Extra!-Linguistic: The LINGUIST List Blog

“In one sense, I’ve been a linguist for just about as long as I can remember. But for a long time, I didn’t actually know it. …my research centers on multilingual grammar engineering and so involves working with linguistic descriptions and naturally occurring data to find and solve linguistic puzzles: How does this language express that idea? How does that language handle this grammatical phenomenon? How can we build computer models that capture what is the same across languages while still staying true to the individual characteristics of each?”

“When I think about my first linguistics course, my mind wanders back to a large lecture hall in the mid-sixties at the University of Paris. Around 300 of us were attending a lecture on English Linguistics taught by Antoine Culioli. Suddenly, in his quiet voice, Culioli asked, “Is François Grosjean there?”. I raised my hand and he continued, “Tell me, in British English, would you say …(X)… or would you say …(Y)…?”. Because of my secondary schooling in England, I was one of the (quasi) native speakers that lecturers would call upon as linguistic informants. I don’t remember the two alternatives Culioli gave me but I believe they concerned some very subtle difference in the use of a preposition. With 299 pairs of eyes looking at me, and not really seeing how the two alternatives diverged, I ventured, “The former, I think!”. Culioli nodded his head and replied, “Yes, that’s what I thought”. He continued his lecture and I sat back and breathed a sigh of relief. Since then, I have the greatest respect for people who are informants!”

(Click here to read more!)

“Before getting to university, I had never heard of linguistics as an academic discipline and only found out about it during my first term, when I was studying English and law. As part of the English program, I had to take an introduction to (English) linguistics and another class on the linguistic analysis of texts (nowadays widely generally known as discourse analysis). And I was immediately hooked. Here there was a way of looking at language and grammar very different from how things were done at high school where most language teaching focused on learning vocabulary.” (Click here to read more!)

The LINGUIST List Fund Drive has begun! Let the LL Crew take you on a journey through lands of linguistic excitement and punnery. Check out our epic gear on the Rewards for Valor page, and stop by the Bard’s Corner to hear this year’s Fund Drive Song. Godspeed!

LL-MAP Team Leader Matthew Lahrman talks about what LL-MAP is and how linguists can use it.

The LINGUIST List blog has moved! Please visit our new URL at

http://linguistlist.org/blog/

Thanks!

GIVE-2.5: NLG Challenge on Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments

From Konstantina Garoufi, University of Potsdam:

For the third time now, the GIVE Challenge has invited research teams to develop systems that generate natural-language instructions to assist users in solving a puzzle in a virtual 3D environment. This year teams of undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers from six universities in five countries have built eight systems, and you can now play with these systems over the Internet. If you go to

http://www.give-challenge.org

one of the systems will be assigned to you. Follow the instructions it produces for you, and see whether you can find the trophy. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes and you are contributing valuable evaluation data. Play as many games as you like: there are 3 new game worlds to explore.

You can find more information about the GIVE Challenge at

http://www.give-challenge.org/research.

(Source: linguistlist.org)

The New South Wales State Library is hoping to revive a number of lost indigenous languages using the letters and diaries of British naval officers, surveyors and missionaries.

KwicKwic (v3.4), developed by Clayton Darwin, is a a fast and easy-to-use
tool for investigating text data. KwicKwic was designed as a simple but
powerful search tool for linguists, but it can be used in many other fields.

A free version of KwicKwic with no expiration is available for download,
with the option to purchase a full license ($29.99 USD for students and
$49.99 for professionals). KwicKwic is currently available for Windows (XP
and higher) users only, and is Unicode compliant.

For more information, please visit our website: http://www.kwickwic.com/index.html

(Source: linguistlist.org)

If you’re a practitioner, teacher or student of applied linguistics in any of its component areas- language teaching, literacy education, speech language pathology, translation and interpreting, lexicography, forensic linguistics, etc.- then become a member of this community!

At mappling.com you can help build, belong to, and share resources with an online applied linguistics community by:

• contributing your own experiences as case studies for other practitioners or students
• commenting on blog postings
• sharing your experiences and opinions on the discussion forum
• posting questions and solutions on practical problems at the community helpdesk 

The community is open to all: not just those in established centres of applied linguistics associated with universities and big professional organizations, but also those working in small schools and colleges, NGOs and communities, or as freelancers; and not only in areas of the world which may have been underserved or excluded from discussion in the past, but also in professional areas of interest which are not always seen as central to the discipline.