I recently came across a blog included in Rogue Scholar that was producing a barrage of posts along the lines of “Animals that start with [letter]”. They included the inspiring “Animals that start with P”, the highly original “Animals that start with H” and of course the intriguing “Animals that start with M”. Here is the introduction to that one: Any opening like this sets off my LLM alarm bells.

Oxford University Press is going full surveillance capitalist mode. They don’t do author offprints anymore because authors sharing their work equals “piracy”; want nothing more dearly than tracking their users’ every move; and would rather you didn’t even email your work to students and colleagues. God forbid anyone actually read your publicly funded scholarly work.

I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and must write about it. Warning: snark detected. This is a new paper by Green, Kong, Brysbaert, and Keogh with the following abstract: “This paper revisits the Age of Acquisition (AoA) norms of Kuperman et al. (2012). Three studies were conducted.

Academic home pages are a special genre. Publication lists are a key part of it: our published scholarly work pretty much defines us (at least as far as our academic persona is concerned). I think every academic should have a full publication list somewhere —why do some universities make this so hard?— but home pages often just have a list of selected papers. How do people make this selection?

Knots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. As Thai textile artist and designer Nithikul Nimkulrath (2024) has pointed out, knots are the kind of thing we come to know “ through and in making”. One of her artworks (see photo) explorers the materiality of knots by translating a physical, hand-knotted container into a 3D render.

Like anyone active in the space of LLMs and generative AI, I get a growing amount of invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia on something or other LLM-related. A subset of these invites is about the relation between LLMs and academic writing. Recently I had the occasion to respond to such an invite.

I have been blogging at The Ideophone since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. My short post documenting the etymology of Zotero is apparently the only scientific documentation of where Zotero’s name comes from; it has served as a source in Wikipedia for ages and has received over 15 scholarly citations.

Language makes us human. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals are seen as having none, whereas computers may well master it according to many. What curious conception of language makes this asymmetry possible? And what do Descartes and Turing have to do with it? Notes from a new essay about language between animals and computers.

Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in linguistics, and as Aimée Lahaussois has shown (2016), they are notably underrepresented in descriptive grammars. As grammars are the main source of data for typologists, this is of course a perfect example of a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing that treating talk as sanitised text can adversely impact voice user interfaces. However, this is still a minority position. Googlers Dan Walker and Dan Liebling represent the mainstream view well in this blog post: Fair enough, you might say.

The last time I blindly accepted an invitation to speak was in 2012, when I was invited to an exclusive round table on the future of linguistics at a renowned research institute. As a fresh postdoc I was honoured and bedazzled. When the programme was circulated, I got a friendly email from a colleague asking me how I’d ended up there, and whether I thought the future of linguistics was to be all male.