on the universality of Merge (Chomsky 2004)

New squib with @christcollins.bsky.social about A-movement in OVS inverted clauses in Russian in which we contrast smuggling vs leapfrogging analyses! lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009...

New paper on quotative inversion in Setswana and English! I show that the construction in two unrelated languages can be accounted for uniformly: in terms of smuggling!! Enjoy! lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009...

who’s going to LSA?

i’ve been experiencing this thing with iOS where I try to select a word in a text field, but the software instead tries to identify what it thinks is something akin to a larger constituent. aside from being annoying, it seems particularly bad at identifying a string that forms an actual constituent

yeah…!

Linguists will really say "the forbidden experiment" like people aren't performing it on the majority of deaf children in this country every day 💀

i can the V2 language speak

this past weekend, i went with my mom to the town she grew up in (Hot Springs, AR). when we were driving around in her old neighborhood, she pointed to an empty lot and said: “This house looks like they tore it down”

New manuscript available on Lingbuzz! Comments welcome! lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009...

Happy World Emoji Day🌎🥳📆!!! Let's all celebrate by reading my two published papers on the morphosyntactic combinatorics of emojis that function as "words"! Glossa paper: doi.org/10.16995/glo... JLCL paper: doi.org/10.21248/jlc... And more to come!! #worldemojiday

scholarly books are so expensive these days :/

this just in: water, carrot, and salad are polymorphemic (brought to you by google AI)

Happy to announce that a paper of mine has recently appeared in the Journal for Language Technology & Computational Linguistics! jlcl.org/article/view...

💜 wiktionary 💜

At least one reason why I mostly don't write accents in my comics is basically this. Who gets written with an accent and who doesn't is always a tell.

Once again, it must be said as loudly as possible: AI can't do the things described in this paragraph, and there is no pathway to it ever being able to do them.

yoga instructor said ““keep pushing forward until you’re the best me that you can be” 💯

I have filed revisions for my doctoral dissertation! You can read it here: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009...

passed dissertation defense!!!

dissertation defense in two days! although i’m more excited than anything, i will be accepting any advice, encouragement, thoughts, and/or prayers!

Pidgin and Creole would be good names for two cats adopted by a linguist

As a response to the question “Have you been studying?”, I and (I believe) most English speakers would say the following: 1. “I have” My husband and other speakers in his family only accept this, though: 2. “I’ve been” This is so strange to me. Does anyone else prefer the second one?

The question everyone is now asking

inspired by a discussion on here earlier today, i have arrived at the generalization that Spanish speakers only like the (b) representation of the word “quesadilla” a) 🧀adilla b) 🧀dilla c) 🧀illa this, of course, tells us extremely interesting things about the morphological structure of Spanish

wish i could hear words like “thematic” and just be normal about it

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh

dissertation defense scheduled for the beginning of next month (coincidentally on my husband’s birthday). feeling very accomplished about this!

reading this now. very interesting, especially as it relates (of course) to the morphology and syntax of elements like emojis in grammar ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007...

gonna start saying “depluction” instead of “deployment”

functional projection friday

new article out now! in this paper I investigate A-dependencies in specificational and predicational copular clauses in Tshila, a Kalahari-Khoe language spoken in central southeastern Botswana www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

does anyone know where the descriptive terminology “SVO”, “SOV”, “VSO”, etc. first started being used for topological classification?

writing my dissertation introduction

this post is a total mindfuck of grammaticality i feel like i’m losing my mind

from tumblr

🤔🤔🤔

i so desperately want it to be “narrorate” and not “narrate”

interesting that icons resembling the ✨ or 🪄 emojis have been cooped to refer to generative AI tools. i wonder if this is intentionally meant to influence public perception of these products, or if it indicates how the majority of people actually view generative AI programs

started nosferatu and it’s giving syntax 🤣🤣

is that…. the universal quantifier?!

Read @taliabhatt.itch.io, i beg you substack.com/home/post/p-...

Look, I don't really want to wade into American politics, but since emblem gestures are my jam, a reminder: gestures are treated in communication as more deniable than words and bad-faith actors can easily exploit this feature.

hindi speakers HMU 📲 please!

People who regularly use emojis, please choose the following sentence which is least acceptable. 1️⃣ 🫵 said that 🫵 would help me! 2️⃣ 🫵 said that you would help me! 3️⃣ You said that 🫵 would help me! 4️⃣ I have no judgments on this 📊 Show results

People who regularly use emojis, please choose the following sentence which is least acceptable. 1️⃣ Wow, 🫵 must really love 🫵self 2️⃣ Wow, 🫵 must really love yourself 3️⃣ Wow, you must really love 🫵self 4️⃣ I have no judgments on this 📊 Show results

People who regularly use emojis, please choose the following sentence which is least acceptable. 1️⃣ 🫵 are responsible for 🫵 own decisions 2️⃣ 🫵 are responsible for your own decisions 3️⃣ You are responsible for 🫵 own decisions 4️⃣ I have no judgments on this 📊 Show results