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About George Walkden

NBN Episodes hosted by George:

Language September 26, 2016

Teen Talk

The Language of Adolescents

Sali Tagliamonte

Hosted by George Walkden
Teenagers get a lot of bad press. Whether it's how they look, how they dress, the things they say, the way they say it - it sometimes seems as if …
Language July 21, 2015

The Indo-European Controversy

Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics

Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis

Hosted by George Walkden
Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze …
Language September 29, 2014

Fixing English

Prescriptivism and Language History

Anne Curzan

Hosted by George Walkden
Language change is like a river. When people tell you how to use language, and how not to use it, they're attempting to build a dam that will put a …
Language April 26, 2014

A Syntax of Substance

David Adger

Hosted by George Walkden
Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it's easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax of …
Language March 29, 2014

The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought

Aneta Pavlenko

Hosted by George Walkden
Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual's capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority of human beings are bilingual …
Language May 20, 2013

Saussure

John E. Joseph

Hosted by George Walkden
Pretty much everyone who's done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure - a name that's attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony …
Language May 6, 2013

Universals of Comparative Morphology

Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words

Jonathan Bobaljik

Hosted by George Walkden
Morphology is sometimes painted as the 'here be dragons' of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath Robinson contraptions abound and anything goes. In …
Language March 1, 2013

The Linguistic Cycle

Language Change and the Language Faculty

Elly van Gelderen

Hosted by George Walkden
In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford University Press, 2011), Elly van Gelderen tackles …
Language November 18, 2012

Sociolinguistic Typology

Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity

Peter Trudgill

Hosted by George Walkden
If you had to bet your life on learning a language in three months, which language would you choose? Peter Trudgill's first choice wouldn't be Faroese or Polish; and in …