John Mansfield
@johnbasil.bsky.social
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my job is just LANGUAGING
pinned post!
Our Anthropological Linguistics group at Uni Zurich has a webpage now:
www.isle.uzh.ch/en/AnthroL.h...
8 months ago
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Joumana Medlej
3 days ago
A Very Cool Thing: Astrolabe from Seville, 1224 AD (Oxford HSM inv.50934). On the throne, at the top of the instrument, note the
#geometry
diagram: it shows the method for bisecting a segment, used here to draw the meridian line. The maker engraved it fully, offering us a glimpse into their process…
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Learning about Italian culture, aka how to use “cazzo” in a sentence.
8 days ago
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Imagine being a hagfish. It’s actually quite offensive
11 days ago
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I would have thought letting your dog lead the lab might fail the students in some ways, but maybe I’m old fashioned
add a skeleton here at some point
12 days ago
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John Mansfield
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
12 days ago
peak fucking performance
add a skeleton here at some point
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“well it depends what the question is” Most evergreen academic reply I swear it works for everything
16 days ago
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I would like to ask descriptive linguists not to use "marked" in a vague way. My supervisor Jane Simpson always got the red pen out for that, and I am now following in her footsteps.
17 days ago
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Stuart K Watson
18 days ago
Coverage in the Guardian of our latest publication in Royal Society Open Science, with fantastic collaborators Alan McElligott (
@amcell.bsky.social
), Christian Nawroth (
@goatswhostare.bsky.social
), Federico Rossano and Simon Townsend. Paper threaded below!
www.theguardian.com/science/2026...
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Goats can find food by following a human voice, study finds
Experiments show 29 animals moved towards a treat-filled bucket 60% of the time when guided by a researcher
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/17/goats-can-find-food-following-human-voice-study
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#StupidSuez
18 days ago
These "bilateral" agreements between Israel and the Authority are already de facto dead and have long been and the pretense that they matter anymore is part of what keeps the fiction of a "process" alive. There is no process, there is no state in-waiting, there's one sovereign apartheid regime.
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Shameful that so many universities continue to normalise relations with the Israeli regime
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
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Video shows family’s car slowing before Israeli troops shot dead Palestinian baby
Footage appears to contradict Israeli military’s account of killing of seven-month-old Sam Abu Haikal in West Bank
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/10/palestinian-baby-shot-dead-israeli-troops-occupied-west-bank-new-footage
24 days ago
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Unnecessarily anti-Irish intro to Hamilton Walks
29 days ago
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John Mansfield
Michael Pleyer
29 days ago
🚨 New Publication Alert!🚨 Polysemy and metaphorical extension in an artificial language learning experiment (w/
@elizabethqingzhang.bsky.social
& Marek Placiński). Out now in
#OpenAcess
in Language and Cognition. 🧵1/
#language
#linguistics
doi.org/10.1017/lang...
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analysis of declining linguistics jobs in USA 😬
add a skeleton here at some point
30 days ago
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_Uniform Information Density_ _Working Memory chunking_ ... these seem related, both to do with unit size constraints Any work on this?
about 1 month ago
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John Mansfield
#StupidSuez
about 2 months ago
Take note of how almost nobody in Europe or Israeli society said a word about how Ben Gvir treats Palestinians who are illegally detained in his fascist prisons. As soon as he records himself doing a tenth of this kind of torture to Europeans, everyone is uproar. Good, but maybe expand the outrage.
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One of the main things keeping me going in life is that I really like breakfast.
about 2 months ago
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SNL Annual Meeting
about 2 months ago
Don't miss the latest episode of
@smwilson.bsky.social
's Language Neuroscience Podcast with
@rmc-law.bsky.social
and
@vborghesani.bsky.social
teasing the program of
#SNL2026
! 🍏
open.spotify.com/episode/0zAE...
🍎
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...
