linguistics

Passive constructions and asymmetries between languages

Researchers often make participants jump through hoops. Due to our personal blind spots, it seems easier to realise the full extent of these acrobatics when we consider the work of other researchers. In linguistic research, the acrobatics are often spurred by unnatural grammatical constructions.

Making research materials Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable

To err is human, but when it comes to creating research materials, mistakes can be reduced by sharing more of our work and by using some helpful tools. For instance, we can make our research materials FAIRer—that is, more Findable, Accessible, …

Preprocessing the Norwegian Web as Corpus (NoWaC) in R

The present script can be used to pre-process data from a frequency list of the Norwegian as Web Corpus (NoWaC; Guevara, 2010). Before using the script, the frequency list should be downloaded from this URL. The list is described as ‘frequency list sorted primary alphabetic and secondary by frequency within each character’, and this is the direct URL. The download requires signing in to an institutional network. Last, the downloaded file should be unzipped.

Discussion of Labotka et al. (2023)

Slideshare Labotka, D., Sabo, E., Bonais, R., Gelman, S. A., & Baptista, M. (2023). Testing the effects of congruence in adult multilingual acquisition with implications for creole genesis. Cognition, 235, 105387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105387

Pronominal object clitics in preverbal position are a hard nut to crack for Google Translate

Unlike English, some Romance languages not only allow—but sometimes require—pronominal object clitics in preverbal position (Hanson & Carlson, 2014; Labotka et al., 2023). That is, instead of saying La maestra ha detto il nome (Italian) ‘The teacher has said the name’, Italian allows Il nome lo ha detto la maestra (literally, ‘The name it has said the teacher’), which could translate as ‘The name has been said by the teacher’, ‘The teacher has said the name’, or even ‘It is the teacher that has said the name’.

Discussion of Jost et al. (2019)

Slideshare Jost, E., Brill-Schuetz, K., Morgan-Short, K., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Input complexity affects long-term retention of statistically learned regularities in an artificial language learning task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 358. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00358

More refined typology and design in linguistic relativity: The case of motion event encoding

Linguistic relativity is the influence of language on other realms of cognition. For instance, the way movement is expressed in a person’s native language may influence how they perceive movement. Motion event encoding (MEE) is usually framed as a …

Dutch modality exclusivity norms for 336 properties and 411 concepts

Part of the toolkit of language researchers is formed of stimuli that have been rated on various dimensions. The current study presents modality exclusivity norms for 336 properties and 411 concepts in Dutch. Forty-two respondents rated the auditory, …

Web application: Dutch modality exclusivity norms

This app presents linguistic data over several tabs. The code combines the great front-end of Flexdashboard—based on R Markdown and yielding an unmatched user interface—, with the great back-end of Shiny—allowing users to download sections of data they select, in various formats. The hardest nuts to crack included modifying the rows/columns orientation without affecting the functionality of tables. A cool, recent finding was the reactable package. A nice feature, allowed by Flexdashboard, was the use of quite different formats in different tabs.

Language evolution: Current status and future directions

The topic of language evolution is characterised by the scarcity of records, but also by a large flow of research produced within multiple subtopics and perspectives. Over the past few decades, significant advancement has been made on the …