This is a critique of the logicist theory of truth and facts set forth in the final section of John R. Searle’s book ‘The Construction of Social Reality’ (1995). Searle’s logicist account, much in the line of his theory of speech acts, is contrasted to a pragmaticist and interactionalist perspective on truth, facts, and discourse. Keywords:…[Read more]

Review of A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages by R. D. Fulk, 2018.

The field of Chinese Historical Phonology is traditionally dealing with a large number of complex and diverse types of data. While the data diversity can be conveniently dealt with in qualitative approaches, computational possibilities that have arisen during the past two decades offer new possibilities and new challenges for the field. In the…[Read more]

English abstract: A proposal to roughly classify acts of discourse into three broad categories, according to their stance vis à vis the broader cultural conversation in which they occur or to which they belong. An act of discourse (a move in a conversation, a published text, etc.) may either fully partake of the accepted conventions of the…[Read more]

from
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LITERARY THEORY, CRITICISM AND PHILOLOGY
http://bit.ly/abibliog
Spanish abstract: En su ‘Teoría de los sentimientos morales’ habla Adam Smith de cómo en la comunicación pública el espectador virtual que emana de nuestro discurso puede no coincidir con los receptores reales de dicho discurso. Y ve Smith en esa no coi…[Read more]

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form’s linguistic and frequency distribution in second l…[Read more]

Line 1122 of Beowulf represents a problem where the findings of metrics, historical phonology, and the reading of the manuscript are in conflict with one another. I revive and adapt Tolkien’s proposal to emend lāðbite līċes līġ ealle forswealg to lāðbite līġes līċ eall forswealg “the cruel bite of fire swallowed up the entire bodies”. This…[Read more]

In this essay, I examined the idea of ‘technological revolution’ to confirm whether it connotes a sort of incorporation of existing technologies as new ones emerges or whether it portrays a ‘sharp discontinuity’ from the prior technologies. I began by exploring the dictionary definitions of ‘revolution’ in order to appropriate its usage in re…[Read more]

During comparative discourse, some scholars have ridiculed African indigenous concepts, phenomena, beliefs, and worldview in a forceful attempt to allow it to fit into western framework and to avoid the charge of irrationality. It is against this background this essay attempt to establish the basis for the rationality of discourse within the…[Read more]

Philip Kitcher is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the past two decades. In “The Advancement of Science (1993)”, he endeavor to probe the notions of progress and rationality in science. His position, in line with his teacher, Thomas Kuhn, was a critique of what he called ‘a legendary view of science’. Thus, he gave new int…[Read more]

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

This is a brief summary of my research results in the field of historical-comparative linguistics and on the subject of language reconstruction. The main focus is on the scientific examination of proto-languages. In this paper, I want to pursue the question about the possibility of a genetic relationship between Proto-Indo-European and…[Read more]

This document summarizes all contributions to the blog “Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice” from 2019, online also available under https://calc.hypotheses.org.

Workshop presentation about reconstruction of sounds preserved only in marginal daughter languages attested later than the earliest daughters

Discussion of recent new proposals for the reconstruction of the PIE sounds called “laryngeals”

“སོ་རི་མེ་བུ།”, “so ri me bu” (teeth, mountain, fire, boy), is an alphabet book for Tibetan. It was in use at Esukhia’s immersion and online school from 2015 to 2018, when it was replaced by an improved and expanded version called “A0 Jongdeb” (https://www.esukhia.xyz/a0-cover). At the time, it represented a major pedagogical breakthroug…[Read more]

This study presents a digital, retro-standardized edition of the Tableaux Phonétiques des Patois Suisses Romands (TPPSR), an early collection of lexical dialect data of the Suisse romande, which was compiled by Louis Gauchat, Jules Jeanqaquet, and Ernest Tappolet in the beginning of the 20th century and later published in 1925. While the plan of…[Read more]

Native speakers are often assumed to be efficient in identifying whether a word in their language has been borrowed, even when they do not have direct knowledge of the donor language from which it was taken. To detect borrowings, speakers make use of various strategies, often in combination, relying on clues such as semantics of the words in…[Read more]

This presentation discusses whether the dating application Tinder and similarly organized applications reinforce rigid gender and other identities and addresses the potential of technologically enhanced selves to contest them. Notions of identity as well as aspects of power and agency in the context of dating apps are discussed by referring to…[Read more]