New chapter 🔓 w/ Matteo Radaelli: ‘Language and intelligence in minds and machines’, in Humanities Perspectives on AI (SUP). An introduction for first-year humanities students, built around a few less conventional ideas we think are needed to understand language AI 🧶👇 www.scup.com/doi/10.18261...

Finding out how round my cat is using #RStats Spoiler: Extremely round github.com/borstell/rou... #DataBS 🐈‍⬛🐱⚫️🔘

Last week I had an amazing time teaching a modality-critical take on sociolinguistics at the LOT Summer School in Linguistic at the University of Groningen. The students were wonderful, and RuG took care of the admin, so it was basically perfect teaching conditions! 🥰

Our new book on sign language linguistics (adapted from the 2007 Auslan linguistics book) isn't out until next month, but over 500 clips of BSL and ASL sign examples from the book can be downloaded now! Take a look at the resources section on the book's webpage. www.cambridge.org/highereducat...

I am most Trinidadian when I'm writing applications and steupsing (sucking my teeth) in annoyance

sacrificing my cool ideas for accuracy 🙄🙄🙄

today's burn: "you're so bad at being an addressee!" #linguistics

paper out, hope it's useful doi.org/10.1017/S009... #linguistics

Are your students entering research culture without ever learning how peer review actually works? We'd love to help. We're offering free "Peer Review 101" virtual workshops for undergrad/grad seminars, tailored to Psych, Neuro, and related fields. Visit our website to learn more tinyurl.com/2ra56w72

university cafeterias are a small miracle to me. What do you mean I can get cheap-ish food, that I don't have to cook, that's different every day, and it's also super easy to just eat a single portion of a vegetable

I started typing LinkedIn into my music app while looking for Linkin Park 💀

Prepositions in Norwegian are hard bcs prepositions, but I also seem to really struggle with the equivalents of expressions like English "however", "nevertheless", "furthermore", "despite", "in contrast to" etc. -- I can't ever remembers what the words for them are #linguistics

I'll be giving a talk on 4 May in Gothenburg on the Israeli practice of pinkwashing and intersectional Palestinian LGBTQ+ identities. You can sign up for either in-person or Zoom attendance here: forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/respon...

One good thing about non-academic job application processes is they reject you fast

🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences. Steps to counter this are in motion. If you - have an SBE proposal under review - serve on an SBE grant panel You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2

📦 My first #RStats package on CRAN: {readelan} A package dedicated to reading all files associated with ELAN: eaf, etf, ecv. Reads annotations, metadata, controlled vocabularies. Relevant for many in #linguistics perhaps? More info here: borstell.github.io/misc/readelan/

asking university presentation templates to be Less Ugly

Hey if you need something to do over this long weekend, have a go at my PhD student Anna-Merete’s survey. It’s sentences to rate, you just need to have any English variety as your first language, and it’ll take you 10–15 minutes. #linguistics docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Norwegian has effectively replaced all languages in my head apart from English

44.93/50! I always guess too light 🎨

The mantra that AI is "just maths" not only ignores the materiality (humans have to mine rare earth minerals) but also the political & human harms like fascism and indentured labour. The idea that AI is detached ideas — and not stolen data & labour that runs on colonial lines — is harmful itself.

hey guys why does my brain work best if I get semi-dressed up, buy a coffee, invariably choose a wobbly table, and get periodically distracted by small babies, doggies, and random people?

For what it's worth, I won't even use it for research. Seeing shit with my own human eyes and understanding how it fits together is the only thing I'm good at??

Giorgia Zorzi and I got some funding from our institution (HVL, Bergen) to study constituent order in Norwegian Sign Language. We are hypeee 👯🎉

Does anyone have any impressions about how common it is for academic journals to publish articles that sort of examine the field itself? I don’t mean reviews here. #linguistics #AcademicSky

Is there a name for when a method that was originally linked to natural phenomenon takes on a life of its own in the history of disciplines? Specifically that the motivation for using is that it's been used elsewhere? #linguistics #AcademicSky #PhilosophySky

Workshop on genetics, eugenics and scientific racism next week! #Philsci #Philosophy #Ethics #HPS #Sociology #AcademicSky We will be conducting hybrid sessions, you can find the zoom link at www.imseam.uni-heidelberg.de/en/heinzelma...

I do enjoy making a lil presentation. Also I absolutely need to use a graphical drag-and-drop type program bcs thinking through the presentation has to be visual for me

love spending my chosen writing day NOT writing 😭

✅️ 🐋 have vowels ✅️ 🐣 have bouba/Kiki prefs ❓️ 🫎 pass Wug test ❓️ 🦙 do center embedding ❓️ 🐌 experience garden paths #linguistics

Sheep to people ratio in Aotearoa/NZ for #TidyTuesday 🐑:👤 🇳🇿🌿 #R4DS #DataViz #ggplot2 Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

naming a folder "linguistics" on my laptop is so uninformative -- like, it's all #linguistics

current mood: depressed about annotation

inconsistent file naming will be the death of me

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

using LLMs to write texts is so unfathomable to me bcs writing is sooo incredibly personal for me

one journal seems to only accept papers within an extremely narrow domain and its zombie alternate seems to accept everything

calling L1 speakers of British English, please help out my student Emilia on her dissertation study! 🐦🐦 it's a short (<20 min) and fun one on voice recognition, please share! lancasteruni.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

the list of things I will apparently find time to apply to grows ever longer 😭

Dr. Adrien Dadone (Leiden U) will present on relative clauses in French Sign Language and French on Mon 2nd Feb at 2:30PM Norway time. Find the abstract and how to get the link to the presentation here: www.hvl.no/en/research/... Languages: Norwegian SL, International Sign, English #linguistics

✨that very special post-interview feeling of inadequacy✨

After more than ten years of preparation, our Manual of French-based Creoles is finally available for download. What better place to announce this publication than during a visit to Martinique? 🦎🌴 Fok zot kouri gadé-y !

In our recent manuscript, we invite cognitive scientists to be critical of the labels they choose to describe language users. We argued that the term native speaker is problematic as it distorts scholarly inquiry and introduces bias. Cognition link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🇩🇲 Would you like a thread on the multiple layers of multilingualism in Dominica? Of course you do. Starting with the linguistic memory of the indigenous Kalinago, still present in many toponyms and other names. The spelling varies widely but the meaning is often quite well documented or remembered.

Years ago, 957 people from Twitter contributed to my research on 'because X' and I promised I'd share the results with them. I can't, because twitter, but please share it with people here anyway: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... Non-paywalled pre-print: kar.kent.ac.uk/105654/ #linguistics

Chicken on pizza should be illegal

About 6 months ago, I got so tired of getting mostly AI(-adjacent) papers in my Google Scholar Alerts for "sign language", so I added a new filter excluding a few keywords to get more relevant #linguistics papers. Now I checked the difference between the two alerts, and there's an obvious pattern.

all my chickens have come home to roost (I have to fill in all the places that say "CITE" in a draft)

my schedule right now is something like pet white kitty, pet black kitty, eat curry probably, pet black and white doggies, pet black kitty, pet white kitty, repeat

This year on Bluesky I wrote 118 posts and apparently I love saying "linguistics" and 😬! www.madebyolof.com/bluesky-wrap...