Michael Pleyer @symbolicstorage Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

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nerd. cognitive/evolutionary linguist. @NCN_PL & @MSCActions POLONEZ BIS fellow @cles_ncu & @UMK_Torun (he/him) @symbolicstorage @bsky .social

Toruń, Poland

https://t.co/n0YZa0nh3n

Joined November 2011

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@symbolicstorage

Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

5 months

Many years ago @hartmast and I got a paper rejection because we tried to cram too much information on Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution into one paper. One of the reviewers ended their review with: “…or the authors should write a book.” It took a while, but we did!

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@hartmast

Stefan Hartmann

5 months

Out now & open access @CUP_Elements : @symbolicstorage and I explore the intersection of #CognitiveLinguistics and #LanguageEvolution research

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@symbolicstorage

Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

Well let me tell you about a little thing called The Linguistics Wars....

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@JSTOR

JSTOR

3 months

Forget Drake and Kendrick... tell us the best academic beef you've encountered during your research👂

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

@cles_ncu @fbisnath @MarahJaraisy @hlutzenberger @rehanaomardeen @AdamCSchembri @fbisnath points out that complexity measurements are not empirically observable "natural kinds" but the result of linguistic analyses, which are not free from ideology. Importantly, complexity should not be used to argue some languages are more "legitimate" than others.

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Michael Pleyer

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2 years

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 months

@remisramosc I also like the less well-known prequel

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

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@JohnHolbein1

John B. Holbein

4 years

What's the best title of a book, article, or other publication you've ever seen?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

6 months

New Sapir-Whorf hypothesis just dropped. Sanskrit is the best language to think about... [checks notes]... AI?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

5 months

It's a good week for language evolution! Steven Mithen's new book is coming out today. "The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age." Looking forward to reading this one! Below is my thread on Mithen's #protolang8 plenary

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@symbolicstorage

Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

10 months

Mithen presents what he sees as the language puzzle: how when and why did ape-like gestures and vocalisations evolve into fully modern language, either spoken or signed?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

The full #jcole2022 proceedings are now available for download. A whopping 855 pages of the latest research on the evolution of language!

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

Seems like Labov would've had a hard time doing his department store study in China

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

She ends with recommendations for working with complexity, and talking about complexity in language, what to do, and not what to do.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

One of my colleagues had this on their door

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

This meme from Etymology Memes for Reconstructed Phonemes made me laugh.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Something peculiar about folk views of "code-switching" and translanguaging practices is that it's "bad" when it's done with "non-prestigeous" and minority languages, but "good" when it's Greek, Latin or French

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

I see a pattern

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@remisramosc

Remis

1 year

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

The next talk in our @cles_ncu workshop on "Directions in Language Evolution" is by @fbisnath , @MarahJaraisy , @hlutzenberger , @rehanaomardeen & @AdamCSchembri : “Deconstructing notions of morphological complexity: lessons from signed and spoken languages"

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

The main thing is miss about in-person conferences is visiting interesting and beautiful places and then staying in your hotel room instead because you haven't finished your slides

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

I have a pragmatics joke

@gwalkden

George Wⓐlkden

4 years

I have a syntax joke, but I won't spell it out for you

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 months

Just received my copy! Out now with @hartmast : "Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution" (Cambridge Elements in Cognitive Linguistics) (Also available #OpenAccess ) @CambUP_LangLing

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

Just as an example of the pettiness this debate sometimes descended to: In a 1973 paper Lakoff wrote that “one of the joys” of debating is that “the winner gets to say ‘Nyaah, nyaah!’ to the loser” and then ended his paper like this:

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

@katiedimartin His account is suspended now but another redditor looked at his post history, and it makes the whole thing even more disturbing

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

Probably a must-read for every linguist living in Poland

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@symbolicstorage

Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

The final version of the Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE) is now available for download Now with a nice cover! (and still a 65MB pdf with over 800 pages of the latest research on language evolution) @JCoLE2022 #jcole2022

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

Currently reading Planer & Sterelny's "From Signal to Symbol" and they have an interesting proposal on how the first composite signs that combine two elements emerged in the evolution of language. 1

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@symbolicstorage

Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Another tongue in cheek #Chomsky meme

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

A 1969 Linguistic Society of America plenary session ended with George Lakoff saying to Ray Jackendoff: "Well, fuck you" and Jackendoff replying "Well, fuck you, George" and the both of them hurling obscenities at each other for several minutes "before 200 embarassed onlookers"

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

My #openaccess #PhD thesis "The Everyday Use of 'pretend' in Child Language and Child-Directed Speech: A Corpus Study" is finally online and out there in the world! 1/10

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

Fun fact. In modern German, the adjective "englisch" means "English". But it used to be a pair of homonyms, meaning "English" & "angel-like". "Mehr englisch als menschlich" meant "more angel-like than human" in 1669 but in modern German reads as "more English than human"

