Purrspectives in Language How we learn about linguistics with cats

From a linguist friend, mad about cats! A different, but excellent, way in the study of Linguistics.

open.substack.com/pub/purrspec...

I'll read this – know thine enemy!!

Guilty by Punctuation Em-dash: linguistic stigmatisation and sociolinguistic marker

In defence of the em-dash...
open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Hundreds of GPs tell BBC they have never refused a fit note for mental health concerns The number of fit notes issued has been rising, with more than 11.2m approved in England last year.

no blood test 4 mental issue. Difficult to assess. In many practices GP does not know you (unlike family GP). What if GP refuses & gets it wrong & patient harm themselves (or worse)
Hundreds of GPs tell BBC they have never refused a fit note for mental health concerns
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

When Policy Starts to Sound Like Pursuit: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Restore Britain’s Deportation Paper How a 100-page policy document turns migrants into a threat, the state into an instrument, and coercion into common sense

When Policy Starts to Sound Like Pursuit: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Restore Britain’s Deportation Paper
How a 100-page (+)policy document turns migrants into a threat, the state into an instrument, and coercion into common sense

linguistically.substack.com/p/when-polic...

Louis Althusser: Interpellation, Institutions, and the Language that Makes Subjects How ideology calls us into being

How does a social order make its categories feel natural?
Ideology works through institutions, rituals, and practices that shape how we recognise ourselves.

Louis Althusser: Interpellation, Institutions, and the Language that Makes Subjects open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Hannah Arendt and Public Speech When words make politics possible, and when propaganda breaks the conditions for meaning

Hannah Arendt and Public Speech
Arendt was not a linguist. But she treats speaking as a condition for political action, and she explains how totalitarian movements attack the conditions that make public speech usable at all.
My latest article 👇

open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

A pragmatics-first account of a one-line apology that turns into humour Pardon My French: why the joke works when a French person says it in Britain

Pardon My French: why the joke works when a French person says it in Britain
Linguisticsto the rescue!

open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Sign the petition: Stop Royal Mail leaving our letters undelivered! Royal Mail are putting profits first and prioritising parcels instead of letters. It means people are missing things like NHS appointments and bills that need paying. Enough is enough, sign the petiti...

Stop @royalmailchat.bsky.social leaving our mail undelivereree. Signe the petition
38d.gs/rm_letters_df

The Quiet Censorship of AI A critique from philosophy of language and ethical linguistics

My latest article: The Quiet Censorship of AI
AI is sold as partner in thinking. But beneath this narrative lies a structural problem: AI systems routinely block, filter and refuse content based on rules that users cannot see.
linguistically.substack.com/p/the-quiet-...

Deborah Cameron: verbal hygiene, gender myths, and the politics of language A public sociolinguist who made “language policing” analysable without pretending language debates are harmless

My article on Deborah Cameron who died a few days ago.
When we argue about “correct” English, pronouns, swearing, accents, sexist language, or whether men and women “speak different languages”, we are actually living inside questions she helped formalise.
open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Penelope Eckert: From Jocks and Burnouts to Social Meaning When variation becomes a social meaning, not just a variable.

My latest article on Penelope Eckert ans her rôle on treating variation as social meaning, not just a variable
linguistically.substack.com/p/penelope-e...

Sign the petition to keep chlorine-washed chicken off our shelves Here we go again. Trump has told the UK that if we want a UK-US tech deal, we need to buy chlorinated chicken from the US! 🤢🐔 How dare he try to impose poor food standards in Britain. Sign the petitio...

Here we go again. Trump has told the UK that if we want a UK-US tech deal, we need to buy chlorinated chicken from the US! 🤢🐔 How dare he try to impose poor food standards in Britain. Sign the petition to keep chlorine-washed chicken off our shelves: act.38degrees.org.uk/act/chlorine...

