We have lots of great Linguistics-related activities for our @lancslinguistics.bsky.social Open Day visitors today.

International Pragmatics Conference just kicking off at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Always a great opportunity to pick up conversations with so many friends and colleagues as if no time had passed since we last met.

Grateful to Linguistics at Georgetown for inviting me to give a talk but it looks like they arranged for Lancaster weather for my visit

I am deeply grateful to Aalborg University for a doctorate honoris causa and wonderful hospitality this week. Looking forward to collaborations with the Communication, Language and Discourse Research Group.

We show how experiences with #COVID-19 #vaccines have resulted in questions and concerns about what a vaccine actually is. This is a new form of vaccine skepticism that will need to be addressed.

Save the date!

On 11-12 September 2025, we are hosting the 5th Symposium of the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care (IC4CH) at Lancaster University. We hope you will join us!

For more information, see ic4ch.wordpress.com/activities/

Lots of comments today on the language used in the UK government's AI announcement. A quick Word Sketch of 'unleash' in the Oxford English Corpus shows that it has a negative semantic prosody, i.e. that most of the things that are 'unleashed' are bad. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Lunchtime walk to see Lancaster in the winter sunshine

Views from the train to and from Bangor, where I spoke to the lovely Linguistics Circle people about metaphors and vaccinations.

Just talked online about one of my favourite topics to a great audience at Shanghai International Studies University. The Q&A brought up issues we all contend with: access to health-related data, ethics, publishing interdisciplinary research, and also AI and metaphor identification.

If you are around Lancaster this autumn, join us for the last three lectures celebrating the 50th anniversary of Linguistics & English Language at Lancaster University! Details here: www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/...

We tested ten metaphors for vaccinations and found that they can help with social interactions about vaccines: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
@sflusberg.bsky.social

We then created five animations based on the metaphors that worked best. You can find them here: wp.lancs.ac.uk/vaccination-...

Second run for my undergraduate lecture on metaphors and Covid today. I've realised that I need to begin by taking into account the stage each cohort was at when it all started. This year it's the cohort who had their GCSEs cancelled.

Blue sky over Lancaster University for my first post on this platform. I teach in the Linguistics & English Language department and today I’m on campus welcoming Open Day visitors. We have wonders ready for them in our Phonetics lab and EEG lab.