Entirely too common

Screen capture of an academic article. Black text on white and beige background.

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

I'd be tempted to clip the second to "ereyester"

A great new resource for language revitalization and promotion! 🤩

Hazy aerial view of Eugene Oregon

🚨 🚨 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... 🐦🐦

Leaving typos as proof of my humanity

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.

We must resist the allure of abstract methods, fixed positions, or other forms of intellectual comfort to avoid the dangers of such complacency.

To quote Fanon 1952:12), "I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves."

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.

Better care urged for animal remains tied to Indigenous peoples New recommendations stress tracing and respecting links between communities and animal bones, pelts and other remains

'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' 🧪🏺🦴

Gracias a ti por la respuesta! Sí, lingüista investigando toponomia, onomástica, lingüística histórica de la region 😃

(a) Three images (mouse drinking, human drinking, water buffalo drinking water) with labels (críit-críit, cróot-cróot, crúut-crúut, respectively). The use of vowel variation to indicate size differences in Khmu ideophones (Svantesson, 2017). (b) Two shapes, one spiky and one rounded. The takete/maluma or bouba/kiki effect - when prompted most subjects call the angular shape (left) takete/kiki and the rounded (right) shape maluma/bouba.

'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.

I think Damián Blasi also suggested that the contemporary sample of langs we see worldwide is likely to be genealogically & typologically impoverished, based on population structure change in the Holocene, so some of these Qs may be the wrong questions or unanswerable, but I might be misremembering.

Yes, I rarely ever see theoretical perspectives stated explicitly.

Timo Roettger's 'preregistration' is one important solution for non-descriptive work, but he also suggests most claims are too quantitatively underspecified to be tested and we need more exploratory research.

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

Yes, great point. Thank you for sharing these important thoughts.

I often find myself thinking "I know nothing about prosodic / suprasegmental phonology".

In fact, I recall faculty berating me for not using more deterministic lang. Coming from the biological sciences, I found that disturbing.

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.

I've taken to starting semesters by giving guidance on how to read research papers

I was also thinking of doing this simply to avoid the use of LLMs

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.

A typology of intermediate phonological relationships This paper presents an overview of phonological relationships that are “intermediate” between contrast and allophony. As has been observed for many years, such intermediate relationships occur widely ...

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)

The Babanki pronoun system Pronominal systems of Grassfields Bantu languages stand out in a cross-linguistic perspective by their high degree of referential precision when it comes to specifying the internal composition of grou...

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