We join scores of friends and colleagues around the world in mourning the passing of Lila R. Gleitman, Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Lila was widely recognized as a brilliant and trailblazing thinker, writer, and teacher, but she was also, famously, a larger than life character with an incomparable wit — […]
Below is a guest post by Devin Grammon and Anna Babel. Both linguists and non-linguists commonly use the term “native speaker” to describe someone who grew up speaking a particular language and who is fully proficient in that language. Often, we invest native speakers with authority regarding how someone should speak a language – for […]
Charles Yang* is perhaps best known for the development of the Tolerance Principle, a way to quantify and predict (given some input) whether a rule will become productive. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he collaborates with various researchers around the world to test and extend the Tolerance Principle […]
The9 is a Chinese girl group hailing from different parts of the PRC. Here they are playing the telephone / Chinese whispers game with their own topolects*, which they refer to as fāngyán 方言, almost universally mistranslated into English as "dialect". *See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, q.v. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWHtFqxBkhk
This is a guest post by Corey Miller. Sometime in the course of my Zoom Russian class, I brought up Chomsky. I thought enough to say /xomski/, but the teacher surprised me when he said /naum/. I checked out his Russian Wikipedia entry and sure enough it says Ноам (Наум). I must say one of […]
[This is a guest post by J.W. Brewer] Among the courses available to Yale undergraduates this fall semester is the one whose description I've cut and pasted below. It's taught by Prof. Claire Bowern. I can't recall anything quite like this offered in the department when I was an undergraduate major way back in the […]
I recently had reasons to consult a book published in 1961, "Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects", Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, Volume XII, edited by Roman Jakobson. The table of contents: W. V. Quine – Logic as a source of syntactical insights Noam Chomsky – On the notion “Rule of Grammar” Hilary […]
Professor Emeritus Petr Sgall, professor of Indo-European, Czech studies, and general linguistics at Charles University in Prague, passed away on May 28, 2019 in Prague, the day after his 93rd birthday. Over a lifetime of distinguished work in theoretical, mathematical and computational linguistics, he did more than any other single person to keep the Prague […]
Today's topic is a simple solution to a complicated problem. The complicated problem is how to estimate "pitch range" in recordings of human speakers. As for the simple solution — wait and see. You might think that the many differences between the perceptual variable of pitch and the physical variable of fundamental frequency ("f0") arise […]
Commenting on the (7/12/2016) headline "US government plans to use drones to fire vaccine-laced M&Ms near endangered ferrets", Joyeuse Noëlle on Tumblr noted that The best part of this title is that in the second half, each new word is completely unpredictable based on what comes before it. “US government plans to use drones to […]
Last week ("Joos jokes", 8/14/2018) I linked to the "Proceedings of the Speech Communication Conference at M.I.T.", published in 1950 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and I promised to revisit "this window into a bygone age" in a later post. So today I present to you the following passage from "Introduction: A […]
Morris Halle passed away early this morning: born 7/23/1923, died 4/2/2018. The abstract from "Morris Halle: An Appreciation", Annual Review of Linguistics 2015, describes his influence on the field: Morris Halle has been one of the most influential figures in modern linguistics. This is partly due to his scientific contributions in many areas: insights into […]
An interesting new paper by Joe Pater: "Generative linguistics and neural networks at 60: foundation, friction, and fusion": Abstract. The birthdate of both generative linguistics and neural networks can be taken as 1957, the year of the publication of seminal work by both Noam Chomsky and Frank Rosenblatt. This paper traces the development of these […]