Fabienne Martin

We're excited to re-launch the journal "Innovations in Linguistics Education", a forum for evidence-based research in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in linguistics! We open for submissions in January 2026.
journals.ed.ac.uk/innovations/

SynTeach Focus Group Interest Form SynTeach is a project researching peoples' experiences teaching and learning syntax in higher education. We have conducted surveys of the field including syntax instructors and students, and we are pl...

SynTeach is a project looking at how syntax is taught in higher ed. Our next stage is FOCUS GROUPS—whether you loved or hated syntax, we'd love to talk to you! Sign up to be contacted as we're recruiting now: forms.gle/PiBYpVPr1yg2... #linguistics

There’s a deep difference between sentences like:

(1) Jane caused the glass to break.

vs.

(2) Jane broke the glass.

A surge of experimental philosophy research has led to some surprising discoveries about sentences like (2)

[Thread]

The average success rate for horizon 2020 isn't that low though, it's around 12%, see p. 19 of www.eu.dk/samling/2024...

this probably has to make the news: the train from Amsterdam to berlin is arriving 10 minutes TOO EARLY

A Street For Every Date Different cultures have their own conventions for naming locations, for example in the United Kingdom there are plenty of places named for monarchs, while in many other countries there are not. An aspect of this fascinated [Ben Ashforth], who decided to find all the streets in Europe named after auspicious dates, and then visit enough to make a calendar. He gave a lightning talk about it at last year’s EMF Camp, which we’ve embedded below. Starting with an aborted attempt to query Google Maps, he then moved on to the OpenStreetMap database. From there he was able to construct a list of date-related street name across the whole of Europe, and reveal a few surprising things about their distribution. He came up with a routing algorithm to devise the best progression in which to see them, and with a few tweaks to account for roads whose names had changed, arrived at an epic-but-efficient traversal of the continent. The result is a full year’s calendar of street names, which you can download from his website. Being used to significant Interrail travel where this is written, we approve of an algorithmically generated Euro trip. We’re indebted to [Barney Livingstone] for the tip, and we agree with him that 150 slides in a 5 minute talk is impressive indeed.

https://hackaday.com/2025/01/08/a-street-for-every-date/
(The guy who made a calendar out of street signs). The linked video is also highly recommended: only 5 minutes but 150 slides

Couverture du NME, 22 mai 1982

Décès de Véronique Vincent (68 ans, emportée, comme on dit, par un cancer). Chanteuse des Honeymoon Killers puis d'Aksak Maboul, elle est une des rares musiciennes francophones à avoir falt la "une" du New Musical Express (avec une photo d'Anton Corbijn).

Véronique Vincent (1957-2025)

(Photo : Anton Corbijn, 1982)

I forgot kramer from shimmy discs

Camper van Beethoven and the meridian brothers

Email saying: “Good afternoon, We needed to shift the schedule for this quarter’s meeting from August 4th to August 11th”

As someone who is not a syntactician I am nonetheless very interested in whether “needed” is in the past tense works as a hedge to soften the imposition of rescheduling the meeting, and how differently this would get read compared to “we need to reschedule”

"Je vais t'en donner" (lit. "I'll give you some") similarly can mean "I'll hit you"

3 new #DiamondOpenAccess papers published in @glossa-linguistics.bsky.social. See glossa-journal.org/articles/ Powered by the @janewayover.bsky.social platform, copy-edited & typeset by @siliconchipsuk, & financially supported by the scholar-owned consortial library model of @openlibhums.bsky.social

Oh ich habe das zweite von oben geliebt

I will say, it's heartwarming to see how chatbots have made professors reevaluate how deeply valuable messy student writing is as opposed to polished bot spam.

For anybody interested in this sort of thing, I think this is a valuable resource.

A graph of articles in the SEP (standord encyclopaedia of philosophy), showing connections; it can help explore the field.

www.visualizingsep.com#/domain/epis...

#Philosophy #philsky #SEP #graph #catalogue

There’s something funny about saying that someone caused something to happen when they didn’t act intentionally — as if that phrasing assigns unintended agency to them. Why is that?

In this new paper below, we take a linguistic approach to answering this question. Lots of interesting data here!

The academic’s mid-summer crisis is a mid-life crisis in miniature:

You realize summer is half gone, & not only that: you see that the longest & least burdened days came early, & they are well past. You compare all you thought you’d do against the days remaining & grieve for what never will be

I'm finishing an (overdue 🙈 ) short paper for the Cambridge handbook of natural language modality where i revisit modal causatives in phillips and kratzer's anchor semantics for modals. Anyone interested in reading it? I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

In my current data set of 3 minute excerpts of everyday conversations recorded by students over the past 9 years, there are 40 conversations containing singing out of 451 total submissions, or 9%

Let me know what singing-in-conversation ideas you have! #singingInConversation

but that's not passivization with the cognate object

"wir wurden nass geregnet" (but only with the resultative)
In french: "on s'est fait pleuvoir dessus" sounds good to me, passive with "être" sounds weird but one finds things like "Puis-je faire fonctionner mon générateur s'il est maintenant sec mais qu'il a été plu dessus"

and it has been proposed (eg by Haider or schäfer) that fate accusatives are hidden transitives with a covert external argument pro (rains apples-ACC = [Voice[pro[rain apples-ACC]]])

and in some languages like icelandic you have the accusative on the surface subject of some of those verbs; they are called fate or stray accusative verbs; "fate" because apparently these sentences often come with a "you can't do anything against it/inevitability" flavour

right sorry dative "von äpfelN" 🙈
By alternating verb I mean verb that can be used transitively or intransitively
It's the same weird transitive structure as in "es gibt einen Apfel auf dem tisch"

it's marked with accusative thus object right? "Es regnet einen schwall von Äpfel vom himmel" funnily an alternating verb

You're a philosopher, or a psychologist, or a neuroscientist, or a computer scientist.

You are interested in how humans think about any of: abilities, agents, animacy, aspects, attitudes, causation, degrees, dispositions, entities, events, facts, forces, goals, habits, identity, intentions, ... 🧵

🐦🐦

Call Center Workers Are Tired of Being Mistaken for AI As more workers are asked by strangers if they're bots, surreal conversations are prompting introspection in the industry about what it means to be human.

“In Australia, Canada, Greece and the US, call center agents say they’ve been repeatedly mistaken for AI. These people, who spend hours talking to strangers, are experiencing surreal conversations, where customers ask them to prove they are not machines.”

Perhaps generative linguistics is not totally lost after all, if it is capable of such insightful self-criticism.

arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12797