Linguistics

The evil of human bondage was more complex than many historians care to reckon with.

The Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG), a research unit of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto, invites you to the second event of the new MLAG Seminar Series featuring talks by invited speakers on topics of interest to the group. The talk, given by Leopold Hess (Jagiellonian University, Krakow), is titled "Slurs and neutral counterparts: an inferentialist perspective" (abstract below) and will take place on 27 November 2025, 14:00-15:30 Western European Time (WET). The me

In the comments on "Cant-idates" (11/12/2025), there was some back-and-forth about how much phonetic residue Americans generally leave of the word-final /t/ in sequences where can't is immediately followed by a vowel-initial word. In defense of the answer "not much", I pulled three examples of "can't even" (literally) at random from the NPR podcast corpus […]

This video begins with two Dutch sayings: Your browser does not support the audio element. There's a saying in Dutch: "God schiep de Aarde, maar de Nederlanders schiepen Nederland". Another saying in Dutch is: "Wij smachten naar achtentachtig prachtige nachten bij achtentachtig prachtige grachten". Today's program is about how the Netherlands picked a fight with […]

We invite you to participate in a survey that will help us evaluate and plan the development of services, activities, resources, and tools of CLARIN.SI, the Slovenian infrastructure for language resources and technologies. Your responses will play a key role in shaping our future strategy and ensuring our infrastructure meets the needs of the research community. Take the anonymous survey here: https://1ka.arnes.si/clarin?language=2 The survey takes up to 15 minutes and is open until the end of

Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere is a seminar pertaining to the project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR (https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to the second talk of the seminar series, to be given by Marina Ortega-Andrés (University of the Basque Country) and entitled ​"When this chef says pot: The importance of the speaker's identity in understandi

All places in China have topolect terms, some more than others, and some are more influential outside of their own region than others. One regional variety whose speakers create numerous memorable expressions they are proud of isDōngběihuà東北話 ("Northeasterntopolect"). I was inspired to make this post after reading a collection of twenty Northeasternisms. I showed the […]

The "what we do" page for the CANTWINVICTORYFUND starts by explaining that they "Run Cant-idates to lose spectacularly in gerrymandered districts". For most U.S. speakers, the linguistic phenomena of flapping and voicing means that "cant-idates" and "candidates" are pronounced pretty much the same way, unless the speaker is trying to make the distinction clear by […]

We invite expressions of interest for chapters in an edited volume exploring the intersections of language, education, and shame in historical and contemporary contexts worldwide, with a particular interest in underrepresented contexts. We welcome contributions that analyse shame in relation to languages and language learning, grounded in primary data and accessible across disciplines including Education, Sociolinguistics, and Anthropology. We particularly welcome contributors from less represen

Our next Making Waves meeting will explore the challenges — and possible solutions — of annotating multilingual and bilingual prosody. On November 19, Svenja Krieger will give a short talk titled “Guidelines for the annotation of intonation data in multi- and bilingual populations.” We look forward to seeing many of you there and to another lively discussion. Abstract: The annotation of intonation is inherently language-specific, and no unified framework has been developed that can be app

The shape of a burger is reinforced in our mental linguistic definitions every time we see a burger but there isn’t a straight-forward definition.

There's an obvious urban/rural divide in the culture of eye contact and greetings, and I suspect that within cities there are differences among neighborhoods, related to pedestrian density and the relative proportions of neighbors and strangers. Some of the (17,962) comments on this YouTube video support these ideas, but many of them suggest peculiar sensitivities […]

The first part of this debate, "Abstand und ausbau" (10/28/25), was so spirited and prolonged, and has recently moved on to significant new ground, that I've decided to launch this part 2. Before commenting here, please go back and review what was said in the previous o.p. and the subsequent comments thereto, some of which […]