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Language and Linguistics

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Tag Archives: Language and Linguistics

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  • 22 Feb 2024
    Mihai Surdeanu, Marco Antonio Valenzuela-Escárcega

    To Understand Large Language Models We Need to Go Back to the Basics

    Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Most of us have experienced this law with respect to the latest iterations of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4. This perspective may lead to incorrect usage of LLMs, resulting in undesirable and dangerous effects such as privacy violations, proliferation […]

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  • 2 Nov 2023
    Louis de Saussure, Tim Wharton

    Emotion? We don’t talk about it!

    Few would deny that emotions are fundamental to what it means to be human. Indeed, according to some, emotions are what make us human. Given that, and given the fact that humans communicate about their emotional states a great deal, you might think that theories of language and communication would include comprehensive accounts of how […]

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  • 19 Oct 2023
    Ekkehard Wolff

    Reconstructing an ancestral African language, mother to 80 present-day languages in the central African Sahel

    In this blog, I provide answers to a few basic questions that I imagine a reader, who is not an expert in historical African linguistics, might wish to ask the author. Why this topic, what’s so interesting about it? Africa is the cradle of humankind and where human language evolved. Tens of thousands of years […]

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  • 7 Feb 2023
    Colin H. Williams

    The New Speaker Phenomenon

    Today many European minority language communities are undergoing profound changes, in part as a result of globalisation, increased mobility and accelerating socio-economic fragmentation within heartland areas. Whereas in the past the family and community network ensured inter-generational language transmission, now it is mainly the statutory education system which provides the skills necessary to communicate effectively […]

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  • 31 Oct 2022
    Heidrun Dorgeloh, Anja Wanner

    Discourse Syntax

    Why a textbook? For both of us, Discourse Syntax is our first textbook. We have both published critical monographs, research articles, and chapters for edited volumes, but, after two decades in the linguistics classroom, we felt it was time to harness our experience as linguists and teachers of linguistics and bring the two together in […]

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  • 21 Apr 2022
    Michal Ephratt

    Hey, so does this book on silence consist of 334 empty pages?

    Ha ha ha, no, in between the many examples of silence in writing (classic and other), in dialogues, in public exchanges as well as in intersubjective conversations, comes speech: words and paragraphs explaining the categorisation of the different silences, pointing to their identification and looking at their functions. In fact, silence, verbal or other, is […]

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  • 17 Jun 2020
    Dániel Z. Kádár, Juliane House

    Interactional Rituals: Covidiotism

    Before we venture into a detailed analysis of interactional rituals and distance keeping, an interesting phenomenon worth considering is ‘covidiotism’ and its relationship with interactional rituals. People react in different ways to social distancing, with some even creating their own interactional rituals to substitute those removed by social distancing. Many of these people have been […]

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  • 10 Jun 2020
    Dániel Z. Kádár, Juliane House

    Interactional Rituals: The typology of interactional rituals

    When we examine the relationship between interactional rituals and social distancing, we need to ask ourselves what type of ritual we are dealing with. Dániel Kádár (2013) distinguished 4 types of ritual in his book Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups, namely: Social rituals In-group rituals Personal rituals Clinical (covert) rituals Obviously, many […]

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