With the tenth World Congress of African Linguistics around the corner (June 7-12, 2021), let me draw your attention to…
An exercise. Take 1️⃣️this paper on ‘Language disintegration under conditions of formal thought disorder‘ and 2️⃣ this Henner and Robinson…
Betwixt and between: structure and anti-structure in titular rituals (>600 papers with “Betwixt & between” in title) Homo Imitatens: Ludic…
News just reached me that we have lost a dear colleague and one of the people responsible for introducing the…
For better or worse, APA is one of the most widely used citation styles in the cognitive sciences. One aspect…
I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this rant my notes for that occasion.
With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science. On that note, consider this: Team science is (often) slow science.
As I’m trawling the literature for work related to our own in-process work on action coordinatio across species, I am becoming aware of some interesting convergences in current approaches to social cognition.
Large language models make it entirely trivial to generate endless amounts of seemingly plausible text. The web is about to be engulfed in unending waves of algorithmically tuned AI-generated uninformation. This builds a feedback loop of uninformation feeding on uninformation. Counterintuitively, there was never a better time to be a scholar.
Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry. But the social facts we live with —from politics to personhood and kinship to currency— are never fully language-independent, so any single ontology will be biased & incomplete.
Almost 13 years ago, in 2007, this blog started as a sub-site on my personal web page. It soon took…
I have a new paper out as part of a special issue filled to the brim with things on the…
I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short obituary notes that he was “known for his work on the language of religion and on two Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya”. In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings.
Thought-provoking discussion on semantic primitives and conceptual decomposition this morning at @in_interaction, led by Guillermo Montero-Melis. We went from Wittgenstein…
What do words like waddle, slobber, tingle, oink, and zigzag have in common? These words sound funny, but they are also iconic, with forms that resemble aspects of their meanings. In a new…
NWO introduces a narrative CV, and I have some thoughts. Sounds like a convoluted cultural evolution experiment: a high stakes…
In voorjaar 2019 mocht ik een week twitteren in naam der wetenschap voor het wissel-account @NL_Wetenschap (10-17 februari 2019). Omdat…
This post originated as a twitter thread. 1 One of my favourite micromoments in music: the creak at 1:15 in…
I’m happy to co-convene a session to take place at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Nishinomiya, Japan. The session…
We’re convening a panel at the 16th International Pragmatics Conference in Hong Kong next week. This doubles as the inaugural…