Language Log

…and between intertextuality and self-indulgence.

Via BoingBoing and many LL readers:

Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter for 5/27/2009: This reminds me of some of the discussions of California's ballot proposition system — and since the cartoon came out the day after the California Supreme Court ruled on Proposition 8, I guess that it was supposed to.

Below is a guest post/email by Preston C.: I wanted to share a compact ambiguous sentence in the spirit of “Buffalo buffalo…,” but built from more ordinary English resources: In Buttons’ Buttons, Buttons Buttons buttons Buttons Buttons’ buttons Buttons Buttons’ buttons’ buttons button. One workable parse treats “Buttons Buttons” as a proper name, “Buttons’ Buttons” […]

But can they still tell us something useful about language?  Here are two new papers that address that question: I. "What the Hidden Rhythms of Orangutan Calls Can Tell Us about Language – New Research." De Gregorio, Chiara. The Conversation, May 27, 2025. In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting […]

When I was in the British Museum bookshop several weeks ago, I was pleased by the numerous offerings of books on language.  Two types stood out:  those on the origins of speech and those on the origins of writing.  As we would say in Mandarin, they are iǎngmǎshì 兩碼事 ("two different things").  The best stocked […]

Ilia Shumailov et al., "The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget", 5/31/2023: What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We […]

Animal communication is not a favorite topic here at Language Log, but according to the following account, one project concerning it seems serious and is being conducted by credible scientists.  Although their claims for its ultimate significance may be inflated, I believe the research they are undertaking is worth considering, especially after hearing the clicks […]

…and ending a sentence is like dying. What do I mean by this weird and even creepy statement? Short answer: Your probability of continuing to live is not constant, but decreases exponentially as you get older. (Actuaries know this as the Gompertz-Makeham Law of Mortality,  usually expressed in terms of your probability of dying.) A […]

Geoffrey Pullum, "Chomsky's Forever War", National Review 2/17/2022: Few American linguists were puzzled when they saw the title of Randy Allen Harris’s book about events in their discipline between 1965 and 1975: “The Linguistics Wars.” Aca­demic feuds are famously bitter, but the hostilities that Harris chronicled were unusual even by the standards of the humanities […]

The dark side of Paul Feyerabend's anarchistic philosophy of science — the observation that researchers often try to resolve scientific questions by political means, in the most negative possible sense of "political" — is confirmed all too often by experience. Linguists can point to the excesses of the The Linguistics Wars of the 1970s, and […]

A few days ago, I posted a post consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a Language Log post (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of… a screenshot of a tweet by Lynne Murphy, a linguistics professor, quote-tweeting* an earlier tweet by […]