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SNL 2026 teaser with Valentina Borghesani and Ryan Law
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0zAEhFjMu6szBiPr0lWbyj?si=fc97aa10bf724b32
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Warwick Anderson
about 2 months ago
TWO great jobs in History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney! Rank from Lecturer (Assistant Prof) to Assoc Prof. Particularly interested in candidates working in the areas of early modern science, or science or medicine in Asia, or Indigenous knowledge systems...
#HPS
#STS
#histstm
#histsci
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Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor to the School of History and Philosophy of Science - Camperdown, Australia job with UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY | 410910
Build your research and apply your expertise by contributing as a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor to the School of History and Philos...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/listing/410910/lecturer-senior-lecturer-associate-professor-to-the-school-of-history-and-philosophy-of-science/
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"auf" is the most difficult morpheme in German
about 2 months ago
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New preprint by Charles Kemp and myself, comparing quantitative frameworks that seek to measure the functional optimality of languages.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
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OSF
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/u46fp_v1
about 2 months ago
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John Mansfield
Martin Haspelmath
2 months ago
A new version (2.0) of Frank Seifart's Affix Borrowing database, now co-authored with Francesco Gardani:
afbo.info
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John Mansfield
Martin Haspelmath
2 months ago
Version 1.0 of the Grammaticon is now online! This has been in the making for over eight years. Quite a few of the entries are still preliminary, but I hope to expand and improve it over the coming months and years. Comments are welcome! An intro text is here:
dlc.hypotheses.org/4316
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Piers Kelly
2 months ago
"The origins and evolution of writing: A very brief synthesis" at Cambridge 16:30, 20th May. Zoom in, if you're in a compatible time zone!
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has anybody looked at Spain? (research idea)
3 months ago
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John Mansfield
Valentina Borghesani
3 months ago
The Department of Basic Neurosciences of UNIGE and the
@nccrlanguage.bsky.social
are looking for an Assistant Professor with Tenure Track or Associate Professor in Computational Neuroscience. Full details:
jobs.unige.ch/www/wd_porta...
#neurojob
#academicjob
#compneuro
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John Mansfield
Christian DiCanio
3 months ago
I’m going to put this out there - I have some funds to run lab experiments involving prosody and segmental articulation. I’m happy to collaborate with people who want to do this work but don’t have much funding, especially given the federal funding catastrophe.
#linguistics
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I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere!
www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...
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Postdoctoral Researchers (x2) in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics
https://www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/postdoc-concevo.html
3 months ago
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kobayashi ḫamṭu
4 months ago
holy shit
add a skeleton here at some point
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Didn’t finish reading this, any tldr? 😀
4 months ago
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Anybody get special sources for PDFs of minority langs of Indonesia?? esp Sumbawa, Osing
4 months ago
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John Mansfield
Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science bot
4 months ago
Bodily Sensations by null:
https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.3d8f2887
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I tried making a joke to the Swiss parking inspector, „Es gibt auch Regeln für Gandalf“. This did not go well.
4 months ago
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John Mansfield
Ambassador Ken Fairfax (ret)
4 months ago
While cruelty has always been the point of Trump's whole Administration, nothing highlights that more than dropping a nearly blind elderly man 5 miles from nowhere in freezing weather so that he die alone, afraid, and abandoned. This is Trump's America.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
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Nearly blind refugee abandoned by US border patrol found dead in Buffalo
Investigation under way after man was dropped off five miles from home but family wasn’t notified, officials say
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/border-patrol-refugee-buffalo
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John Mansfield
The Chaser
4 months ago
What have we learned from history? Would people let a Trojan Horse through their gates today?
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kobayashi ḫamṭu
5 months ago
"cold brew" means coffee if you stress the first word and beer if you stress the second word
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John Mansfield
Jenneke van der Wal
5 months ago
Thinking about the relation between certainty and commitment 🤔 If a speaker is certain of a proposition, are they committed to it? Can a speaker have full support for a proposition without being committed to it? (Please help me think, semanticists and philosophers!)