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

The final plenary of @ICCG_11 #icc1 is by the brilliant @ev_fedorenko : "The language system in the human mind and brain"

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Linguist Llama (Halloween Edition): I wanna be a schwa. It's never stressed* *exceptions apply

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

. @BodoWinter and @MarcusPerlman with a provocative title: "there is nothing arbitrary about the linguistic sign" #jcole2022

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 months

Just got my author copies of @hartmast and my Cambridge Element "Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution" but you can also read it #OpenAccess @CambUP_LangLing

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

just remembered this not-at-all-confusing figure of different "information structure terminologies and their dependencies" from Kruijff-Korbayová & Steedman (2003).

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

I am fascinated by this ticket machine on the bus in Toruń that has a sign in three languages. Polish: "Automat widaje resztę" English: "Machine gives change" German: "Automat ist restgeldauszahlungsfähig". The translator really created a beautiful German compound word here.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

Some more highlights from Harris' thoroughly entertaining book:

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

The second talk in the #futureoflinguistics webinar is by @drculbertson : The future of linguistics is multidisciplinary, multimodal, multicultural

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

I can now officially call myself Dr. Michael Pleyer! I am #PhDone ! (Photo is from my thesis defense last December)

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

I couldn't resist. Langacker's "Cognitive Grammar" was initially called "Space Grammar", but "A theory called space grammar can obviously not be taken seriously" (Langacker 1987: vi) so he changed the name.

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@AlexanderLasch

Alexander Lasch

@AlexanderLasch

3 years

Reframing mit @AlexWillich - neues Introbild für Eure Tele·lehre! Einfach hochauflösend ( #razorsharp ) selbst hier erstellen: . Background 3, Titelstil 4! #laser #mega

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

Brolinguistics

@phylogenomics

Jonathan Eisen

4 years

Mature

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Michael Pleyer

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1 year

Minimalists when they really want to do some linguistic analysis but have to grade papers instead

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

7 months

Lay perceptions of the "way a language sounds like" (rough, soft, melodic, harsh etc.) are an interesting topic. This one I found a bit puzzling, do people generally describe Cantonese as "guttural"?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

I am happy to share that I have been awarded a POLONEZ BIS fellowship by the Polish National Science Centre with a project on "Metaphor and Semiotics in (Inter)Action" at @cles_ncu and @UMK_Torun !

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

So somebody started a trend. #SociolinguisticSightSeeing 4th floor at Macy's in NYC

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

A discussion on the nature of linguistic generalisations, productivity and exceptions with @adelegoldberg1 & Charles Yang, hosted online by the University of Manchester.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

9 months

Oh wow, this is the first time I've seen this in a journal

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 months

Jackendoff had also previously used linguistic example sentences that probably were not quite innocent given the context, e.g. "Although the bum tried to hit me, I can’t really get too mad at George. (Jackendoff 1968: 13)"

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

5 months

Our introduction to our special issue on "Combinatoriality and Compositionality in Apes, Hominins, Humans, and Birds" is now out in @IntJPrimatology ! (w/ Nathalie Gontier, @hartmast & Evelina Daniela Rodrigues). Stay tuned for the full issue coming soon!

Combinatoriality and Compositionality in Communication, Skills, Tool Use, and Language

International Journal of Primatology - Combinatorial behavior involves combining different elements into larger aggregates with meaning. It is generally contrasted with compositionality, which...

link.springer.com

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Working on the slides for my Cognitive Linguistics course. Long cow is one of my favourite examples of the Gestalt principles of perception.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

5 years

@GretchenAMcC This reminds me that I have a meme on my office door where I had to correct the IPA

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

@ginnyhogan_ @LaymansLinguist

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

One of my favourite German words is "verschlimmbessern", which means trying to improve something but actually making it worse in the process

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

You ever notice your L2 influencing your L1? Today's example: I just said: "Er hat ihn nach der Richtung gefragt" (lit. "He asked him for the direction") instead of the idiomatic German "Er hat ihn nach dem Weg gefragt" (lit. "He asked him for the way")

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

This made me laugh (With the spoilsport caveat that this meme of course simplifies a complex debate and that I don't necessarily agree with this take)

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

Hi, I'm a linguist. You may know me from my greatest hits "no I don't speak lots of languages", the sleeper hit "No [insert X] is not actually ruining language" and the viral "The 'Eskimo words for snow' thing is actually a lot more complicated because..." (Remix feat. Hans Boas)

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

There is so much wrong with this that it's too much to unpack. But really, only "that last number is disputed"? Who has that person talked to? Not any linguists or anthropologists, that's for sure...

