thelingspace:

thelingspace:

What happens when we lose our ability to use language? What difficulties do we run into when studying language loss? In this week’s episode, we look at aphasia, and particularly Broca’s aphasia: what symptoms occur, why it’s hard to make sweeping generalizations about what to expect, and what aphasia can tell us about how language works.

Aphasia’s definitely not a happy topic, but it’s a very interesting one, and we’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it!

Quick reblog for the day crew! ^_^

Our video this week is about aphasia, and the many things we’ve learned about language and the brain through the ways things can go wrong there! 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Oscar Headlines and Attachment Ambiguities

thelingspace:

We’ve still been thinking a lot about ambiguity on the Ling Space team, and another good, if slightly painful, example came to our attention from Language Log. Sunday night, the film The Imitation Game — a 2014 biopic about the life of computer scientist Alan Turing — won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. During his acceptance speech, screenwriter Graham Moore revealed that he had a very personal connection with some of the events portrayed in the film; he explained that, when he was 16, he had tried to end his own life.

Unfortunately, the headline over at the New York Daily News read “Screenwriter Graham Moore reveals he tried to commit suicide during 2015 Oscars acceptance speech for ‘The Imitation Game’” (as of writing this, the headline’s been changed to “Graham Moore wins Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for ‘The Imitation Game,’ surprises in speech by admitting he made suicide try as teen”, though you can see a screengrab of the original here). This particular arrangement of words, you might notice, carries alongside the intended meaning an unfortunate alternative interpretation: Mr. Moore attempted suicide during his acceptance speech, and only later revealed the act publicly.

So what can these dual meanings tell us about how our language system works? And how do we deal with getting computers to process them? This got kinda long, so take a look below for the rest.

Read More

Headlines, man. 

allthingslinguistic:

A video about various linguistics concepts from vsauceblog, including contrastive focus reduplication, retronyms, early emoticons, and rebracketing. As with many issues of unclear definitions, I’d say that the question about whether cereal is soup could be answered using Prototype Theory. 

<3! I love the shout-out to Prototype Theory, too. I did my undergraduate honours thesis on ideas connected to this, namely how it might apply to the kind of errors little kids make. Potential future video topic for thelingspace in there!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

medievalpoc:

schweizercomics:

Black History Month!

My favorite parts of history (as might be obvious from my choice of subject matter when making books) are the ones that fall into easily-categorized genres, genres with associated visual iconographies. This is the sort of stuff I loved as a kid: pirates, knights, cowboys, explorers, romans and Egyptians and flying aces. Stuff you could find featured in a bag of toys or a generic costume.

For Black History Month, I thought I might visit some of these adventure-leaning periods and pick a few historic black people from those eras to draw, just for fun. If you’re doing a project or report in school this month, you could do worse than to tackle one of these toughies.  Feel free to share some of these with youngsters that you know.  And call them youngsters, they LOVE that.

Read More

Reblogging for anyone (youngsters or oldsters) who is looking for some starting points for research, year-round! 

This is awesome! Thanks for making this!

When I was teaching in a Japanese high school they asked me what I wanted to talk about in my classes in February. Valentine’s Day? 

I sort of groaned internally, because, Valentine’s Day. If ever something was trite and overdone. But it looked like my coworkers also didn’t find the idea too inspiring, and it was a high-level school with really engaged kids, so I thought… How about Black History Month? It could be really interesting and informative for them, and also kind of show what a lot of schools in North America do this time of year.

As an activity, I researched a bunch of interesting people from history, from all over the world and all walks of life, like George Washington Carver and Rosa Parks and Alexandre Dumas. This awesome artwork would have been a great resource at the time! So I absolutely love it. 

I didn’t watch the Oscars, but man is this message relevant. It will always be relevant. Stay weird. Stay different. You have so much to contribute to the richness and beauty of the world by being who you are. You will be happy, and you will make other people happy by being you. Believe me. I never thought it would happen either.  

ellenkushner:

I do not give a fuck about the Oscars.

But I give many fucks about this speech by Graham Moore, winner for his screenplay for The Imitation Game.

Pass it on.

International Mother Language Day

C’est avec plaisir que nous commémorons aujourd’hui la Journée internationale des langues maternelles! Chaque langue a le droit d’être reconnue et traitée avec respect. Célébrons la diversité linguistique de notre monde et souvenons-nous que l’on y commet toujours de grandes injustices au nom du langage. 

Bien que nous produisions surtout du contenu de langue anglaise, tel que mentionné nous avons aussi l’allemand et le français parmi nos langues maternelles, chez The Ling Space. Ayant moi-même grandi dans une famille trilingue, je suis fière de participer à cette initiative sur tumblr, et j’ai hâte de voir vos billets multilingues!  

allthingslinguistic:“Saturday, March [sorry, typo: February] 21st, is the 15th annual International Mother Language Day — a day for celebrating linguistic diversity, supporting minority languages,…

International Mother Language Day

Q&A Video

thelingspace:

1000 subscribers on YouTube, and over 400 here, and we’re all really pleased! To celebrate, we’re going to do a Q&A video in the next couple of weeks, so if you have any questions for us, just let us know. We’re not hard to reach. ^_^

Oooo! I’ve been looking forward to this! Send us questions, everybody! About linguistics, about educational video, about Moti’s sweet t-shirts, whatever! 😀

Q&A Video

thelingspace:

1000 subscribers on YouTube, and over 400 here, and we’re all really pleased! To celebrate, we’re going to do a Q&A video in the next couple of weeks, so if you have any questions for us, just let us know. We’re not hard to reach. ^_^

Oooo! I’ve been looking forward to this! Send us questions, everybody! About linguistics, about educational video, about Moti’s sweet t-shirts, whatever! 😀

Syntactic Movement and Traces

Syntax is one of these things which is both super neat and important to linguistics, and not the most intuitive for a lot of people! We try to explain one of the key aspects of it in our most recent video. Fun stuff!

thelingspace:“What elements move around when we make our sentences? Is it the same in all languages? In this week’s episode, we look at syntactic movement: how we know that words move around, what…

Syntactic Movement and Traces

Linguistic Determinism

New video is up! 😀 Some pretty interesting topics here.

thelingspace:“Does our language determine how we can think, or can we think about things our language can’t frame? In this week’s episode, we talk about linguistic determinism: who came up with the…

Linguistic Determinism