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About Chris Cummins
NBN Episodes hosted by Chris:
June 22, 2017
Computational Models of Referring
Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring …
January 18, 2017
Yiddish and Power
As described by Dovid Katz, Yiddish is an extraordinarily multifaceted language: a language that is at once acclaimed as sacred and dismissed as defic…
August 3, 2016
Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice
According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) "explores…
February 17, 2016
Language, Mind and Computation
My instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I…
November 8, 2015
Writing Systems (2nd Edition)
It's not always been clear how the study of written language fits into linguistics. As a relatively recent historical development, it's tempting to se…
May 28, 2015
Philosophy of Language
I must admit that my relationship to philosophy of language is a bit like my relationship to classic literature: I tend to admire it from afar, and re…
March 18, 2015
From Whorf to Montague
A colleague once told me that people in linguistics could be divided into two groups: sheep and snipers. I'm not sure whether this is a proper dichoto…
December 13, 2014
Speaking Our Minds
I hope I'm not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as o…
September 14, 2014
Communicating
The name of the New Books in Language channel might hint at a disciplinary bias towards "language". So in some sense Ruth Finnegan's Communicating: th…
August 10, 2014
Attitudes to Endangered Languages
As linguists, we're wont to get protective about languages, whether we see them as data points in a typological analysis or a mass of different ways o…
July 18, 2014
The Language Hoax
The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think - sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - has had an interesting history…
June 9, 2014
The Geometry of Meaning
A conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Mean…
April 15, 2014
Other People's English
In linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no "better" or "worse" among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely …
January 28, 2014
Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax
When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsole…
November 7, 2013
The Materiality of Language
David Bleich's book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013) is described as a wide-ranging c…
September 25, 2013
Health and Risk Communication
Scientists - and I claim to include myself in this category - sometimes seem to be disparaging about the ability of people in general to understand an…
September 14, 2013
From Utterances to Speech Acts
The recognition of speech acts - classically, things like stating, requesting, promising, and so on - sometimes seems like a curiously neglected topic…
July 1, 2013
Native Listening
One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes there's no way around this and we just have …
June 10, 2013
Lexical Analysis
It's tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round afte…
May 30, 2013
The Emergence of Meaning
It's not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations - logic, in some sense, 'works'. For linguists, this represents a pote…
April 13, 2013
The Neural Architecture of Grammar
Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn't seem to be an imminent pr…
March 15, 2013
Understanding Language Through Humor
A problem with doing linguistics is that once you start, it's kind of inescapable - you see it everywhere. At some point a few months back, I was watc…
February 19, 2013
A History of Psycholinguistics
The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells…
January 16, 2013
The Anatomy of Meaning
Linguists are apt to get excited when a language is identified that exhibits exotic properties, and gladly travel halfway round the world to document …