Category: Linguistics
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2026
I recently had a colleague ask me about how to represent
language areas for one language group alongside other
languages spoken in the area. The observation was that many
languages with a small number..
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I recently attended the annual conference of the Society for
the Science of Motivation (SSM) in Barcelona. Joyce was
presenting a paper about our recent work automating
subcategory coding for implicit..
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When conducting comparative studies on linguistic features, we
are essentially observing patterns. In a previous post I
mentioned one problem we need to deal with, related to how we
represent the feat..
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Some colleagues and I recently published a paper updating our
progress on automating the coding of implicit motives. If you
follow my blog and research, I’ve been working with
psychologists on this ..
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Most of my fieldwork research on minority languages has been
conducted within the Austroasiatic (AA) family. This is a
group of languages spoken by diverse peoples across South
& Southeast Asia, and w..
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My interest in languages has led to some interesting places,
working on languages from different families in various
contexts. Most recently I’ve been curious about the ways that
languages develop ove..
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Since 2023 I’ve been teaching a course on natural language
processing at NTU Singapore. The goal is for students to learn
basic Python programming skills that allow them to work with
language data. Ty..
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2023
Last semester I taught an introductory Natural Language
Processing (NLP) course at Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. I wrote a thread about it on Twitter (now X) but
here is a slightly expa..
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2019
Things have been quite busy over the last year or so, when I
last posted. My wife and I moved to Zurich with our 4-month
old, I helped organize a workshop on word order here at UZH, a
proceedings volu..
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Planting rice near Jowai, NE India At the end of last year the
ICAAL 7 proceedings volume was published by University of
Hawai’i Press as a special issue of the Journal of the
South-East Asian Lingui..
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2018
The last post was a bit of a brain dump to make sure I didn’t
forget a few lessons I learned, in part because I knew I was
quitting the job that involved doing ML type things. While I
was working ther..
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2017
I have been quite lax with posting here mainly because I have
been working very hard on a difficult problem. My current job
involves (among other things) trying to automate a
psychological coding syst..
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One of the concerns that has occupied my mind for that past
few years is the question of data accessibility in the field
of Linguistics. I am happy to announce that the data that
underpins my grammati..
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One of the first things I did after passing my PhD
confirmation exercise (like a qualifying exam in the USA) was
to research the best way to write my thesis. As a side note, I
use the word ‘thesis’ to..
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Along the lines of some of my previous posts on tools for
linguistic analysis, I thought I’d post a quick update on a
Praat script I’ve been working on. While not part of the
series of posts I’ve been..
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Recently, I started to explore using Git to maintain and
organize my data. This includes both the primary data I work
from as a linguist and the various kinds of data I produce in
the form of written ..
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This is the fourth installment in a series of blog posts where
I discuss some of the tools I use for linguistic analysis. In
a previous post I described the tools I use for processing and
converting v..
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In this third post about linguistic tools, I’ll be discussing
software that I use for acoustic analysis. Praat is one of the
premier acoustic analysis tools available for computers. While
there are pr..
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When you discuss doing language documentation and description,
one of the first things to know is that you have to collect
language data. The primary source of language data is people
who speak the la..
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When I started my PhD program in Linguistics (language
documentation and description), I had some experience with
linguistic analysis, but not to the degree that I had to learn
in order to complete my..
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This is my first update in a long while, as I notice that this
blog hasn’t been updated since 2015. I blame life and the ease
of posting short updates on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Since my l..
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2014
I finally submitted my PhD thesis last week. It has been a
crazy final month. The reason I had that deadline was that
here in Singapore (at least at NTU) all PhD students are given
4 years of funding ..
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In my last post I discussed the concept of deixis and
illustrated deictic demonstratives in Pnar. Pnar’s deictic
demonstrative system combines gender clitics with largely
distance-based deictic morp..
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At the Himalayan Languages Symposium last week I gave a talk
about deixis. This grammatical feature is essentially
‘pointing’, and words or morphemes in language can point to
various things, so gramma..
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For the past week or so I’ve been working on getting my corpus
of transcribed and translated texts into shape. The word
corpus is from the Latin word meaning “body”, and in
this case refers to a “bo..
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2013
I’ve been in Bangkok for the last few days, attending the
SouthEast Asian Linguistics Society conference here at
Chulalongkorn University. The campus is in the center of
Bangkok and rather easy to get..
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I’ve been in Australia (affectionately known by locals as Oz
or ’stralia) for almost 3 weeks, and so far it’s been
fabulous. People are friendly, food is good and I’ve already
seen 2 incredible firewo..
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Over the coming weeks I plan to feature different people or
groups of people who have helped make this album a reality.
And where better to start than with the people I first started
working with in S..
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