Nathan Schneider

Currently accepting applications on a rolling basis! Postdoc in Empirical Approaches to Legal Interpretation, with a start date of Fall 2025. A great opportunity to work with the wonderful @complingy.bsky.social @kevintobia.bsky.social

Details here: apply.interfolio.com/170055

Saturday morning, feeling too lazy to produce even a schwa

'nɑnbənt̩

rabbinate
nonbinate?

Can't access today. :(

Me: English doesn't have resumptive pronouns.

Also me: It says to cool on wire racks, which I don't know where they are.

#syntax #RelativeClauses

7 Supreme Court justices: linguists may actually know something about how to interpret language?

Justice Thomas: now that's crazy talk.

Our survey highlights the enduring influence of linguistics on #NLProc. We emphasize 6 facets: Resources, Evaluation, Low-resource settings, Interpretability, Explanation, and the Study of language.

Grammar Fans Flock to a Film About Participles and Gerunds (Gift Article) “Rebel With a Clause” celebrates the improbable cross-country journey of a woman who gently imparts grammar rules to strangers.

So thrilled for @grammartable.bsky.social !

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/n...

📣 New Paper ⚖️🧑‍⚖️🏛️ Large Language Models for Legal Interpretation? Don't Take Their Word for It 👩‍⚖️🏛️⚖️ with @bwal.bsky.social , @complingy.bsky.social Amir Zeldes, and @kevintobia.bsky.social papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Reminds me of "at cost"

Well my understanding is that indexing matters for evaluating research in many institutions in Europe and Asia. There may be problems with the metrics, but one has to consider whether foregoing indexing will put researchers at a disadvantage relative to researchers in other fields.

At least, the ones that have to advertise this because nobody has heard of them are probably shady!

Four (4!) postdocs, neurosci of language, Georgetown University NeurosciLang Training Program docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"...My wife knows approximately 1,700 attractive, smart, funny, middle-aged single women who would love to be in a committed relationship with a man. (I don't mean with the *same* man.) (Although at this point they might not rule it out.)"

Dave Barry, formal semanticist

#linguistics

William Labov, ‘father of sociolinguistics’ who studied the Philadelphia accent, dies at 97 William Labov's work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. He is considered the father of sociolinguistics.

A lovely obituary for Bill Labov in the Inquirer.

Garden path of the day: "Merchan wrote the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump should receive broad immunity for official acts during his time in office did not mean the conviction should be dismissed...."

Definitely use software that sends a reminder to subscribers on the first of every month, those are super helpful.

Phase Transition xkcd.com/3025

CC: @grammartable.bsky.social

[POLL] What do you think about the grammaticality of the following sentence?:

"I’m not getting as good of service out here as I thought I would."

(absent a poll feature, reply with 👍 or 👎, and feel free to explain yourself)

Recently discovered this for taking out the trash!

How was this not a part of my postdoc?!

Of course, when evaluating a paper about a resource, there are many things to look for beyond trivial novelty (is the resource new). COLING 2018 had a separate set of questions for resource papers: coling2018.org/paper-types/

Practical technology is one possible motivation (whether a new specialized system or evaluation of a more general system). I also tend to think that creation of novel resources—especially if there is a systematic annotation effort—reveals something about how that language works.

Yeah, I think it's basically what Fillmore (1985) dubs "the semantics of understanding", which he contrasts with truth-conditional semantics. people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cos...

Now my impression is that the formal semanticists have walled off referential meaning and said that's pragmatics, not semantics. Which is convenient for certain theories (and all theories make idealizations), but misses a big part of the inferences people actually make when they encounter language.

Does it mean if all the buildings & people of Paris were the same but located in e.g. Germany? What language would they speak? Would there be croissants?

It's an odder (or more interpretively demanding) counterfactual than "If I hadn't forgotten my umbrella today, I wouldn't have gotten rained on."

What does "If Paris weren't in France" actually mean to people, though? It's the sort of counterfactual that is hard to reason about out of context, because much of what we know about Paris is tied to its location in France.

Sure...just as 'Paris' is interpreted by default as denoting a place in France. ('If Paris were not in France' is a weird hypothetical.)