#linguistics
#philosophy
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reading up on semantics to learn that the meaning of „dog“ is DOG
#linguistics
5 months ago
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John Mansfield
Women In Neuroscience Repository
5 months ago
How transparent is your research funder? 🧐 In our latest work we introduce the Transparent Reporting Scale (TRS) to evaluate how funders report grant data. It's time for standardized transparency to bridge the "scissor-shaped curve" in neuroscience.
www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...
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Frontiers | Girls just wanna have funds: a new Transparent Reporting Scale for evaluating grant data reporting from funding agencies
IntroductionDespite the increasing representation of women in scientific fields, disparities in research funding allocation remain. This inequity deprives ta...
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2026.1765249/full
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John Mansfield
Preeti Chhibber
5 months ago
omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for
gradient.horse
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gradient.horse
Draw a horse, watch it run!
https://gradient.horse/
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John Mansfield
kobayashi ḫamṭu
5 months ago
i heard both of these today: "what are we solutioning here" "we don't have a solve for that" nouns and verbs, two ships passing in the night
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John Mansfield
Texas Conference of the AAUP
5 months ago
⭐️⭐️UTAustin alumni call on all ex-students to sign this petition urging UT not to sign the federal government’s higher education compact. UT leaders have still not made their decision about the compact clear.😡
alumni.standforcampusfreedom.org/petitions/un...
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University of Texas: Reject the federal government’s “Compact”
The Trump Administration’s “Compact” will put the University of Texas at Austin under political control. Join with Longhorns for Liberty to tell President Jim Davis and the Board of Regents to reject ...
https://alumni.standforcampusfreedom.org/petitions/university-of-texas-reject-the-federal-government-s-compact
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John Mansfield
Xiaofang Yao
5 months ago
Grateful to Ge Song for his generous review of my book. He clearly articulates how the book brought together geosemiotics, sociolinguistics of globalisation, and metrolingualism to build a strong theoretical foundation for
#linguisticlandscape
. Far from a 'simplistic' field:
doi.org/10.1075/japc...
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Review of Yao (2025): Power, Affect, and Identity in the Linguistic Landscape: Chinese Communities in Australia and Beyond
Welcome to e-content platform of John Benjamins Publishing Company. Here you can find all of our electronic books and journals, for purchase and download or subscriber access.
https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.26001.son
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Epic photo
add a skeleton here at some point
5 months ago
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John Mansfield
Remi van Trijp
6 months ago
Excited to share that our book "History of Ideas in the Science of AI" (co-authored with Luc Steels and Ann Dooms) is now freely available as
#OpenAccess
!
#OpenScience
,
#AIResearch
,
#HistoryOfAI
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
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The majority of the writers pulled out, director resigned, festival no longer tenable this year. Great to see writers standing up for human rights and resisting authoritarian bootlickers.
add a skeleton here at some point
6 months ago
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Pathetic Adelaide Writers Week board trying to stop Palestinians from talking about the genocide
add a skeleton here at some point
6 months ago
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John Mansfield
Valentina Borghesani
6 months ago
Tenure-track Assistant Professor position in computational linguistics at UNIGE /
@nccrlanguage.bsky.social
The application deadline is around the corner (Jan 15)- don't miss it!
linguistlist.org/issues/36/37...
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LINGUIST List 36.3752 Jobs: Computational Linguistics: Professor of Computational Linguistics, University of Geneva, Switzerland
The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.
https://linguistlist.org/issues/36/3752/
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I'm hiring! 2 x PhD positions to work at Uni Zurich with me on "Evolutionary Semantics" for an ERC-funded project. semantically curious MA grads from linguistics, cog psych, anthro encouraged to apply
evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the...
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Studying the Evolution of Abstract Thought - NCCR Evolving Language
In the new ERC-funded project, “Conceptual Diversity and the Evolution of Abstract Thought” (CONCEVO), Mansfield will lead a team of researchers to develop a method for reconstructing the evolution of...
https://evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the-evolution-of-abstract-thought/
6 months ago
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