Extra!-Linguistic: The LINGUIST List Blog

LINGUIST of the Day: Emily Bender

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:26:37 -0400

“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?”

Linguist of the Day: François Grosjean

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Linguist of the Day: François Grosjean:

“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!)

Linguist of the Day: Nikolaus Himmelmann

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:43:00 -0500

Linguist of the Day: Nikolaus Himmelmann:

“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!)

Fund Drive 2012

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:22:26 -0500

Fund Drive 2012:

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: Making scholarly maps for a digital medium

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:37:00 -0500

LL-MAP: Making scholarly maps for a digital medium:

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

We've Moved!

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:29:43 -0500

We've Moved!:

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

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:00:06 -0400

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.

Lost indigenous languages to be revived

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:00:06 -0400

Lost indigenous languages to be revived:

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: A Great Text Analysis Tool

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

KwicKwic: A Great Text Analysis Tool:

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

Mappling.com: A New Applied Linguistics Website

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:00:06 -0400

Mappling.com: A New Applied Linguistics Website:

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.

All-New SpecGram (August 2011) Online

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:00:06 -0400

From Trey Jones, Managing Editor of Speculative Grammarian:

The August 2011 issue of Speculative Grammarian—the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics—is now available online for your browsing pleasure.

http://SpecGram.com/CLXII.3/

Included in this bitchin’ issue—tons of gnarly articles, including a guide to the history of linguistics based on example sentences, a veritable slew of lucrative advertisements, a bit of QR-code-induced insanity, a very special announcement from the editors of SpecGram, and a fresh batch of things you didn’t know you didn’t know—along with the usual mass of bomb diggity letters from our readers, movie reviews, book announcements, puzzles, and more…

Next time (September 2011), we will have another all-new issue of Speculative Grammarian.

Enjoy!

GOLD is an ontology for descriptive linguistics. It gives a...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

GOLD is an ontology for descriptive linguistics. It gives a formalized account of the most basic categories and relations (the “atoms”) used in the scientific description of human language. GOLD is intended to capture the knowledge of a well-trained linguist, and can thus be viewed as an attempt to codify the general knowledge of the field. It will facilitate automated reasoning over linguistic data and help establish the basic concepts through which intelligent search can be carried out.

MultiTree is a searchable database of hypotheses on language...

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:00:06 -0400

MultiTree is a searchable database of hypotheses on language relationships. Using MultiTree, you can:

compare language trees and access bibliographical information on them,
see a graphical representation of every scholarly hypothesis on language relationships,
view information on every language,
and share comments on hypotheses and add new hypotheses (as a registered user).

LINGUIST List Has a YouTube Channel!

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:29:00 -0400

LINGUIST List Has a YouTube Channel!:

Featured on the page are not only various lectures on linguistics but also tutorials and videos created by the LINGUIST Editors. Please check out our page, and feel free to email us with any suggested videos or comments at media@linguistlist.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

Thinking of Studying Linguistics?

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:00:05 -0400

Thinking of Studying Linguistics?:

Non-linguists may have at least a vague sense that linguistics has to do with the study of language; the most common notion is that it involves learning lots of languages. In fact, when people introduce themselves as a linguist or linguistics student, often the first question they are asked is “How many languages do you speak?” While most linguists have some degree of familiarity with more than one language and many of them are indeed multilingual, linguistics itself is not the study of languages, but is rather the scientific study of the nature of human language.

For more information about linguistics and language resources, please visit our Student Portal.

E-MELD School of Best Practices in Digital Language Documentation

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:00:05 -0400

E-MELD School of Best Practices in Digital Language Documentation:

‘Best practices’ are practices which are intended to make digital language documentation optimally longlasting, accessible, and re-usable by other linguists and speakers. Recommendations of best practices cover all aspects of digitizing and archiving language documentation, including how to record it, annotate it, catalogue it, store it, and display it in such a way as to respect the intellectual property rights of stakeholders. The recommendations on the E-MELD site have grown out of some of the larger language digitization and language engineering projects. E-MELD has been charged with disseminating these recommendations and encouraging community feedback.

By Emiel van Miltenburg, University of Utrecht

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:01:06 -0400

By Emiel van Miltenburg, University of Utrecht

Language and Linguistics Compass is an online-only journal ...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:01:05 -0400

Language and Linguistics Compass is an online-only journal publishing original, peer-reviewed surveys of current research from across the entire discipline of linguistics. Theforum facilitates discussion between linguists and their peers, and LINGUIST List users have free access to selected articles from Compass. A new set of articles is available three to four times per year. For more information about the journal, please visit its webpage.

Computational Linguistics Masters Program Resources

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:01:00 -0400

Computational Linguistics Masters Program Resources:

Here are some computational linguistics lectures and other course materials that are freely available on the web. Many thanks to the Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft of the University of Tübingen.

Created by Elyssa Winzeler, Eastern Michigan University

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 10:10:05 -0400

Created by Elyssa Winzeler, Eastern Michigan University