Top Research Papers on Linguistics

This collection presents new research on key topics in anthropological linguistics, with a focus on African languages. While Africanist linguists have long been concerned with sociocultural aspects of language structure and use, no comprehensive volume dedicated to the anthropological linguistics of Africa has yet been published. This volume seeks to fill this gap. The chapters address a broad range of topics in anthropological linguistics, including classic themes such as spatial reference, color, kin terms, and emotion, as well as emerging interests in the linguistic expression of personhood...

Anthropological linguistics is the study of language within the wider context of culture. It is concerned with how humans employ communicative culturally meaningful, or semiotic practices, as resources to forge large and small, transient or permanent social groups. Such semiotic practices are underpinned by abilities and conventions at three levels: individual‐cognitive, interpersonal‐interactive, and sociocultural‐institutional, and the breadth of anthropological linguistics results from the fact that it conducts studies at all three levels, examples of which are presented in this entry.

This book is the first comprehensive systematic introduction to the linguistics of humor. Assuming no background in humor studies at all, and an elementary knowledge of linguistics, all the terminology and conceptual apparatus of humor studies are introduced, as well as all the linguistic concepts necessary to understand the most up-to-date formulations in the linguistics and applied linguistics of humor. The book is not limited to the theoretical linguistic analyses of humor (for example the General Theory of Verbal humor or the Isotopy Disjunction Model), but has a broad approach encompassin...

Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students' sense of self and identity. This book presents Anti-Black Linguistic R...

Linguistics is concerned with rules that are followed by languages as a system. Computational linguistics(CL)combines the power of machine learning and human language.As a subfield of linguistics, CL is concerned with the computational description of rules that languages follow. Itis what powers anything in a machine or device that has to do with language—speaking, writing, reading, and listening. It is often linked with natural language processing (NLP), which is the use of computers to identify structures in natural language.The boundary between NLP and CL is not so clear-cut. This paper is ...

CLICS tackles interconnected interdisciplinary research questions about the colexification of words across semantic categories in the world’s languages, and show-cases best practices for preparing data for cross-linguistic research.

In the last fifteen years, we have seen the emergence of a branch of linguistics which has come to be called Documentary Linguistics. It is concerned with the making and keeping of records of the world’s languages and their patterns of use. This emergence has taken place alongside major changes in the technology of linguistic data representation and maintenance; alongside new attention to linguistic diversity; alongside an increasing focus on the threats to that diversity by the endangerment of languages and language practices around the world, especially in small indigenous communities; and p...

This book develops a model of language which can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. Its core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed and in fact reconstituted by the feedback-loop interaction of three components: usage, i.e. the interpersonal and cognitive activities of speakers in concrete communication; conventionalization, i.e. the social processes taking place in speech communities; and entrenchment, i.e. the cognitive processes taking place in the minds of individual speakers. Extending the so-calle...

This book sheds light on the theoretical and methodological issues underlying the use of corpora, provides a critical evaluation of the scientific literature, and demonstrates how to use corpora in academic work.

Corpus Linguistics has revolutionised the world of language study and is an essential component of work in Applied Linguistics. This book, now in its second edition, provides a thorough introduction to all the key research issues in Corpus Linguistics, from the point of view of Applied Linguistics. The field has progressed a great deal since the first edition, so this edition has been completely rewritten to reflect these advances, whilst still maintaining the emphasis on hands-on corpus research of the first edition. It includes chapters on qualitative and quantitative research, applications ...

Now in its second edition, this accessible guide and introduction to critical applied linguistics provides a clear overview of the problems, debates, and competing views in language education, literacy, discourse analysis, language in the workplace, translation, and other language-related domains. Covering both critical theory and domains of practice, the book is organized around five themes: the politics of knowledge, the politics of language, the politics of difference, the politics of texts, and the politics of pedagogy. Recognizing that a changing world requires new ways of think...

Paradoxically, doing corpus linguistics is both easier and harder than it has ever been before. On the one hand, it is easier because we have access to more existing corpora, more corpus analysis software tools, and more statistical methods than ever before. On the other hand, reliance on these existing corpora and corpus linguistic methods can potentially create layers of distance between the researcher and the language in a corpus, making it a challenge to do linguistics with a corpus. The goal of this Element is to explore ways for us to improve how we approach linguistic research questions...

