I’m starting a new way of getting updates about my linguistic activities: summary blog posts on my website approximately once a month. My blog, All Things Linguistic, continues to update daily, and I continue to write for Slate’s language blog, Lexicon Valley, and elsewhere, but if you’d rather get a highlights version or you prefer to subscribe to things via email, that’s what these posts are for. They’ll also be a useful record, as All Things Linguistic by now has a considerable archive. You can subscribe via email using the “follow” button at the side, via rss, or just check my website and probably other social media profiles.
In July, I taught two linguistics sessions to 9-14 year olds at Explorations summer camp in Montreal. I wrote summary blog posts each week with the activities we did and some reflections on the experience.
- How Does Language Work? week 1
- How Does Language Work? week 2
- Make Your Own Language, week 3
- Make Your Own Language, week 4
Highlights of my recent writing for Lexicon Valley:
- “Look at all these ducks there are at least ten” Why is this caption funny? (Gricean maxims)
- When your eyes hear better than your ears: The McGurk Effect
- Why do sportscasters use the historical present? (In honour of the World Cup)
- What happens if a child is never exposed to language?
Selected blog posts:
- How Latin became the Romance languages
- Verb tenses/aspects with timelines
- Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” gets doge wrong, among other problems
- Practice with pronouns
- One wug, two __, red wug, blue wug
For August, I’m starting a new project on crowdsourced linguistics, which you can read about here.
Gretchen McCulloch 