Category: authorship

369: The Grammarian Is In (with Ellen Jovin and Pete Swanton)

If you’re at a park in New York City, you may see someone at a table offering free grammar advice.

That person is writer Ellen Jovin, and she dispenses wisdom from her Grammar Table. What motivates her to do …

313: That’s Cool. That’s Hot. (featuring Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm)

Boiling with rage. A warm embrace. A cool time in a hot town.

How do we think about heat and cold, and how does this work its way into language? And does this have anything to do with what the …

254: Plagiarism

Did Melania Trump really plagiarise that speech?

Yeah, she totally did. But how can you tell if someone is copying someone else’s work? How do plagiarism checkers work? And can you beat them?

Linguist Daniel Midgley shows his work on …

160: Evidence for Innateness?

Are we hard-wired for language?

New studies have found that infants (and even adults) seem predisposed to certain combinations of sounds and words. But is this evidence for innateness, or is there another explanation?

Linguist Daniel Midgley takes us into …

146: Gender ID

Language research is turning up some surprising things about how language and gender interact.

It appears that our brains process language differently with male or female speakers. But what about online text? Can you tell whether someone is male or …

129: Light Warlpiri

With so many dying languages in the world, it’s good to see new languages being born.

A brand new language has been discovered in the Northern Territory. It’s Light Warlpiri, and while it seems to combine English with the Australian …

116: Downton Anachrony

Downton Abbey has enchanted millions of television viewers with the goings-on of the fictional Crawley family of the 1910s and 20s.

But some of the language they use is decidedly post-post-Edwardian, and language fans are having fun turning up words …

31: Who Wrote the Bible?

Scholars have long supposed that certain books of the Bible were written by a number of different authors.

Now a team of language researchers is using computers to determine Bible authorship, and they’re coming up with some surprising findings. Can …

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