@RichardDawkins

Richard Dawkins

@RichardDawkins

2 years

"A lexicographer estimated that the average 19th-century peasant used a vocabulary of 250 words, an educated person 5,000, and Shakespeare 27,780, though that last number is disputed” (Max Hastings, The Times) Does that figure of 250 make origin of language seem less mysterious?

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Michael Pleyer

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1 year

On my way to #ICLC16 @iclc16 ! Who else is coming?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Our second #protolang7 is by @MichelDeGraff : "Does Creole formation recapitulate the emergence of human language? Notes on the origins and evolution of linguists’ most dangerous myth"

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

Today I learned the brilliant Polish word "wihajster" (thingamabob, whachmacallit), which comes from German "wie heißt er?" (What is he called?)

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

So my students were not familiar with the concept of a "birb" - Do I just spend much more time on the internet than them or is "birb" not a thing anymore?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

The last of the Birmingham Lectures: Language Structure and Language Use is by @haspelmath : "Explaining Diverse Language Structures From Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Conventions" You can follow the lecture live on Youtube (with CC & BSL) #brumlects

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Birmingham Lectures 1.5: Martin Haspelmath

www.youtube.com

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

I think I found the person from my maths textbook

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

5 months

I once asked George Lakoff at a conference what he thought about the philosophical/historical forerunners of conceptual metaphor & he said he's not interested in history but in data & analyses of language. If a PhD student wanted to include this, they could do that in an appendix

@linguistMasoud

Masoud

@linguistMasoud

5 months

I am a linguist and I want to emphasize that philosophy has been and will be absolutely essential for progress in linguistics. My own field of semantics and pragmatics is deeply indebted to contributions from philosophers. I'd say the same for cognitive science. Unfortunately...

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

New #OpenAccess 🔓paper out in Journal of Language Evolution! @OUPAcademic We looked at "The representation of animal communication and language evolution in introductory linguistics textbooks" 🧵1/

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The representation of animal communication and language evolution in introductory linguistics...

Abstract. The last three decades have brought a wealth of new empirical data and methods that have transformed investigations of language evolution into a

academic.oup.com

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

Having a PhD in English linguistics did not prepare me for having to explain the German instructions on a washing machine to my Indian flatmate in our flat in Poland

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

Getting my PhD thesis ready for online publication & printing tomorrow and I've just found a "Lingusitics" that so far had escaped all previous proofreading stages. Whew.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Got my first jab!

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Michael Pleyer

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6 months

To be honest I am not quite sure about this tourism ad

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Do you have any favourite student evaluations? Mine is "I suspect Mr Pleyer might be a robot" because during one class, I had to identify the traffic lights to log in to google, got it wrong and asked my students for help using the projector.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Just stumbled on this "list of unsolved problems in linguistics", which features the warning "This article needs attention from an expert in linguistics." - so which problems in linguistics do you find particularly exciting?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 months

How many likes do I need so I can put a Tweet on my CV?

@symbolicstorage

Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

Well let me tell you about a little thing called The Linguistics Wars....

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Michael Pleyer

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2 years

Linguistics Hivemind: Can anyone recommend a critical examination of the prejudices and factors that led linguists to dismiss signed languages as "not real languages" before this slowly started to change from the 1960s onwards?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

I have a (tonge-in-cheek) question about the "PAHK THE CAH IN HAHVAHD YAHD" cliché. Since Boston English as a non-rhotic variety exhibits "linking r" wouldn't many Boston speakers actually say "PAHK THE CAR IN HAHVAHD YAHD", depending on sentence stress?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

5 months

Huge congratulations to @cwiekaleks for receiving the Wilhelm von Humboldt prize (best PhD dissertation award) at #DGfS2024 for her work on Iconicity in Language and Speech!

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Etymology is awesome. Today I learned that the (old-fashioned) German interjections "ach herrje!" and "ojemine!" / "o je!" are derived from "Herr Jesus" (German: "Lord Jesus") and "O Jesu domine" (latin: O Lord Jesus)

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 months

SAVE THE DATE! The next #Protolang9 Ways to Protolanguage Conference will take place in Vienna, Austria, September 15-17 2025! #evolang2024 #evolangXV

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Michael Pleyer

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1 year

This has to be my favourite street name in Poland (found in Toruń county by @thematzing )

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 months

@d_feldman Reminder that Roebuck & @glupyan have a really cool "Internal Representation Questionnaire" where in the end you can see how your results compare with those of others!

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

"We have a curfew here in the Netherlands so we have to finish the meeting on time so we can go home and won't get arrested" - is definitiely not a sentence I ever expected to hear in my lifetime at an academic meeting #futureoflinguistics

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

I've been watching this for ten minutes straight

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Very interesting talk by @kensycoop on pointing with cool examples from art throughout history. Pointing is culturally universal, is used for a wide-range of functions & frequent in everyday contexts in both spoken and signed communication.

