Archiving and using corpora [1/4] (FieldLing 2022)

This post accompanies a lecture given on “Archiving and using corpora” as part of the FieldLing 2022 “International School in Linguistic Fieldwork” hosted by CRNS in Paris (INALCO). Outline: – Context– Why archives– How to archive– Ethics of archiving Context Archiving in linguistics is a topic that comes out of a recent history of the

Expressiveness in Barayin

This weekend I’m presenting at a Workshop on the Typology of Ideophones. I’m using a collection of Barayin recordings to analyze when ideophones (and other words) are used with “expressive marking” or “expressiveness”. This is basically when people modify how a word is pronounced but the changes are not necessarily linked to a particular semantic

Descriptive and documentary linguistics in a pandemic: a bibliography

As descriptive and documentary linguists have processed adapting their research practices to a global pandemic, a number of presentations and papers have come out. Since I’ve been teaching about fieldwork, I’ve collected a list of the works on this topic I’ve seen so far (with some annotation). The list is broken down in three sections:

What is a Lexical-Functional approach to Barayin Morphosyntax?

Last month, I had a book published on a fairly niche topic: Barayin Morphosyntax: A Lexical-Functional Approach. In the words of Facebook friend Jon Laurion, “I had to look up the definition of most of the words in the definition of Barayin Morphosyntax.” I’m not sure the blurb on the book cover or website is

Publications cited by type and year

This week I was checking the copy-editing on a forthcoming monograph, and as I went through the references, I started wondering what kinds of publications I cited most often. Since I used LaTeX both for the monograph and the dissertation it’s based on, it was pretty easy to get access to a list of types

Double vowels in Kodi

Kodi is an Austronesian language spoken by about 100,000 people in Sumba, Indonesia. A few years ago, I got to help out at an alphabet workshop for Kodi, and have collaborated with a few colleagues on more analysis of the phonology as a follow-up. We (me, Misriani Balle & Owen Edwards) recently recorded a presentation

Associated motion and directionals in Chadic languages

I recently recorded a 20-minute presentation for a workshop on associated motion in African languages which is part of the 10th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL 10), June 7-12, 2021. It’s free to register as a participant for the online conference and get full access to all the presentations through the WOCAL website. My

New paper: Minimal phrase structure in LFG

A new syntax article is now online in the Journal of Language Modelling! I worked on this with John Lowe, building on a previous paper we wrote for the 2017 LFG conference. In that 2017 paper, we developed a formal system (one that we implemented in a parser, XLE) that creates representations of the phrase

Babel: Not the origin of linguistic diversity

Last year, a friend asked if I thought the story of Babel in Genesis was a historical explanation for the diversity of languages in the world. (If you don’t know the story, it’s Genesis 11:1-9, and it’s commonly thought of as an origin story for why there are so many languages in the world.) I

Syntax is fascinating

More than one person recently sent me this screenshot explaining that adjectives in a noun phrase in English have to go in a quite specific order, for example, big red balloon clearly sounds better than red big balloon. That particular screenshot is probably from a 2016 tweet pointing out how amazing it is that native