Andrew Smith
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andrewdmsmith.bsky.social
Andrew Smith
@andrewdmsmith.bsky.social
470 followers 340 following 14 posts
Linguist at Stirling University. Cànanaiche. Cognitive linguistics, language evolution, grammaticalisation, metaphor, Gàidhlig, languages, Scottish and UK politics, football (Burnley/ East Stirlingshire/ groundhopping), music, maps, cats, other stuff.
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Reposted by Andrew Smith
cambup-linguistics.cambridge.org
"A compelling and thought-provoking analysis of human sociality and the origins of language."

The Interaction Engine by Stephen C. Levinson (@mpi-nl.bsky.social), Out Now & #OpenAccess

https://cup.org/4nusznG

#OA #Linguistics #LangSky 🐦🐦
Abstract painting of two people gesturing
October 1, 2025 at 9:05 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
mustafaucar.bsky.social
Hang it in the Louvre
July 20, 2025 at 7:48 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
violawiegand.bsky.social
The data is actually part of my forthcoming book, ”Exploring Meaning in Surveillance
Discourses through Corpora“ - available to pre-order now (with a discount code 😉 😇), and coming out in March 2026 (so stay tuned ☺️)

#cl2025 @cl2025.co.uk @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social
EXPLORING MEANING IN SUPVEILLANCE DISCOURSESCORPORA BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Pre-order now at 35% off: Exploring Meaning in Surveillance Discourses through Corpora Viola Wiegand This book takes a fresh perspective on surveillance, examining how it is defined, discussed, and negotiated in different domains of public discourse Use the following discount code to save 35% on bloomsbury.com/9781350501515: BLOOM-CONF-26 March 2026 Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and surveillance studies, this book focuses on how surveillance is defined, discussed, and negotiated in public discourses. It analyses different meaning components of the cultural keyword of surveillance - inherently linked to power relations - in ongoing debates of public discourses. The author looks at the representation of surveillance in different discourse domains through three different studies - the prime academic joural in surveillance studies (Surveillance & Society), The Times newspaper, and the signage of public spaces. The first two studies illustrate implementations of a novel method of 'co-occurrence comparisons' in diachronic analyses of collocation. The final study integrates cutting-edge research on the multimodal representation of surveillance in public spaces. Adopting the sociolinguistic framework of 'surveillant landscapes' from mediated discourses analysis, this analysis reveals how surveillant practices are signalled in public environments. To capture the textual and material representation of surveillance in a collection of photographs from public spaces in multiple cities across Europe, North America, and Asia, the study presents a novel methodology combining corpus and qualitative methods for the analysis of multimodal data. Viola Wiegand is Lecturer in Education (TESOL) at the University of Stirling, UK.
July 2, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
haspelmath.bsky.social
Interested in Balkan languages? The definitive reference work has arrived – on 1000 pages, in open access. www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...
June 30, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
superlinguo.bsky.social
A Decade of Lingwiki: An informal history

2025 marks ten years of lingwik. I like round numbers, documenting informal histories and lingwiki, and so I wanted to celebrate this anniversary by sharing the parts of the lingwiki story I am familiar with.

www.superlinguo.com/post/7870922...
A Decade of Lingwiki: An informal history Lingwiki...
A Decade of Lingwiki: An informal history Lingwiki is the name used for an informal network of people and events with the aim of improving the representation of linguistics on Wikipedia. Whether it’...
www.superlinguo.com
June 30, 2025 at 7:38 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
carorowland.bsky.social
Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/
www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social
Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition
Explaining how children build a language system is a central goal of research in language acquisition, with broad implications for language evolution, adult language processing, and artificial intelli...
www.cell.com
June 27, 2025 at 5:17 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
ollisilv.bsky.social
Some years ago, I started to notice the phrase 'going forward' in the sense 'in the future, from now on'. When @tanjasaily.fi and Turo Vartiainen organised a workshop on constructional creativity and innovation and asked me to join, I decided to take a closer look. Here is the result:
Going forward as an adverb | English Language & Linguistics | Cambridge Core
Going forward as an adverb
doi.org
June 24, 2025 at 7:13 PM
andrewdmsmith.bsky.social
Wow!
ellamchawk.bsky.social Dr Ella Hawkins @ellamchawk.bsky.social · May 29
Today is National Biscuit Day, and it’s about time that I populated this account with biscuit (cookie) sets from the past few years. Here are some of my favourites. 🧵

