Ekaterina Lyutikova on Syntax Models (Or “Syntax for Laypeople&#...

Dec 24, 2015 by

Ekaterina Lyutikova on Syntax Models (Or “Syntax for Laypeople” in under 15 Minutes)

[Note to Readers: the following is my translation from Russian of Ekaterina Lyutikova’s video lecture posted on PostNauka.ru, posted here with her permission. Some Russian examples have been replaced by corresponding English...

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Does Universal Grammar Theory Imply that Language Are All the Same?—Re...

Nov 29, 2015 by

Does Universal Grammar Theory Imply that Language Are All the Same?—Response to Vyvyan Evans (Part 2)

In the previous post, I began laying out a response to Vyvyan Evans’ article in Aeon and more generally in his book, The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. That earlier post focuses on whether language is in instinct. In...

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Ekaterina Lyutikova on the Architecture of Grammar

Nov 19, 2015 by

Ekaterina Lyutikova on the Architecture of Grammar

[Note to Readers: the following is my translation from Russian of Ekaterina Lyutikova’s video lecture posted on PostNauka.ru, posted here with her permission. Some Russian examples have been replaced by corresponding English...

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A Guide to the Perplexed: How to Identify Pseudo-Linguistic Articles i...

Nov 8, 2015 by

A Guide to the Perplexed: How to Identify Pseudo-Linguistic Articles in the Media

[The title of this post is inspired by the title of a famous work by one of my favorite scholars of all time, Moshe ben Maimon, aka Maimonides, an extremely influential Jewish philosopher, astronomer, Torah scholar, and physician....

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Is There a Language-Area of the Brain?—And Moro’s Experiments about Re...

Oct 22, 2015 by

Is There a Language-Area of the Brain?—And Moro’s Experiments about Real and “Fake” Italian

Russian neurolinguist and experimental psychologist Tatiana Chernigovskaya has recently given a public lecture “How the internet changed our brain”. (Thanks to Inna Louneva for drawing my attention to this lecture.) A transcript of...

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Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geogra...

Oct 1, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 2)

In the previous post, I began to analyze Svetlana Burlak’s critique of Longobardi et al. (2015), posted on Генофонд.рф website. As I pointed out, the idea that grammar is a better indicator of language relatedness finds new support...

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