Regardless of where your views fall on the political spectrum, there's a pretty good chance that you subscribe to the idea that we are in a new age of inauthenticity. The modern world makes it even more of a challenge to "get real" when we are communicating with language.  Continue reading...

The relations among words are not so different from those among people. It's not unusual for, say, first cousins to bear no obvious resemblance to each other, but if we examine their DNA we find that they have a grandparent in common.  Continue reading...

Linguistics and Big Data have been a fruitful partnership since they first found each other, and new hookups with promising results are happening all the time. Here's a small sampling of the riches to be found in two new corpora — the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus.  Continue reading...

What happened (and is apparently still happening) in English-speaking societies that results in so much discourse about the problems in education? Here is some fodder for the discussion.  Continue reading...

Unesco chooses a cultural theme to highlight and celebrate every year. Now, in 2019, indigenous languages are ready for a long overdue closeup.  Continue reading...

If we start from the fact that language is first and foremost a spoken activity, the methods by which people have extended its powers to writing offer a fascinating lens into human history.  Continue reading...

Nothing is more intuitive and natural to humans than communicating via language, and specifically, via speech. Language must be central to developing a more robust channel for human-robot communication.  Continue reading...