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.
En la entrada anterior de esta serie me referí a un testimonio perdido de conexión escolástica del Lucidario . Al revisar el ms. 13594 de la BNE, el segundo volumen del Índice y inventario de los libros que ay en la librería de don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, conde de Gondomar, en su casa en Valladolid , hecho en abril de 1623, di con la siguiente entrada en el fol.
As many of you know, I took secondment from my academic role this year to work on research and development at Crossref. A variety of factors inspired this, not least my health and wanting to be able to work from home. After a year, I have reflected on my experience of transferring to a very good employer outside of academia. If you did the same, your mileage might vary, because it all depends where you end up working and for whom.
2023 continued to pose the all-important question: just how many health disasters can I endure? This year, I started haemodialysis as my kidneys entered the extremely worryingly named "end-stage renal failure". This turns out to be a very long-term prospect, as I can't have a transplant owing both to BK viremia (which caused the kidney damage in the first place) and a conflict with the immunosuppression that treats my rheumatoid arthritis.
A letter to the Editor of the _Guardian_, who declined to publish it. Dear Madam, Your Economics Editor, Larry Elliott (5th December, “[I’ve got news for those who say Brexit is a disaster: it isn’t. That’s why rejoining is just a pipe dream](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/05/brexit-disaster-rejoining-channel-europe-economy?CMP=share_btn_tw)”), offers an opinion piece that appears to be based on little more than his own
En la última entrada hablé de la emendatio por divinatio. Otra manera de enmendar un pasaje transmitido incorrectamente en toda la transmisión manuscrita es reconstruirlo empleando parcialmente las lecturas erróneas de varios testimonios (combinatio). Esto puede verse en el siguiente pasaje del capítulo 1 del Lucidario, que compara los humores del cuerpo humano...
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.
Hace dos entradas comencé a hablar de la emendatio en el Lucidario, ofreciendo algunos ejemplos de selectio entre variantes adiáforas. Otra forma de emendatio ocurre cuando un pasaje es transmitido incorrectamente por toda la transmisión manuscrita (ya sea por errores de sustitución o eliminación del texto). Sin pistas textuales, es necesario reconstruir la...
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.