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) creates, stores, and distributes language resources, in particular language corpora, for educational, governmental, and commercial purposes. At this time, the number of corpora available on the LDC platform exceeds 900, and new ones are added on a monthly basis. Since its founding in 1992, LDC has had thousands of members such as universities, libraries, government research laboratories, and corporations. While there is a plethora of language resources available to researchers these days, LDC continues to stand out by offering an unparalleled selection of c...

Linguistic Theories of Humor appeared thirty years ago. It attracted a lot of attention and ended up being one of the most quoted books in the linguistics of humor. Partly due to its broad coverage which includes both theoretical and socio-pragmatic aspects and partly due to the depth of its bibliography it remained an indispensable reference in many areas, despite the growth of the field. The original fully corrected text is supplemented by a long essay, in which the author revisits the topics of the book to discuss how three decades have shifted the perspective of the field.

This is the third, newly revised and extended edition of this successful book (that has already been translated into three languages). Like the previous editions, it is entirely based on the programming language and environment R and is still thoroughly hands-on (with thousands of lines of heavily annotated code for all computations and plots). However, this edition has been updated based on many workshops/bootcamps taught by the author all over the world for the past few years: This edition has been didactically streamlined with regard to its exposition, it adds two new chapters – one on mixe...

is a substantial contribution to our field, both in scope and significance and will likely prompt many readers to reflect upon the history of forensic linguistics and the place of this edition in that history.Readers will likely recall the popularity of the first edition in 2010, which provided broad coverage of the field with plentiful reference to general scholarship in linguistics, applied linguistics and the legal processes giving it a wide appeal.However, no sooner do we start to consider the history or development of this field than we run into a range of definitional problems: what exac...

Critical applied linguistics remains deeply relevant today, arguably more than ever, but it needs constant renewal. This paper returns to these concerns to assess where this project has got to and where it may be headed. I review first both long-term and short-term political trends, from the rise of neoliberalism to the COVID pandemic. Next, I discuss responses to these conditions – questions of pessimism or hope – and their relevance for applied linguistics. This is followed by a discussion of epistemological changes (or turns) in applied linguistics, and an argument that we need to be both r...

This chapter gives an overview of parallel corpora, i.e. corpora containing source texts in a given language, aligned with their translations in another language. More specifically, it focuses on directional corpora, i.e. parallel corpora where the source and target languages are clearly identified. These types of corpora are widely used in contrastive linguistics and translation studies. The chapter first outlines the key features of parallel corpora (they typically contain written texts translated by expert translators working into their native language) and describes the main methods of par...

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and me...

This chapter discusses Complementizer Agreement (CA): agreement between the complementizer introducing an embedded finite clause and the subject of that embedded clause. CA is mainly found in Frisian and the nonstandard varieties of Dutch and German. This chapter discusses the morphological properties of CA, in particular the (defectivity of) its paradigm, the relation between the CA paradigm and the verbal agreement paradigm, and the relation between the agreement on the complementizer, clitics, and pro-drop. It also goes into the syntactic properties of CA: its distribution in the left perip...

This chapter surveys recent research on political discourse which makes use of corpus linguistics in order to show the direction of travel for work in this area and to reveal where there may be gaps in coverage. The first section addresses the different ways that we can interpret the idea of ‘political discourse’ and the genres this encompasses. The second presents the different kinds of topics that are studied in investigating the structures of political discourse, while the third section shows the themes which have received attention in studies of the content of political discourse. The four...

Negative existentials: A cross-linguistic study

Heritage languages are minority languages learned in a bilingual environment. These include immigrant languages, aboriginal or indigenous languages and historical minority languages. In the last two decades, heritage languages have become central to many areas of linguistic research, from bilingual language acquisition, education and language policies, to theoretical linguistics. Bringing together contributions from a team of internationally renowned experts, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art overview of this emerging area of study from a number of different perspectives, ranging from ...

The second edition of this invaluable introductory text takes account of developments in syntactic studies. Dealing with the whole range of syntax, this book explains, in a lucid and approachable way, why linguists have adopted certain solutions to problems and not others. This book introduces the basic concepts used in the description of syntax, independently of any single model of grammar. Profusely illustrated with diagrams, there are sets of exercises for every chapter which can be used in class or by students working independently.

Abstract This article argues for an uncovering of the multitude of ways in which applied linguistics has functioned as an important and effective vehicle for White supremacy and empire, with its disciplinary roots embedded in assumptions about racial inequalities and racial hierarchies and, equally importantly, the concealment of these forms of racial discrimination which often manifest as innocuous language practices. In particular, the notion of objectivity has played a guiding role in reinscribing Whiteness in much applied linguistics theorizing and research within a global context of inequ...

