different backgrounds through the history of the field, current state-of-the-art, & where we’re heading. A taster in this thread.🧪 1/n

Referring the Home Office to Prevent as it's clearly a radicalising group with an extremist far-right agenda.

Coverage of the refugee proposals demonstrates why we have such a broken political system. Endless focus on left-wing anger and right-wing support. Basically nothing on whether the reforms will work. They will not, which is why we'll still be here having the same debate in three years.

This is a spot on analysis of the government's increasingly crazed approach to comms

Thought the plan was to smash the smuggling gangs not emulate them.

it's gonna be Windrush rebooted

Am so using this in my next syntax class

'Graduates are overwhelmingly positive about universities – 81 per cent say universities have a positive impact on the nation. Among non-graduates, that figure drops to just 55 per cent.' (Interesting that it's that high). 1/3

Can we go back to the days when politicians said that they really wanted to help people but it’s very hard and takes time, rather than saying that they want to hurt people and can do it quickly?

BBC has a case against Trump. WhiteHouse Chief Press Officer called the BBC ‘100% fake news.’ Which is defamatory and untrue.

My childhood, in academic Cambridge in the 1970s, was full of interesting friends of my parents who were refugees from all over the world, escaping various Communist or Fascist countries or political oppression in some other way. That they were welcome here, indeed *encouraged* to settle, was great.

Good Law Project we’re in court this week holding the EHRC to account over their flawed approach to policy on the spaces trans people can access and now they want OUR help to tackle BBC transphobia. https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?e=e00287e0db&u=f1c42fae5214b3ee59aab75ab&id=c77e09859c