Been reading this paper by Damián Blasi, Jo Henrich, Lila Adamou, David Kemmerer and Asifa Majid and can recommend it…
A serendipitous wormhole into EMCA history. I picked up Sudnow’s piano course online and diligently work through the lessons. Guess…
A preprint claims that “ideas from theoretical linguistics have played no role in [NLP]”. Outside the confines of Chomskyan linguistics folks have long been working on incorporating storage, retrieval, gating and attention in theories of language, with direct relevance to computational models. The only way to give any content to the claim is by giving the notion “theoretical linguistics” the narrowest conceivable reading.
📣New! “Interjections“, a contribution to the Oxford Handbook on Word Classes. One of its aims: rejuvenate work on interjections by…
An exercise. Take 1️⃣️this paper on ‘Language disintegration under conditions of formal thought disorder‘ and 2️⃣ this Henner and Robinson…
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.
I have a new paper out as part of a special issue filled to the brim with things on the…
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…
We’re convening a panel at the 16th International Pragmatics Conference in Hong Kong next week. This doubles as the inaugural…
After much postponement, writing the final report for my NWO Veni grant (2015-2018) turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. It made me realise a couple of things — key among them the role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research.
I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area. Part II from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’, in which I make a distinction between (iconic) depictions and (indexical) displays, and point out the issue of lexicality is orthogonal to this.
I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area. Part I from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’.
Every time I learn new name signs —e.g. during my UCL visit hosted by @gab_hodge— I’m struck by how they…
Just out in Glossa, the premier open access journal of general linguistics: Dingemanse, Mark. 2018. “Redrawing the Margins of Language:…
In late 2011, I defended my PhD thesis and submitted two papers on ideophones. One to Language and Linguistics Compass,…
Here are some insights from J.R. Firth in 1935 that offer an interesting early outlook on language use in social…
Making and breaking iconicity was the theme of a plenary lecture I gave at the 6th conference of the Scandinavian Association…
Ideophones —vivid sensory words found in many of the world’s languages— are often described as having little or no morphosyntax.…