Archive for the ‘Linguists’ Category
September 7, 2026
You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time
— the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album)
[evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph]
💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻 for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act.
Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package. (more…)
Posted in Academic life, Bilingualism, Events and occasions, Language and culture, Languages, Linguists, Music, My life, Names, Ohio State, Social class, Social life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »
September 6, 2026
The big scheme is Pleasure as Therapy: something I do for pleasure (or play or engaged curiosity) turns out to be excellent therapy, alleviating some affliction of mine or extending my life. These are unintended, but gratifying, consequences. Gravy.
Previously on this blog, the story of my singing Sacred Harp hymns in communities of shapenote singers, a practice that moves me deeply, sometimes taking me into an ecstatic state. That’s the pleasure. Then my pulmonologist — who had me using breathing apparatus to strengthen my lungs — discovered this and said that my singing full-out was much better therapy than his, and I should do it as much as possible, ideally some every day. I see this as getting a prescription to eat cake. Or, to pick a different metaphor, go for the gravy.
(more…)
Posted in Age, Language and medicine, Lexical semantics, Linguists, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Play, Social interactions, Social life | 2 Comments »
August 3, 2026
One inspired by Aaron Broadwell, one by Steven Levine; I get a little help from my friends.
(more…)
Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguists, Lives, My life, Photography, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
August 1, 2026
🐇🐇🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia!
Now to dive into today’s topic in medias res, with this 7/30 Facebook greeting from Pietro Giovanni to Aaron Broadwell on the occasion of AB’s 64th birthday, somewhere around that time:
Many returns of the day to my favorite linguist
AB is George Aaron Broadwell (known as Aaron Broadwell), Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of Florida (Gainesville). PG is AB’s husband Peter Marino under the pseudonym Pietro Giovanni. For further complexity, since there are a regrettably large number of men named Peter Marino, some of them famous in their fields, Peter Marino uses the nickname Piet as his professional name; Piet Marino is the author of young adult novels (Dough Boy and Magic and Misery):
(#1) The Piet Marino logo
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Conversation, Events and occasions, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Indigenous peoples, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguists, Logos, Marriage, My life, Phallicity, Professional names, Pseudonyms, Speech acts, Switzerland and Swiss things, Teaching | 3 Comments »
June 7, 2026
I begin the story in medias res, with a May 27th Facebook comment by Probal Dasgupta on a posting of mine:
— PB > AZ: Speaking of the way one pronounces the acronym “AZ”, I’ve been puzzled by the fact that some function words that end in orthographic s in English (as, is, has) use a /z/ while others (us, this) use an /s/. I’ve failed to find a specialist who is generous with their time to tell me the diachronic sequence that led to this … My puzzlement originated in the fact that a friend of mine, in her Indian English, says “us” with a final /z/, definitely not in keeping with what most speakers of Indian English do.
With the help of Elizabeth Closs Traugott — nether of us experts in the phonological history of English or the development of spelling conventions, neither of us able to find an authoritative text or an actual living expert, but both willing to take a shot at some possibly useful speculation — I gave PB some tentative responses. And then came the news from his family that he had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, during the night of June 1st, at the age of 72.
His query to me was characteristic — intellectually curious and open, thoughtful and specific — and showed that he continued to follow my work closely, which is how we came to be (geographically distant) friends: when I was in an unhappy moment of doubt about the value of my research and writing, he sent me a bracing message of appreciation, with specific details, so that I came to think, jokingly, that at least I had a guy in Kolkata.
From this story, you will see his striking humanity, but nothing in that story predicts his passionate political engagement or his steady competence at academic administration.
(more…)
Posted in Death notices, Linguists | 2 Comments »
May 27, 2026
The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band:
The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure by Anissa Rei Zaitsu: PhD dissertation oral presentation (Monday, June 8, 2026, 1:00-2:15pm). Committee: Vera Gribanova (co-chair), Cleo Condoravdi (co-chair), Boris Harizanov, Nandi Sims, and Gabriella Safran (Slavic Languages and Literatures, university chair).
(more…)
Posted in AAVE / Black English, Abbreviation, Academic life, Events and occasions, Linguists, Names, Negation, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
April 24, 2026
A report on an exchange between me and my UNC-Chapel Hill colleague Bruno Estigarribia about polypersonalism (explanation to follow). As it unfolded in e-mail between us, presented here with BE’s permission.
This is one in a series of reports on linguists musing about stuff and groping with ideas — showing people something of what we do professionally (before actual publication, if that eventually comes) and something of our passion for and commitment to this work.
(more…)
Posted in Agreement, Argument structure, Government, Guarani, Inflection, Languages, Linguists, Morphology, Semantics, Spanish, Syntax | 3 Comments »
April 22, 2026
Two things: in my e-mail, the list of the members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the 2026 class, including two linguists and two scholars of LGBTQ+ matters (I might have missed others); then through the USPS, the information booklet for this June’s California direct primary elections, with its massive list of candidates for governor (61 of them).
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics, Linguists | Leave a Comment »
December 24, 2025
Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
(more…)
Posted in Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguists, Photography, Poetic form, Poetry | 2 Comments »
November 13, 2025
On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:
[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.
(more…)
Posted in AI, Dialects, Linguists, Music, Parody, Pseudonyms, Variation | 1 Comment »