First up, a set inspired by the delicious designs of William Morris and John Henry Dearle.
A set of eight rectangular cookies arranged on a square white plate against a dark wooden background. Each cookie is inspired by a wallpaper design by Morris & Co. The patterns represented feature different floral and leaf shapes in shades of baby blue, soft pink, leafy green, mustard yellow, cream, and dark grey.
May 29, 2025 at 9:19 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
unpopularscience.bsky.social
I will forever be haunted by this footage.

Trawling has only been filmed underwater a few times in documentary history, and never with such clarity.

What’s so heart-rending about these shots is watching how the animals don’t just get swept up — they swim for their lives.
🌎🦑🧪
May 9, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
petergeoghegan.bsky.social
🔴 Remember Aria, the “moonshot" research agency dreamed up by Dominic Cummings?

It's funded by £800m in public money but exempt from FOI laws

We decided to fight for transparency... and we won 🎉

New on Democracy for Sale w/ @lucasamin.bsky.social

democracyforsale.substack.com/p/dominic-cu...
Democracy for Sale 1, Dominic Cummings 0
We fought to expose the £800m research agency that Cummings built to escape scrutiny - and we won.
democracyforsale.substack.com
April 24, 2025 at 9:52 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
cognitionjournal.bsky.social
"Words acquire new meanings by creative processes of semantic extension. We studied this experimentally: participants conventionalise novel labels with a partner, then extend labels to convey new meanings. Salient shared associations facilitated figurative semantic extensions."

See link below!
April 22, 2025 at 2:28 PM
andrewdmsmith.bsky.social
New article in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social
with @kennysmithed.bsky.social and Josie Bowerman.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Semantic extension in a novel communication system is facilitated by salient shared associations
Creative processes of semantic extension play a key role in language change, grammaticalisation, and (by hypothesis) the early origins and evolution o…
www.sciencedirect.com
April 18, 2025 at 12:22 PM
andrewdmsmith.bsky.social
New paper on metonymic and metaphorical semantic extension in a novel communication system with @kennysmithed.bsky.social and Josie Bowerman out in Cognition.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Kenny Smith (@kennysmithed.bsky.social)
Professor of evolutionary linguistics at Edinburgh. Cyclist, runner, climber, coward.
kennysmithed.bsky.social
April 15, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
krissychula.bsky.social
This is high art
April 6, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
georgemonbiot.bsky.social
You think the arbitrary arrest of political dissenters cannot happen in the UK? It already does. www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...
Quakers condemn police raid on Westminster Meeting House
Police broke into a Quaker Meeting House last night (27 March) and arrested six young people holding a meeting over concerns for the climate and Gaza.
www.quaker.org.uk
March 29, 2025 at 7:39 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
edhawkins.org
Five years ago today, most historical UK monthly rainfall observations were not available to scientists.

But the 66,000 pieces of paper containing the data had been scanned.

With covid lockdown approaching we saw an opportunity to transcribe the data.

#RainfallRescue began... 🧵
March 26, 2025 at 10:37 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
petergeoghegan.bsky.social
🔴 For *four years* officials refused to release names of all companies linked to Conservative donors and party figures put in the 'VIP' lane for bumper Covid contracts

Now a judge has ordered them to.

