Language Log

For about thirty years, Professor Laurie Taylor (retired from the University of York) has been doing a humor column in Times Higher Education, a U.K. university administration magazine, in the form of a newsletter from an imaginary Poppleton University. This week it included a painfully awkward message from an equally imaginary Interfaith Chaplain, struggling to find some kind of contentful and seasonal greeting that couldn't possibly offend anyone of any faith:

You know, very soon we will be reaching that special time of the year when people who subscribe to certain religious beliefs rather than to others will be celebrating what they regard as a very significant event. May I therefore take this opportunity to wish all such believers a very happy special time of the year…

Language Log, however, is not quite so inclined to imagine that simple words of greeting will shock or disgust anyone; it seems to us that such worries are rather closely related to word taboo, with which we have little sympathy. So it has been our custom for some years to come out quite boldly and use the C word at this season. We love writing for you, and as time permits, in our odd moments of spare time between full-time university jobs or research projects, we will continue to do so. And whatever your religion or lack of it, we wish you a happy Christmas Day.

Everyone who's anyone in British higher education knows that today at one minute past midnight the results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were released. And as I believe I have occasionally mentioned here, in the small part of my life that is not devoted to Language Log, I moonlight as Head of Linguistics and English Language (known as LEL) at the University of Edinburgh. So you'll naturally want to know how well we did in the RAE. That's why I'm still up after midnight (Greenwich Mean Time).

Well, you can easily check the published details for yourself now, at the relevant RAE results web page, as soon as their server stops crashing (it was a bit over-excited just after midnight). So it would be silly for me to let my natural innate modesty hold me back. The truth is out there: LEL ranks absolute highest in the UK for the proportion of its work falling in the 4* "world-leading" category. And not only that, but its numbers are so strong that if you compute a sort of absolute volume of world-leading-research by multiplying the number of Edinburgh linguists considered in the exercise (36) by the percentage of their work that was considered world-leading (30%), you get a number (10.8) that cannot be matched even by adding together the figures for any two other departments of linguistics in the United Kingdom.

Just in time for the holiday season: The Linguists educational DVD! According to the announcement on the LINGUIST List, it "includes 30 minutes of DVD extras profiling endangered languages around the world and efforts to archive and revive them; and a discussion guide created by Dr. K. David Harrison and the Center for Applied Linguistics."

The catch, of course, is that this DVD was produced for educational purposes, which somehow makes the price a whopping $300. But c'mon, you know you want one.

Language Loggers haven’t posted much on the category of ethics lately, so this may be a good time to announce a panel called “Ethical Issues in Forensic Linguistic Consulting,” which will take place at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America from January 8 to 11 at the San Francisco Hilton. I will chair a panel that includes professors Geoffrey Nunberg, Gail Stygall, Ronald Butters, Edward Finegan, and Janet Ainsworth.

The panel believes that as more and more linguists are being called upon to consult or give expert witness testimony in civil and criminal law cases, a number of ethical issues need to be addressed. This is especially important information for linguists who may be taking on their first consulting assignments in this area. In a three-hour session, this panel will address the following issues in particular, although other topics may also arise:

The New York Times carries an obituary today for lexicographer Larry Urdang, who was the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the founding editor of the language quarterly Verbatim. He studied linguistics at Columbia University and lectured on the subject at New York University, but he never completed his dissertation. His wife Nicole told the Times, "He always said he considered the Random House dictionary his dissertation."

No, not the one in Beijing — the 6th International Olympiad in Linguistics is underway this week in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria (yes, really).  The Head Coach is Dragomir Radev, and the other coaches are Lori Levin, Amy Troyani, and Adam Hesterberg (who was last year's international winner).

Powerset is a search engine that allows users to express their queries as phrases, rather than a few keywords.  It uses natural language processing (NLP) technologies to analyze the verb-argument structure of a query and deliver more focused search results, initially just from Wikipedia.  Powerset has attracted interest from the NLP community, as its services promise to demonstrate the value of NLP – and of language analysis more generally – in extracting information from the trillion or more words of text on the web.  On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it has acquired Powerset, and that Powerset will become part of Microsoft's Search Relevance team.  I hope this takeover means that natural language search will become mainstream, scaled up to the entire web, and used far more widely than before [Powerset blog|Microsoft Live Search blog].

For those of you who plan to be in Vancouver at the end of July (and who wouldn't want to?), the 43d International Conference on Salishan and Neighbouring Languages will be hosted by the Squamish Nation and Capilano College in North Vancouver, Friday July 25th and Saturday July 26th. Further information is available at http://icsnl.org.

The conference's odd name is due to the fact that it has historically focussed on Salishan languages but is intended to include the various other languages of the greater Pacific Northwest region. Talks on Athabascan languages nominally fall within its purview but are relatively rare since we Athabascanists have our own conference.
The Dene Languages Conference meets in Cold Lake, Alberta next Friday and Saturday.