Liberation Linguistics: Language as a Site of Emancipation Language, Power and Justice

Liberation Linguistics: Language as a Site of Emancipation
The words we speak, the accents we carry, the dialects we inherit are not just communicative tools but markers of identity, dignity, and belonging. Yet they are also sites of discrimination.

open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Language, Power, and the Shadow of Fascism Steven Miller at the Charlie Kirk Memorial

A critical discourse analysis of Steven Miller's speech at Charlie Kirk's memorial service with echoes of discursive strategies used in periods of democratic crisis, including fascist mobilisation in the twentieth century.

open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Pierre Bourdieu: Promise and Problems Reassessing Linguistic Power, Practice, and Inequality

Can Bourdieu still explain how language shapes inequality?
My latest: Pierre Bourdieu: Promises and Problems
A sociolinguistic framework that provokes more questions than answers.
#Linguistics #CriticalTheory #SymbolicCapita open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

The Continuous Nature of Polysemy Challenging Traditional Boundaries in Contemporary Linguistics

The Continuous Nature of Polysemy
Traditional linguistics got polysemy wrong. Words don't have fixed multiple meanings. They exist on continuous spectrums. BERT and other AI models show how human meaning-making actually works. #linguistics #semantics #cognitivescience
tinyurl.com/2h249psa

Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Language of Understanding Hermeneutics, history, and the shared act of meaning-making in human dialogue.

Gadamer saw understanding as dialogue, not solitude, shaped by language, history, and shared horizons. #Hermeneutics #Philosophy #Linguistics
linguistically.substack.com/p/hans-georg...

Otto Jespersen The Hidden Architect of Modern Grammar

Otto Jespersen shaped how we teach grammar, word order & language change, yet most linguists barely mention him.
Visionary or relic? His ideas on efficiency & typology still echo today, but so do his biases.
Should we reclaim his legacy or leave it buried?
open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Falling in Love with the Science Behind What We Say The Linguist's Gaze

Ever fallen in love with language? This isn’t about grammar rules—it’s about the architecture of speech, the politics of words, and the poetry of "innit"
open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Beyond Simple Categories Linguistic Typology

I just published Beyond Simple Categories
Linguistics Typology reveals the boundaries of human language, what’s possible, what’s common, and what’s rare. It helps us understand both the diversity and the underlying unity of human linguistic capacity.
medium.com/p/beyond-sim...

Construction Grammar challenges traditional linguistics by treating language as stored patterns rather than abstract rules. Explore this very different approach.

open.substack.com/pub/linguist...
#Linguistics #grammar

Losing Our Humanities... One Sentence At A Time Language, thought, and war are unmaking compassion

We are not just losing lives. We are losing the language to mourn them.
Gaza. Israel. Humans first.
Read my piece : “Losing Our Humanities”
#Linguistics #Gaza #Israel #Philosophy #WarLanguage
Losing Our Humanities... One Sentence At A Time open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Robert Stalnaker: Shaping Meaning through Context Pragmatics, Possible Worlds, and the Dynamics of Conversation

Robert Stalnaker: Shaping Meaning through Context
A critical analysis of Robert Stalnaker's influential work on common ground and conversational context. Does his formal framework capture how we actually communicate? #Pragmatics #PhilosophyOfLanguage open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

When Is an Apology Really an Apology? Linguistic Analysis of an Apology

Critical Discourse Analysis is a useful tool for linguistics to understand language beyond structure and look at it as *social practice*.
Updated from the article first published in 2024.
open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

He stripped linguistics down to science. No introspection. Just patterns, data, and rigour.
Was he brilliant, or blind to meaning?
Read more 👉
Leonard Bloomfield: Describing Language Without Meaning open.substack.com/pub/linguist...
#Linguistics #Bloomfield #Language

Some of my articles (very.few to date) are particularly targeted at people who may be known (more less) in a field and yet have played a role in linguistics. Sometimes a bit of a tight rope exercise, but it opens up conversations.

can we settle for 'one of the founders of..' 😀

I agree that as a anthropologist he is fairly well knows. But from a Linguistics perspective (my niche) i never heard his name once in all my years of study

Franz Boas: Language, Power, and the Limits of Cultural Relativism Pioneer, Linguist, Ethnographer, Controversial Humanist

He tried to challenge racist science, insisted every language deserved study on its own terms, and founded modern descriptive linguistics.
Yet, very few have heard of him!
Franz Boas: Language, Power, and the Limits of Cultural Relativism
open.substack.com/pub/linguist...
#linguistics #Anthropology