official-linguistics-post

[official-linguistics-post]

one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet

[official-linguistics-post]

I really appreciate how the sociolinguistics of compounds mean that we have one suffix -vore, -vory meaning "to eat", and another suffix -phage, -phagy meaning "to eat (fucked up)"

[official-linguistics-post]

fricative friday

[official-linguistics-post]

my dealer: got some straight gas. this strain is called “linguistics class” you'll be zonked out of your gourd

Me: yeah whatever. i dont feel nothin.

50 minutes later: dude i swear there's invisible words in these sentences

my ∅ friend, pacing: the determiner phrases are lying to us

[official-linguistics-post]

logging into the online to play a game called Worst Sentences where you competitively try to think of the Worst Sentences

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

from my linguistics

[official-linguistics-post]

William Labov, one of the single most influential linguists to date, passed away yesterday at the age of 97. His foundational work in sociolinguistics has rippled throughout the modern field. Virtually every working linguist today owes some debt to him for shaping not only our research but also a culture of kind and earnest inquiry. His legacy will continue to define linguistics as a discipline.

I never had the honor of knowing Dr. Labov, but I'm sharing here some tributes and remembrances from his colleagues.

Cynthia McLemore and Mark Liberman (Language Log)

Josef Fruehwald (Væl Space)

Betsy Sneller (Bluesky)

May his memory be a blessing.

[official-linguistics-post]

So if i may be so bold as to ask, how do accents arise? Are they informed by the language, do they inform the language, do both coexist in a loop of creating new dialects? Curious after seeing the recent-not-recent zeitgeist about how (falsely) different cities in different parts of the US are, and i wanna find some evidence to dig deeper ^0^

there's not a straightforward answer, necessarily! accents can develop in an isolated group and diverge from other varieties; they can find a midpoint between pronunciations; they're very dependent on exposure and social context.

here's a couple general articles on accent development, and one more technical piece on cognitive processing of different accents:

how different accents develop within the same language, laurie l. dove

linguists hear an accent begin, susanne bard

navigating accent variation: a developmental perspective, elizabeth k. johnson, marieke van heugten, and helen buckler

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

Preach I guess

[official-linguistics-post]

the three linguistics papers to read about singular they (morphosyntax)

Bjorkman, B. M. (2017). Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2(1). Open access link

Konnelly, L., & Cowper, E. (2020). Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular they. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 5(1). open access link

Conrod, K. (2022). Abolishing gender on D. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 67(3), 216-241. Open access link

in chronological order because these papers are all basically responding to each other; this papers focus on the (morpho)syntax and semantics of english singular 'they' referring to specific people (like they/them pronoun-users).

if you like posts like this, let me know! i'll give "three linguistics papers to read about (topic)" every once in a while based on interest

[official-linguistics-post]

on reconstruction and historical linguistics

to follow up on today's reblog, i want to comment briefly on the apparent misapprehension that linguistic reconstruction is just guesswork with a fancy name, because that's not accurate!

reconstruction is based on specific, well-attested constraints of linguistic development. we know from centuries of investigation that languages tend to change in predictable ways. we also have a decent understanding of the complexities introduced by phenomena like language contact, which can result in borrowing on multiple structural levels. our methods are well established and borne out by evidence.

comparative reconstruction involves applying these known constraints ("rules") in reverse on a collected body of words in related descendant languages. when possible, we also incorporate historical written evidence, which often provides midpoint references for changes in progress. it is always recognized by historical linguists that reconstruction can be imperfect; we cannot know what information has been lost.

the results of reconstruction can be mixed, but i'll let campbell (2013:144) explain:

How Realistic are Reconstructed Proto-languages? The success of any given reconstruction depends on the material at hand to work with and the ability of the comparative linguist to figure out what happened in the history of the languages being compared. In cases where the daughter languages preserve clear evidence of what the parent language had, a reconstruction can be very successful, matching closely the actual spoken ancestral language from which the compared daughters descend. However, there are many cases in which all the daughters lose or merge formerly contrasting sounds or eliminate earlier alternations through analogy, or lose morphological categories due to changes of various sorts. We cannot recover things about the proto-language via the comparative method if the daughters simply do not preserve evidence of them. In cases where the evidence is severely limited or unclear, we often make mistakes. We make the best inferences we can based on the evidence available and on everything we know about the nature of human languages and linguistic change. We do the best we can with what we have to work with. Often the results are very good; sometimes they are less complete. In general, the longer in the past the proto-language split up, the more linguistic changes will have accumulated and the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct with full success. (emphasis mine)

or, to quote labov's (1982:20) pithier if less optimistic approach:

Historical linguistics may be characterized as the art of making the best use of bad data, in the sense that the fragments of the literary record that remain are the results of historical accidents beyond the control of the investigator.

in sum, historical linguists are very realistic about what we can achieve, but the confidence we do have is genuinely well earned, because linguistics is a scientific field and we treat our investigations with rigor.

---

Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Labov, William. 1982. "Building on Empirical Foundations." In Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Winifred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel, eds. Pp. 17-92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

[official-linguistics-post]

so long farewell auf wiedersehen adieu i am going tf to bed

oh what the hell, i'm not going to finish my project tonight, i'm declaring open inbox. send whatever nonlinguistic asks you want for a couple hours.

[official-linguistics-post]

i don’t have a question but i do have a picture of my cat’s lil paws. in case you’re interested

excellent peets 10000000000000/10

[official-linguistics-post]

What is the smallest living thing in your home?

my jade plant margo (she usually lives outside but had to be rescued from freezing weather)

[official-linguistics-post]

i mean i have a diploma too but it's waiting to be framed

did people miss that i'm a doctor? i have a phd in linguistic anthropology. i spent 7 years in grad school and wrote/defended a dissertation. i've got the stupid hat to prove it

[official-linguistics-post]

she official on my linguistics till I post

yeah

[official-linguistics-post]

grad school is fake i just wrote two final papers on video game linguistics and might do my master's thesis/capstone on video game linguistics. i feel like im cheating somehow.

i still feel like i cheated my way to a degree despite an entire very competent committee deciding that i'd earned it through the merit of my own independent work