Huge win for @jennacorderoy.bsky.social (and DfS)
democracyforsale.substack.com/p/government...
Government loses legal battle over Covid ‘VIP Lane’
Exclusive: Judge slams “most unsatisfactory” Cabinet Office and orders release of names of 'VIP' firms to Democracy for Sale reporter - after *four year* wait.
democracyforsale.substack.com
March 22, 2025 at 8:33 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
onicatam.bsky.social
Unpublished 2011 results rescued from oblivion!⏳ osf.io/preprints/ps.... Effects of systematicity and frequency distribution (uniform, skewed) on artificial language learning. With Barbora Skarabela, @andrewdmsmith.bsky.social and @simonkirby.bsky.social
OSF
osf.io
March 22, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
andywightman.scot
With yet more going round the houses in council tax - here is the secondary legislation I actually drafted that could reform it tomorrow andywightman.scot/2024/02/scra...
Scrapping the Council Tax is Straightforward - Land Matters
Today, the STUC has published an open letter to Scotland’s political parties urging them to revalue Scotland’s domestic property in order to provide an accurate tax base for the Council Tax which is s...
andywightman.scot
February 12, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
danaroemling.bsky.social
My paper with @bodowinter.bsky.social and @jwgrieve.bsky.social was published in the Journal of Linguistic Geography today. 🎉
It’s a tutorial on how to use R & ggplot2 to visualise linguistic map data.

doi.org/10.1017/jlg....
Visualizing map data for linguistics using ggplot2: A tutorial with examples from dialectology and typology | Journal of Linguistic Geography | Cambridge Core
Visualizing map data for linguistics using ggplot2: A tutorial with examples from dialectology and typology
doi.org
January 30, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
davidallengreen.bsky.social
NEW

How Harry and Watson forced News Group Newspapers to admit wrongdoing

Why the circumstances show it was NGN wanting to avoid a public trial—and not the costs risk on the claimants—that brought this case to its end

By me, at @prospectmagazine.co.uk

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...
The best explanation is perhaps not that the prince and Watson had finally buckled to costs risk; it instead looks like a desperate last-minute move by a publisher anxious to avoid a public trial of the claims. It appears from the evidence available that NGN signalled that it would actually accept liability. If so, this would change everything. If NGN accepted it was liable for at least the main part of the claims, there would be no need for a full trial—for there would be nothing to be tried. The prince and the politician would not now be able to force a full trial even if they had wanted to do. For a defendant to admit liability is an unusual, if not unique litigation ploy.
January 24, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
symbolicstorage.bsky.social
JOB ALERT! Come work with me!
34-Month Postdoc Position here at the Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in my project "Paths to Polysemy"
Job offer here: www.umk.pl/en/jobs/?tas...
Please repost & share widely!
a picture of Torun old town in winter
January 24, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
heddwen.bsky.social
I've become slightly obsessed with anachronyms; words that are used in an anachronistic way, by referring to something that was appropriate in a former time.

E.g. to clock in, to film something, to hang up the phone, to dial a number.

I've collected a list.
30 examples of anachronyms - English in Progress
Anachronyms are words that are used “in an anachronistic way, by referring to something in a way that is appropriate only for a former or later time.” (Source) I chanced upon the term through a Reddit...
englishinprogress.net
January 17, 2025 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Andrew Smith
pauliewaulie.bsky.social
In Eugene Ionesco’s play, ‘Rhinoceros’, nearly all of the characters gradually turn nto Rhinoceroses.

It’s a parable about how fascism spreads, and how its opponents concede one minor point after another before they nosedive into nazi savagery.

Niall Ferguson. And ‘conservatives’ everywhere:
ianfraser.bsky.social Ian Fraser @ianfraser.bsky.social · Jan 3
Niall Ferguson rewrites history, saying he erred in describing Donald Trump as “a demagogue and would-be tyrant” in the wake of the 6 January 2020 attacks on the US Capitol. Now, the historian seems eager to suck up to the president-elect.
Niall Ferguson: I was wrong to call Donald Trump a would-be tyrant
The historian was once a critic of the president-elect, but now says he is glad that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris — and has already visited him at Mar-a-Lago
www.thetimes.com
January 3, 2025 at 7:02 PM
andrewdmsmith.bsky.social
The worst parliament in history … so far.
bylinetimes.bsky.social Byline Times @bylinetimes.bsky.social · Dec 26
🔴 2024 In Review: The Year The Tory Story Ended

@russincheshire.bsky.social takes a look back at how the 'worst parliament in history' came to its calamitous conclusion...
2024 In Review: The Year The Tory Story Ended
Russell Jones looks back at how the ‘worst parliament in history’ came to its calamitous conclusion
bylinetimes.com
January 1, 2025 at 11:48 AM