Stefan Müller

2/ And then I do not even get the book chapters. I get stuff related to the book chapters.

Why is anybody publishing with #OUP?

Why are they doing this to us? I want this book! Why do I have to download 15 files instead of the book? Did these publishers ever talk to their costumers?

#OUP

As evidence that chunking is the mechanism behind the formation of complex units in language, from prefabs to constructions, we consider in the following sections both the phonetic effects of chunking and changes in analysability and compositionality due to chunking. Phonetic effects of chunking and repetition will be discussed in the next section. There we will see that within a

I guess this was intentional. =:-)

#Bybee

Somebody has an heart attac. I woman tries to help him and calls for a doctor. Man says that he is a doctor. She asks for help. He says that he has a doctor in Linguistics. She says: „We should help him!“ He thinks of a syntax tree of this utterance.

#Cartography #Syntax #Linguistics

Hi, there are still people out there believing in parameters being in our genes? Is there a recent paper setting that straight for non-biologists?

I have the following:

Elman, Jeffrey L., Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi & Kim
Plunkett. 1996 […]

This is what profit-oriented publishers with several hundreds of years of experience give you.

What you see there should be an AVM. But it is just gibberish.

#DeGruyter

2/ Hm, I feel a little bad since this turns out to be "my" most successful toot on my linguistic account and the content is not by me. At least it is credited in the image. So thanks to snail.and.snail for this great cartoon.

Analysis in HPSG of reduplicaiton

Paper by Yanru Lu and me about #reduplication in #MandarinChinese is now (pre-)published:

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226725101047

#Linguistics #HPSG #Grammar #Morphology #fun

#Language #Mathematics #English #Grammar .

Graphic withe the words „We are hiring“ on it.

Job offer: full-time postdoctoral position
– Digitality of Historical Research –
to start on 1st of July 2026.
The contract is fixed-term and limited to a maximum of five years.
Salary: German pay grade TV-L EG 13.

Please send your application by 09.03.2026 […]

[Original post on fedihum.org]

This is a proof that one does not need #MicrosoftWord to get the kerning wrong.

The paper is from 1937. Bill Gates was not even born back then.

#layout #typography

I know this is pretty small beer in the light of world events, but I was not expecting to have to write “risk of invasion by the USA” into the risk assessment for my fieldwork in Greenland in June.

These conundrums are addressed by Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG; Sag 2012; Michaelis 2012, 2015; Sag et al 2012), an extension of BCG that embodies lexicalist commitments common to HPSG (Miiller and Wechsler 2014). SBCG expands the canon of

„Sign-Based Construction Grammar is an extension of Berkeley Construction Grammar.“ But can there be an extension of something inconsistent?

Logically you can infer everything from inconsistent stuff. If you add things it does not get better. Or worse.

I would […]

[Original post on lingo.lol]

Somebody just found out that the source code of @langscipress books is available on the page of the books and thanked me enthusiastically.

So, in case you do not know this yet. The source code of ALL our 308 books is available on github and linked from within the books and from the langsci book […]

I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person. Let me give you an example. Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am. Does the leadership at my company promote a xenophobic agenda and use the wealth I help them acquire to donate directly to bigoted causes and politicians I find despicable? Yeah, sure. Did I celebrate my last birthday at Drag Brunch? Also yes. I even tipped with five-dollar bills. I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one. Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically. I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans. And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others. But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement. Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go. Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms. And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do. Of course, I don’t love everything the company does, but true love means loving something because of its flaws, not despite them. And more importantly, I’ve completely detached myself from reality and real suffering and intend to continue to do so as long as I work here and after I leave.

One of the best pieces I've read in awhile. Emily Bressler in @mcsweeneys.net writes "I Work for an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person":

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person

In particular, we eschew the traditional terms direct object and indirect object, which we take to reflect a thematic distinction (i.e., one based upon semantic role), not one of relative obliqueness.

Working on a conference paper. A reviewer asked for the term "primary object". I wanted to add a footnote and did not remember the exact publication this term was defined in. But what I did remember was that the word "eschew" was used. I learned the word back then and liked it. =:-)

OK. Did not know this. I first thought this was a hallucination of #ChatGPT, but Gerhard Helbig really published a book in the VEB Niemeyer in Halle in East Germany. And this book was copublished by Mouton and therefore is now available at De Gruyter.

Hm.

#Elsevier finally (after 25 years) retracted the primary study concluding that #glyphosate is safe for humans. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in #Roundup herbicide and manufactured by #Monsanto.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230099913715

h/t @civodul […]

AVM for the Argument Realization Principle

When I retire, I will start a collection of versions of the Argument Realization Principle in HPSG.

This one (wrongly) predicts that only elements that are final in the ARG-ST can be extracted.

It is fun to read papers from around 2000 and be absolutely sure that this must have been written with #ChatGPT, since it does not make any sense at all.

But this must have been #NaturalFoolishness.

I find it strange that one has to supply a list of societies in which one is a member for CVs. One can be a member of a lot of societies by just paying money without doing anything.

This is an article about reduplication in Madarin Chinese. By Yanru Lu and me. It grew out of Ynaru Lu's masther thesis and will appear in 2027 in the Journal of Linguistics.

Have fun.

https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009505

#linguistics #language #Chinese #syntax #morphology #semantics #HPSG

Hm. So #ConstructionGrammar is about #LLMs now? I think this is the wrong way to go.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MnyaPhopxCGZgH7iWAwbmx4X4N7xY759/view

#CxG

Screenshot of a post: This is a week when arts degrees are worthless but asking the AI industry to pay for the products of that would kill the whole industry

ht @MMantscheffAu

Analysis of [dass] er ihm den Teich leer fischt ‘that he fishes the pond empty for him’, an example in which the benefactive and the resultative construction interact

New version of my paper on phrasal constructions in TAG.

https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009130

#Grammatik #Linguistik #Argumentstruktur #CxG #Konstruktionsgrammatik #ConstructionGrammar #HPSG #Lexikalismus

The #HPSG website from Tübingen has been archived by Frank Richter, who is in Frankfurt/Main now.

It is over 20 years old:

https://www.english-linguistics.de/archives/hpsg/starten.html

If you want to have a glimps of the design back then …

This is the result of an #openAccess and #openSource publication in the Grammars and dictionaries series. A #Dagaare-#English Dictionary Web Application.

Thanks to @langscipress! And to Adams Bodomo and to Omar Zintan Mwinila-Yuori.

https://zintan.pythonanywhere.com/

Just found another way to derive my #ErdosNumber of 4:

0 Paul Erdős
1 Patrick Eugene O'Neill
2 Gerhard Weikum
3 Ulrich Schäfer/Hans Uszkoreit
4 Stefan Müller (An Integrated Archictecture for Shallow and Deep Processing)

@marshalla99 Yes, Language Science Press is a scientific publisher that was founded by scientists for science publications. Of course this is not about novels or things like this. They should be payed. I am talking as a scientist to a scientific community here. Sorry, if this was not clear […]

@marshalla99 Scientist are paid for their work (usually), they do not need money from readers. And the money you get for a book is usually not a lot, unless you are George Lackoff or so.

I would like to know how many copies of the Grammar Theory textbook would have been sold, if it was not OA.