LINGUISTIC SCIENCE AND LANGUAGE TESTS

Linguistic Research and Language Teaching

It is not uncommon for theoretical linguists to find themselves involved in language teaching because of their expertise in a specific language, even though their primary training is not in language instruction. Apparent lack of intellectual stimulus and career development is a typical concern shared by those who are in these academic positions; and it is sometimes the case that time spent on l...

Language variation and linguistic invariants

Human languages are diverse and so precise statements of common properties must abstract away from specifics of particular languages. We note several abstract and absolute ‘Type 1’ universals and present some new ones built on a notion of ‘structural invariant’ that applies equally to constituent structure and individual grammatical morphemes. Crucially, these universals may be realized in stru...

Linguistic Relativity and Spatial Language

Linguistic Invariants and Language Variation

Since the publication of Noam Chomsky’s field founding Syntactic Structures in 1957, generative grammarians have been formulating and studying the grammars of particular languages to extract from them what is general across languages. The idea is that properties which all languages have will give us some insight into the nature of mind. A widely acknowledged problem to which this work has led i...

Language extinction and linguistic fronts

Language diversity has become greatly endangered in the past centuries owing to processes of language shift from indigenous languages to other languages that are seen as socially and economically more advantageous, resulting in the death or doom of minority languages. In this paper, we define a new language competition model that can describe the historical decline of minority languages in comp...