A new typology database: Areal Typology of Languages of the Americas (ATLAs). atlas.evolvinglanguage.ch Take a look at the article on apprehensional morphology for an example: atlas.evolvinglanguage.ch/contribution... #linguistics #typology

Official English in the US will have life and death consequences. This is not an exaggeration. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

A great new resource for language revitalization and promotion! 🤩

🚨 🚨 Last call for abstracts: Usage-based Approaches to Phonology welcomes papers using diverse methods to explore the emergence of phonological patterns from language use. Plenary by Joan Bybee (U of New Mexico). Come hang with us at U. of Oregon, July 12 & 13. sites.google.com/view/usage-b... 🐦🐦

Humans, and sadly most other species on the planet, are totally f&%ked. There. I said it.

A quick reminder that we are witnessing the beginning of simultaneous cascading global catastrophes. It's a good day for a long walk.

Paraphrasing the follow abstract: Science must be systematic or methodological in order to be rational. But equally, we must recognise our inherent tendency to lose our object if out work becomes excessively instrumental. Hence, we must constantly radicalise our methods.

'Curators should closely study animal remains for any links with Indigenous nations or communities, and researchers should involve those groups when remains are culturally significant' 🧪🏺🦴

'Forms, Mechanisms & Roles of Iconicity in Spoken Language (review)' Argues: — Multimodal bihemispheric comm. system has phylogenetic + ontogenetic advantages — Aids lang learning + processing — Iconicity as integral, not a marginal phenomenon (Open access: doi.org/10.1177/00332941241310119) 🐦🐦

I think we can state clearly what our theoretical perspective is, what hypotheses we're testing, and what the data/results demonstrate. We can speculate about what the results mean for all of "language" I suppose, but linguists almost uniformly ignore language sampling bias.

the primary purpose of all social media is to amass data. if BlueSky isn’t taking down what’s supposed to be horrifying or offensive content such as revenge porn, then it’s because they see collecting related user data and interaction metrics as useful to whatever they’re building

A great quote for the linguistic anthropologists among us: "We anthropologists [...] must re-examine basic premises and realize that English language patterns of thought are not a necessary model for the whole of human society." — Leach, E. R. (1961). Rethinking Anthropology. p. 27. 🐦🐦

LSA president Tony Woodbury on Sapir's idea that each language has its own "genius", and that each language should be described with its own framework, rather than through a general ("theoretical") framework. muse.jhu.edu/article/948426

Shared widely elsewhere: "I have resisted the term 'sociolinguistics' for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.” — William Labov, 1927-2024 🐦🐦

One thing that has stuck with me from my reading this fall is a point that Jeff Mielke makes in his 2008 book: "linguists often confuse their shared assumptions with linguistic universals." Since I care about features, I thought I should read Jeff's book in more detail. A thread. 1/n #linguistics

One nontrivial measure of a given framework is its direct utility or benefit to language description. We should consider more gravely the pros and cons of precision contra jargon.

I've heard so many faculty blithely make statements to the effect of "X isn't linguistics". Yet inevitably, it is.

Do we have any linguist here who is actively documenting iconicity in spoken language? I would love to connect with them. Most of the people I know working on iconicity focus on their he experimental sides of things.

The first that comes to mind is Hall (2013) on intermediate phonological relationships that as relegated as exceptional and rarely addressed despite their ubiquity (doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2013-0008)

A nice article on pronouns in a Grassfields Bantu language - no gender, but fine-grained distinctions in grouping event participants incl some "compound pronouns" #linguistics

Thinking about the systematicity of fast, slow, casual, and careful speech alternations but also what syntactic 'errors' reveal. Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. †22. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 125, 13-34.

The de facto government sanctioning of nuclear power for AI and the pivot towards multimodality means society is about to become very scary. Dark times ahead.

SOV languages tend to show fewer overt arguments in the clause – Example of communicative efficiency (as maximisation of accessibility) – SOV means longer sum dependencies than SVO, so fewer arguments = reduced memory (CogLing Antwerp abstract: benecla.com/wp-content/u...) 🐦🐦

I'm surprised more phonologists and syntacticians aren't working together. We all agree there are minimal units in each domain (phone, morph, etc), but what about a program to identify cross-domain equivalents to phenomena?

Made modified ยำส้มโอ since as I'm allergic to nuts and shellfish. Turned out delicious and I definitely wanted to add shredded chicken.

What can interjections, discourse particles and other 'marginal' elements of language teach us about culture, communication and cognition? Felix Ameka (@unileiden.bsky.social) shares his work on African languages in this Abralin talk. Watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyxu...

