Linguistic genocide or superdiversity: new and old language diversities

Commentary : Superdiversity old and new

This commentary reviews the papers in this volume as successful attempts at unthinking a legacy of nation-state sociolinguistics, enabled by developments in Europe-based sociolinguistics and US-based linguistic anthropology. After offering arguments on why superdiversity should best be seen as an advanced and synthetic perspective on language and society and pointing out its fundamentally criti...

I-23: Freezing Oocytes: New or Old Ethical Issues?

Background: This paper considers whether the development of oocyte freezing raises any new or distinctive ethical issues. It will examine the ethical issues raised by this technique: the ’social’ use of egg freezing and how that might be defined; the use of egg freezing for cancer patients; and limitations and benefits of the technique. Materials and Methods: A consideration of the literature a...

Crowdsourcing and language studies: the new generation of linguistic data

that allowed us to collect this data. Participants heard 75 sentences from one of 16 artificially constructed languages, and were asked to identify individual words. Results from MTurk were Brainwaves are known to dip when semantic anomalies psycholinguistic data Screening for Confirming corpus trends statistically indistinguishable from controlled lab-based studies. are encountered. The leadin...

The Language of Text Messaging: “Linguistic Ruin” or Resource?

Self- or Pre-Tuning? Deep Linguistic Processing of Language Variants

This paper proposes a design strategy for deep language processing grammars to appropriately handle language variants. It allows a grammar to be restricted as to what language variant it is tuned to, but also to detect the variant a given input pertains to. This is evaluated and compared to results obtained with an alternative strategy by which the relevant variant is detected with current lang...