Vowel & consonant duration vary inversely in Australian #Yolngu language Djambarrpuyŋu, so what’s contrastive? A pair of production & perception studies show that V length is contrastive, though both V & C duration influence perception #LabPhon #openaccess doi.org/10.16995/labph…

Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s research grant suspension is a blatant act of political repression. This is about punishing pro-Palestinian voices and reinforcing anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim racism in these colonial institutions afr.com/policy/health-…

This is a ridiculous and damaging move from the ARC which should cause all academics here and abroad substantial concern. afr.com/policy/health-…

Most academics don’t seem to understand or care about this blatant political interference in the ARC. This is not just about Randa or Palestine. This is about the very idea of intellectual freedom. This precedent will be weaponised against you next. theguardian.com/australia-news…

"A simple explanation for harmonic word order" 😎 new paper with Lothar Sebastian Krapp. Formal modelling of word order as a dynamic system helped us understand some fundamental mathematical patterns! lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008852

Randa Abdel-Fattah has been subjected to a relentless campaign that aims to destroy her career because she has spoken out against Israel’s genocide. It’s excellent to see so many colleagues sign on to our letter calling for the immediate reinstatement of her Future Fellowship.

Uni Melbourne staff talking about language diversity. vimeo.com/1067193049/9b0…

never thought i’d say this but please come work for me! the abc is hiring a researcher to assist in the task of providing timely and accurate language guidance to staff careers.abc.net.au/en/job/504660/…

The history of books about negation makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original edition is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional edition, and this in turn may be felt as the book proper ...

I'm hiring! 2 x PhDs and 1 x PostDoc, to work with me at Uni Zurich on a project investigating how semantic patterns differ by geographic region. Linguistic typology, data science, spatial analysis, phylogenetic methods, potential fieldwork... REPOST 🙏 comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/jobs.html

Weaponizing food is so evil bro

The health ministry has released a new 1,000-page document with the names, ages and other info, of 52,959 Palestinians killed in Gaza. For the first 100 pages (over 5,000 names), the age is listed at 5 years or younger. The first 18 pages the age is listed as 0 (under 1 year)

🚨New publication alert! "Corpus-based approaches to evolutionary dynamics in language" (w/ Stefan Hartmann) out now in the in the Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution. Kudos to Dr. Limor Raviv 🦄🤗🐘🦒 & cedric boeckx for putting this great volume together! academic.oup.com/edited-volume/…

My heart is with Warlpiri mob, the Yuendumu community, and all those grieving the shocking death in custody of a young Aboriginal man in Mparntwe yesterday, who died while being restrained by police outside a supermarket.

Languages are shaped more by communication constraints than by learning constraints sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Macquarie University is preparing to dismantle two foundational disciplines: Sociology and Politics. Under the current proposal, Sociology will no longer be offered as a major in the Bachelor of Arts, and 11 of the department’s 14 academics — including long-time colleagues I’ve

The attention is on ANU but the cuts are happening elsewhere. At Macquarie there is a proposal to cut the sociology and politics majors from the BA, along with the jobs of 11 of 14 in sociology and several staff in politics. Our retired former head of department has started a

A user's manual for analysing variation using the R programming language, including practical exercises, checklists, and insider tips. Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation, 2nd edition by Sali A. Tagliamonte, Out Now #Linguistics #Sociolinguistics cup.org/4lu8GMO

A paper with Vic Ferreira and Norvin Richards is now out in JML! (1) Speakers syntactically encode zero complementizers as cognitively active mental object. (2) No evidence LLMs capture cross constructional generalizations about zero complementizers. nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%…

“If they thrive I thrive, if they are diminished I am diminished.” Professor Ghassan Hage Ghassan Hage said in a status update today, we are indeed interconnected and our very humanity relies on the collective direction of the history being created, this very second.