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@ozyurek_a

Prof. Asli Ozyurek @ozyurek_a

3 years

Please join us in the next Nijmegen Gesture Center 2021 Virtual Colloquim on April 14 at 16:00 (CET Amsterdam) with Dr. Kensy Cooperrider on "the Deictic Urge" . Please join the ngc mailing list to be able to register

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Michael Pleyer

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3 years

"Albumveröffentlichungsverzögerer" (lit. 'album-release-delay-er') - sometimes you just have to love the German language.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

Thought it only appropriate to wear this T-shirt when dropping off my PhD thesis at the copy shop. After all, being really mad about Chomsky's view of language evolution is what got me into linguistics.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 months

@IbnAllan Very broadly they were arguing over the relationship of syntax/language structure and meaning. W/ very different analyses of language & if it can be connected to "semantic representations". Unfortunately even the wiki article is already quite complicated

Linguistics wars - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

A corpus on gender bias in video game dialogues that comes with its own game about the results! This is brilliant.

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@aucksAdventures

Sean Roberts

@aucksAdventures

1 year

New paper with Stephanie Rennick ( @EpicureanCure ) and colleagues: We created the largest corpus of RPG video game dialogue ever in order to examine gender bias. We found that male characters are given twice as much dialogue as female characters.

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Michael Pleyer

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1 year

Supercool talk by Anjie Cao on joint work with @mollyllewis & @mcxfrank on a synthesis of early cognitive and language development using (meta-) meta-analysis #CogSci2023

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

Had an entry in my calendar that simply said "Lucy's Birthday" & I was like: "Oh no! I don't remember anyone by that name! I hope it's not somebody's kid whose name I forgot, how embarassing!" Until one of my colleagues said: "Do you maybe mean Australopithecus?" Yes that was it

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

#Protolang7 starts with its first plenary by Asifa Majid ( @asifa_majid ): Does language reflect an evolutionary trade-off between olfaction and vision?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

I find it fascinating that sometimes you hear "the most important problems in science are solved" when in linguistics, there are 6000-8000 languages & we have descriptions of maybe 500 of them & as @haspelmath for example has pointed out, we don't even really know what a word is

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

One of my favourite anecdotes about philospher G. W. F. Hegel is that he once cancelled a lecture because he "wasn't done thinking yet" ("Die Vorlesung von Herrn Professor Hegel muß heute leider ausfallen, da der Herr Professor mit dem Nachdenken noch nicht fertig geworden ist.")

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

7 months

My thoughts are with my friends, colleagues and everyone affected in Prague today. Heartbreaking.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

So assuming the German pronunciation of this town this pun only works in scouse I guess?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Just asked my flatmates if they were coming to my talk and one of them said: "We already attended about 100 of your linguistics lectures - only it was here in our kitchen" - which I think is a fair response.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Very sad to hear of Gilles Fauconnier's passing He made huge contributions to Cognitive Linguistics & the theory of mental spaces & conceptual blending he co-developed has been hugely influential This great quote is something I often use when I introduce Cognitive Linguistics

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@adelegoldberg1

Adele Goldberg

@adelegoldberg1

3 years

Very sad to learn that the eminent cog linguist Gilles Fauconnier passed away on Wed He fearlessly tackled knotty exs like👇 I dreamt I was Beyoncé and I kissed me Once COVID is over is the new inshallah Huge contributions:

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

2 years

Currently reading @MH_Christiansen & Nick Chater's new book "The Language Game" where they have a funny footnote replying to Chomsky's claim that "probably 99.9 percent" of language use is "internal to the mind." It's theoretically impossible.

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 months

Big if true

@lastpositivist

Liam Bright

@lastpositivist

3 months

It's actually pretty weird that strings of symbols or sounds can mean things. Has anyone looked into this?

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

my paper with @hartmast proposing a usage-based, construction grammar approach to animal communication and language evolution has now been published in Evolutionary Linguistic Theory! Preprint and summary 🧶/ 🧵in the RT'ed post below:

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

New preprint with @hartmast in which we explore the potential implications of a usage-based, construction grammar approach to animal communication for language evolution 🧵 1/n

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

4 years

I want to share some examples from: Rickford, John Russel Rickford & Sharese King. 2016. Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and Other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond. Language. 29(4). 948-988. [Thread]

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

1 year

German academics: Well at least the system can't get any worse than it already is German politics: Hold my beer #WissZeitVG

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

3 years

Live in less than 30 minutes! @BodoWinter 's talk "Iconicity, not arbitrariness, is a design feature of language"

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Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage

5 years

Tried out the #betterposter template at @iclc15 #iclc15

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