This is the third, newly revised and extended edition of this successful book (that has already been translated into three languages). Like the previous editions, it is entirely based on the programming language and environment R and is still thoroughly hands-on (with thousands of lines of heavily annotated code for all computations and plots). However, this edition has been updated based on many workshops/bootcamps taught by the author all over the world for the past few years: This edition has been didactically streamlined with regard to its exposition, it adds two new chapters - one on mixe...

Abstract In this final contribution to the issue, we discuss the important concept of generalizability and how it relates to applied linguists’ ability to serve language learners of all shades and grades. We provide insight into how biased sampling in Applied Linguistics currently is and how such bias may skew the knowledge that we, applied linguists, are building about second language learning and instruction. For example, our conclusions are often framed as universally-applying, even though the samples that have given rise to them are highly specific and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Ri...

The ontology dolce is introduced and how to use it on a few modeling cases is shown, showing how to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains.

The results suggest that language performance in naturalistic probes expose subtle early signs of progression to AD in advance of clinical diagnosis of impairment.

This paper provides an overview of how analyses of linguistic features in writing samples provide a greater understanding of predictions of both text quality and writer development and links between language features within texts. Specifically, this paper provides an overview of how language features found in text can predict human judgements of writing proficiency and changes in writing levels in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. The goal is to provide a better understanding of how language features in text produced by writers may influence writing quality and growth. The overvie...

This paper addresses the problem of automatically generating human-like descriptions for unseen images, given a collection of images and their corresponding human-generated descriptions, and presents a generic method which benefits from all three sources simultaneously, and is capable of constructing novel descriptions.

Preliminary analyses of the data suggest that scholars may give abstracts lower ratings of scientific quality when the writing does not conform to standards of international academic English.

"Now in its second edition, this accessible guide and introduction to critical applied linguistics provides a clear overview of the problems, debates, and competing views in language education, literacy, discourse analysis, language in the workplace, translation and other language-related domains. Covering both critical theory and domains of practice, the book is organized around five themes: the politics of knowledge, the politics of language, the politics of texts, the politics of pedagogy, and the politics of difference. Recognizing that a changing world requires new ways of thinking, and t...

Drawing on ethnographic interview data informed by international students in Australia, this study aims to expand the notion of ‘linguistic racism’ through two main traits–‘ethnic accent bullying’ and ‘linguistic stereotyping.’ ‘Ethnic accent bullying’ refers to bullying in the forms of ‘laughing’ and ‘joking’ towards ethnically and linguistically different background speakers’ biographical English accent. ‘Linguistic stereotyping’ refers to predefined negative perceptions imposed on English speakers based on their race, ethnicity, and nationality. These speakers are often ‘heard,’ ‘seen,’ or ...

Geography studies the world. Our knowledge of the world, however, comes mostly from Anglophone sources. This makes Geography in urgent need of worlding – of including multiple voices and languages from around the world. Introducing the notion of linguistic privilege, the article establishes language as an important dimension of epistemic struggle, alongside gender, race, class and others. Its analysis finds the greatest linguistic privilege in the most influential positions in knowledge production – editors of handbooks and journals and authors of progress reports. Three strategies of worlding...

This work establishes that brain responses to words are modulated by ubiquitous, probabilistic predictions, and disentangle model-based predictions into distinct dimensions, revealing dissociable signatures of syntactic, phonemic and semantic predictions.

Abstract Linguistics, and typology in particular, can have a bright future. We justify this optimism by discussing comparability from two angles. First, we take the opportunity presented by this special issue of Linguistic Typology to pause for a moment and make explicit some of the logical underpinnings of typological sciences, linguistics included, which we believe are worth reminding ourselves of. Second, we give a brief illustration of comparison, and particularly measurement, within modern typology.

Language diversity is under threat. While each language is subject to specific social, demographic and political pressures, there may also be common threatening processes. We use an analysis of 6,511 spoken languages with 51 predictor variables spanning aspects of population, documentation, legal recognition, education policy, socioeconomic indicators and environmental features to show that, counter to common perception, contact with other languages per se is not a driver of language loss. However, greater road density, which may encourage population movement, is associated with increased enda...

In the words of Etta James, “At Last.”April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy is, indeed, the book that many of us have been waiting for—not just in ...

This book is thought-provoking for the field of applied linguistics (AL). Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South seeks to map the areas in which AL has been overwhe...