In this article we provide a brief overview of some of the forefront research topics in human language evolution. We begin by briefly reviewing the bio-evolutionary framework usage in linguistics, then analyze central theoretical premises with regard to language organization in the brain and examine modern understanding of the importance of the specific brain structural features such as cerebra...

Until recently, the study of writing systems was something of a Cinderella subject within the discipline of linguistics. For a long time there was only one standard monograph, I.J. Gelb’s 1952 book A Study of Writing, which was valuable but was little influenced by the insights of modern structural linguistics. Many linguists saw human language as a window onto biologically-determined structure...

The paper deals with the development of certain preference expressions (in particular 'rather') against the background of language change. Following results from narrow syntax, a diachronic reanalysis at the level of Logical Form is proposed. Synchronically, certain actuality entailments (Bhatt 1999/2006) are observed and a structural analysis capitalizing on Hacquard (2009) is proposed. This w...

This article examines the issue of whether linguistics is better suited for a face-to-face (F2F) environment than an online teaching environment. Specifically, it examines assessment scores and student perceptions of the effectiveness of an introductory linguistics course at an undergraduate state university that has been taught multiple times in both online and F2F modes. To study this issue d...

One cannot ignore the impression, when going through the indexes of a sufficiently large number of relevant works in linguistics or language theory, that vagueness — other than, for instance, ambiguity — has in the majority of cases not yet gained the status of a keyword signalling a topic of current interest. This might seem rather a paradox considering the fact that modern linguistics, and it...