Favourite posts
I’ve been blogging on All Things Linguistic since 2012, but many of those posts are reblogs, linkposts, or other ways of highlighting interesting linguistics things by other people. So here’s a compendium of some of my favourite longer posts, series, and meta that I’ve written myself.
In more recent years, much of my writing has been for other places, which can be found on the writing page of my website.
Popular culture
- The Meaning of Silence: Implicature and Entailment in Lizzie Bennet Diaries
- Lying, Presuppositions, and Lizzie Bennet Diaries
- “Don’t deny it!” More presuppositions from Lizzie Bennet Diaries
- Why don’t we say “orangehead” instead of “redhead”?
- A detailed explanation of Negative Polarity Items and Downwards Entailment, using Mean Girls references
- Welcome to Night Vale: where even “not” isn’t what it seems
I wrote an incredibly long series analysing linguistics elements in all 26 episodes of the excellent BBC radio comedy Cabin Pressure:
Season 1: Airline vs Airdot in Abu Dhabi, Structural ambiguity and scalar implicature in Boston, Superlatives and “would do” in Cremona, At-issue-ness, passives, and metaphors in Douz, Why “Edinbra”, plural sports teams, and “posh Welsh” in Edinburgh, More on Edinburgh/Edinbra, Word games in Fitton.
Season 2: NATO alphabet and chiasmus in Helsinki, Polish names and sportscaster present in Gdansk, Expletive infixation, strong past, Gricean maxims, and quantifiers in Ipswich, Formal vocabulary, Spanish, and onomatopoeia in Johannesburg, Ambiguous compounds in Kuala Lumpur, Limericks, perfect rhymes, and evil-sounding names in Limerick, Christmas mondegreens in Molokai.
Season 3: Ellipsis ambiguity in Newcastle, Snowclones, irregular plurals, and adjectives in Ottery St Mary, Diagnostic questions and rhyming phrases in Paris, Uvular stops, Q, French adverbs in Qikiqtarjuaq, dactyls and “DER der der” in Rotterdam, At-issue content in St Petersburg.
Season 4: Contrastive focus reduplication in Timbuktu, Modality in Uskerty, The NPI “give a hoot” in Vaduz, Gricean relevance in Wokingham, Reduplication, truth conditions, and accidental doge speak in Xinzhou, Swollen speech in Yverdon-les-Bains, Ambiguity of “big”, hereditary accents, and otters in Zurich.
How to teach yourself more linguistics
- How to remember the IPA vowel chart
- How to remember the IPA consonant chart
- Phonological natural classes and set theory, a nifty diagram!
- Phonotactics or why Spanish speakers drink “esprite”
- A detailed explanation of Sonorants, Obstruents, and Sonority
- Quantifier scope jokes
- Why do we get confused about “you and me”?
- Why “because X” isn’t a preposition (or was already a preposition all along)
- Pied-Piping Day: A holiday the origins of which you may not be aware
- How linguistics is like coding
- How to threaten people and spoil jokes using Gricean Implicatures
- Slash: A punctuation mark slash conjunction slash topic shifter
- Cocktail Party Linguistics: Explaining English plurals to non-linguists
- Moar words, fewer meanings: How “moar” doesn’t always mean “more”
- Unaccusativity and the mysteries of French past participle agreement, brought to you by reindeer
- Why learn semantics? Comebacks to annoying people
I have a long series about syntax trees:
- So, you asked the internet how to draw syntax trees. Here’s why you’re confused.
- What do we even mean by a syntax tree?
- Type 1: A sentence is an S
- Type 2: A sentence is an IP
- Type 3: A sentence is a TP
- Reconciling theories and final notes
- Other resources and topics
- A step-by-step guide to drawing trees, with gifs
Posts about language learning:
- Will learning a second language help me learn linguistics?
- Will learning linguistics help me with learning new languages?
- Why linguists hate being asked how many languages they know
- Using Gricean maxims to deflect the “how many languages do you know?” question in a way that leads to a better conversation
- How to learn vocabulary in another language in 12 steps (using science!)
- 12 ways to stop freezing up when you try to speak a language you’re less fluent in
- Linguistic approaches to language learning (link roundup)
Rec lists that I update occasionally:
- How to teach yourself linguistics online for free
- A very long list of pop linguistics books and lingfic
- Linguistics and language podcasts (from Superlinguo but I co-sign it)
For advice on academic linguistics programs, lingcomm, grad school, and getting a job with one or more linguistics degrees, see the Linguistics Jobs Series page.
Meta
How we made a better podcast website for Lingthusiasm
LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social:
- Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
- Designing online conferences for building community
- Scheduling online conferences for building community
- Hosting online conferences for building community
- Budgeting online conferences or events
- Planning accessible online conferences
A crash course in “getting” Twitter, for linguists and other people in specific niches
How to interact with someone who’s just given a talk - A guide to academic conversations