SynTeach is a project researching peoples' experiences teaching and learning syntax in higher education. We have conducted surveys of the field including syntax instructors and students, and we are pl...

Different cultures have their own conventions for naming locations, for example in the United Kingdom there are plenty of places named for monarchs, while in many other countries there are not. An aspect of this fascinated [Ben Ashforth], who decided to find all the streets in Europe named after auspicious dates, and then visit enough to make a calendar. He gave a lightning talk about it at last year’s EMF Camp, which we’ve embedded below. Starting with an aborted attempt to query Google Maps, he then moved on to the OpenStreetMap database. From there he was able to construct a list of date-related street name across the whole of Europe, and reveal a few surprising things about their distribution. He came up with a routing algorithm to devise the best progression in which to see them, and with a few tweaks to account for roads whose names had changed, arrived at an epic-but-efficient traversal of the continent. The result is a full year’s calendar of street names, which you can download from his website. Being used to significant Interrail travel where this is written, we approve of an algorithmically generated Euro trip. We’re indebted to [Barney Livingstone] for the tip, and we agree with him that 150 slides in a 5 minute talk is impressive indeed.

As more workers are asked by strangers if they're bots, surreal conversations are prompting introspection in the industry about what it means to be human.

Author(s): Palleschi, Daniela; Ronderos, Camilo Rodríguez; Knoeferle, Pia | Abstract: The English present perfect and simple future tenses are felicitous with the living, but not the dead, as a referent must exist at reference time. In contrast, the simple past is odd with living referents in out-of-the-blue statements, as it requires a specified or implied past reference time. We employed eye-tracking during reading (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading (Experiments 2 and 3) in order to explore how (referent) lifetime-tense congruence influences processing across three English tenses. Referent-lifetime contexts (e.g., Jimi Hendrix was an American musician. He died in London.) were followed by critical sentences in the present perfect (Experiments 1-3), simple future (Experiments 1 and 2), and the simple past (Experiment 3) (e.g., He has performed/will perform/performed in numerous music festivals.). Lifetime-tense congruence effects in reading times and naturalness responses emerged in all three tenses, but with differences in the latency, magnitude, and direction of effects: Longer reading times were elicited by the present perfect (Experiments 1-3) and simple past (Experiment 3) in incongruent (versus congruent) lifetime-tense conditions, with earlier and larger congruence effects in the present perfect. Conversely, the simple future elicited shorter reading times and reaction times in the incongruent condition (Experiments 1 and 2). All incongruent lifetime-tense conditions elicited lower naturalness judgements than congruent conditions, suggesting metalinguistic awareness of the violations, with the largest effect in the simple future condition. Our findings provide the first evidence of processing costs associated with violations of the Perfect Lifetime Effect, and contribute to the existing literature exploring the distribution and processing of (English) tenses.

Mark Dingemanse’s blog post “In praise of niche papers” is a lovely way to share academic influences. It got me thinking about some of my favourite papers that I love and cite, and which I’m always su...

Chatbots learned from human writing. Now it’s their turn to influence us.