Overreliance on English hinders cognitive science – premature claims of universality (due to over-sampling of English speakers) – limited cognitive constructs being examined (due to the use of English as a meta-language) (doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.015) 🐦🐦

Embodied gestures are fundamental to language grammar! 📖💡 This study by Freitag, Cruz & Nascimento shows how gestures like rhythmic hand movements and facial expressions create coherence in conversation, revealing their systematic patterns, variability, and social relevance. doi.org/10.25189/267...

Chapter on sign languages by Deaf linguist Carol Padden in the new Open Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science, edited by Asifa Majid and Michael C Frank. (oecs.mit.edu/pub/l60gyowl) 🐦🐦

'Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways' Evidence role cognition is prelinguistic - Inanim food triggered early bias to agents - Anim agents easier to ID w/ inanim patients - Agent bias may benefit survival, trophic interact'ns (doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002857) 🐦🐦

We need to recast teaching about the 'phoneme' as a set of alternation patterns

Children only rely on MEP (Mutual Exclusivity Principle = assume that novel words have distinct meanings) if novel words are focalized 'Why Do Children Think Words Are Mutually Exclusive?' (PsyArXiv preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...) 🐦🐦

Demonstratives may have emerged early in evolution of language to serve a combination of spatial, social, and functional needs 'Spatial communication systems and action' (doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.10.002) 🐦🐦

Reuse & combinat'n of existing words (= the 2 main lexicalization strategies): constrained by a tradeoff between precision v. word length (= two competing communicative pressures) 'Word reuse and combination support efficient communication of emerging concepts' (doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2406971121) 🐦🐦

ISO is complicit by making them the official registration authority for ISO 639-3

Cool paper looking at the vowel signatures of interjections. I wonder what role prosody plays in the lexicalization of emotional vocalizations. Do some of these come with distinct pitch dynamics like for example vocatives? And if so does that affect the phonologization process? #linguistics

Optimist: glass half full Pessimist: glass half empty Corpus Linguist: Which word most frequently appears in the phrase "glass half *"?

If a goal is testable predictions, then more syntacticians should work on computational parsers. For the past two years I've been collaborating on creating a syntactic parser for Triqui using nltk in Google Collabs with my colleague @rpchaves.bsky.social . It's been fun. 1/2

Anonymity affords the freedom to learn haphazardly. To that end: Will non-Indigenous linguists continue to be silent on the harm that the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) causes and promotes through missionization and conversion? #colonialism 🐦🐦

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– Early stage of syntax: flat combo of 1 V + 1 N – 'Fossils' of stage w/o structure: compounds & small clauses – V-N comps, typ. used for derogatory & (nick)naming: links metaphor, imageability, face recog – Possibility last enhanced by naming strategy! (doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1445192) 🐦🐦

Evidence of some recombination, nestedness, and non-adjacent dependencies in the calls of common marmosets 'Beyond bigrams: call sequencing in the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) vocal system' (doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240218) 🐦🐦

'How language evolves depends on how language is learned' Lang evolves differently in groups where some individuals have language impairment Main outcomes: - more innovative elements - reduced communicative success - reduced convergence (doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70011) 🐦🐦

Evidence for domain general cognitive mechanisms behind language? Other animals may lack language—and other human-distinct behavioural traits—due to poor performance remembering sequences of stimuli. 'A sequence bottleneck for animal intelligence and language?' (www.cell.com/action/showP...) 🐦🐦

Cross-linguistically interjections that are similar iconic by nature 🗣️ Nonling vocal'ns have distinct vowel patterns 🗣️ Only 'pain' robust: wide falling dipth, open vowels like [a] 🗣️'Disgust': central schwa-like vowels 🗣️'Joy': front vowels like [i] (doi.org/10.1121/10.0032454)​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 🐦🐦

'Linguistic intuitions are about communicativeness, not grammaticalness' (PsyArXiv preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...) 🐦🐦

Are orthographic representations a subcomponent of phonological representation? Adults attune to novel-language prosody but interference from text! 'Tuning in to a novel language is easier without orthography' looks at Czech speakers with Māori (PsyArXiv preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...) 🐦🐦

Hello, I've officially moved the Content Scrapers blocklist to its own dedicated account. The old list will stay for the time being, but you'll need to manually re-subscribe to the new list if you want to stay up to date with the latest additions to the blocklist.

Had a lovely weekend with family. We made matcha shortbread cookies. Hope everyone did as well.