(come to class for the fun ones)

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General Linguistics

• The Linguistic Society of America’s webpage dedicated to helping students at any level locate resources to study Linguistics
• All Things Linguistic, Gretchen McCulloch’s long running, excellent blog about Linguistics
• Superlinguo, Lauren Gawne’s equally excellent blog about Language and Linguistics
• PBS’s Crash Course Linguistics, a video introduction to the study of Linguistics
• The Ling Space, an excellent YouTube channel that covers a wide variety of many linguistic topics that also has a website
• Wikipedia’s article on Linguistics is well written for a general audience, but the related articles can be highly technical at times
• For free, open-source, fully certified, online linguistics classes, The Virtual Linguistics Campus has you covered

Phonetics & Phonology

• The International Phonetic Association, the organization responsible for producing the IPA Chart and includes a clickable chart with sound files of different speakers for each phone
• Peter Ladefoged’s fifth edition of A Course in Phonetics, hosted by UCLA (the current print version is the seventh edition)
• Sammy, the interactive sagittal section, created by Daniel Currie Hall and hosted by Saint Mary’s University
• Typeit.org, a site for typing IPA symbols that allows for copying and pasting symbols instead of downloading fonts
• Bobo Gaming’s YouTube channel presents examples of tone in Mandarin Chinese
• From YouTuber Ben Actis, a viral video of his Italian Grandmother using Google Home for the first time, highlighting the need for linguists in Artificial Intelligence
• Praat, the free phonetics software package created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the University of Amsterdam, includes manuals
• XKCD comic about complex vowels that should not be missed. Go for the image. Stay for the mouseover text.

Morphology

• A fun overview of cottagecore, bound morphemes, and borrowings from JSTOR Daily
• A fantastic example of reduplication features in this Smithsonian Magazine article from 2018 about what to call the moon of a moon
• Rhabarberbarbara, the best and most hilarious video about compounding ever that even non-German speakers can easily understand
• The Oxford English Dictionary, the best dictionary for learning the history and productivity of English morphemes; check your local library for a subscription
• XKCD comics (contain adult language):
  • concerning the loss of inflectional morphemes
  • concerning the one infix in English, the offensive one, not its cousin, freaking
  • concerning intensifiers, to which JSTOR Daily also addresses

Syntax

• A comprehensive guide to garden path sentences and lexical ambiguity, written by Itamar Shatz, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University
• Neil Whitman wrote a fun yet informative article in 2013 about because shifting from its subordinating conjunction role to that of a preposition for Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl.
• Tactus Therapy, a producer of speech therapy apps, has several informative videos that demonstrate how important syntax is to speech production:
  • This YouTube video featuring Mike Caputo, a survivor of Broca’s Aphasia and founder of Voices of Hope, illustrates how difficult the loss of content words can be for speakers and the impact it has on syntax while at the same time not interferring with the comprehension of language
  • This YouTube video featuring Byron Peterson, a survivor of Wernicke’s Aphasia, presents speech that has maintained its well-formed syntactic structures, but has impaired content words, possibly interfering with the speaker’s comprehension and severely impacting the message of the speaker
• Online Syntax Tree generators can be useful for those who don’t want to draw them by hand:
  • This syntax tree generator created by Miles Shang is simple to use but requires the tree to be input as linear nested structures to generate a tree
  • This syntax tree generator created by Yoichiro Hasebe at Doshisha University is more customizable but may be more difficult to use by beginning students
• XKCD comic about lexical categories

Semantics

• A recent paper about iconicity, or universally understood speech sounds, has created a stir since its publication in Scientific Reports, the open-access counterpart to Nature, as it provides data from two experiments that suggest that there are some vocalizations that may be universal
• PBS’s lesson plan for high school students covers a fundamental question in lexical semantics: “Terrorist, Freedom Fighter, or Something in Between?”
• One of the more infamous introductions of Semantics to popular discourse was when President Bill Clinton had us wondering what the definition of is actually was; this introduction to verb classifications published by The Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES) of the European Commission may help
• At the intersection of Semantics and Natural Language Processing, how easily bias can creep into the most innocuous algorithms, from The Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation
• Free online Venn diagram maker for those who don’t want to draw by hand
• One of the few instances where there isn’t an XKCD for everything, Katie Martin, PhD student at MIT, made one
• Understanding hate speech is really hard for Facebook, especially since they don’t have enough linguists with the cultural knowledge necessary to spot it
• Unicorns? Traditionally a concept we have a sense of, but no referent for. These scientists might have found a referent for us

Pragmatics

• This video of Teddy the porcupine demonstrates Grice’s Cooperative Principle , at least by half of the participants in this conversation posted by Allison Blankenship at the Zooniversity1 YouTube channel
• T-Rex from Quantz attempts to explain performatives; don’t forget the mouseover text
• An XKCD that includes Gretchen McCulloch, Pragmatics, and Historical Linguistics
• Using Pragmatics and J.L. Austen to explain an unbelieveable baseball play by Peter Wayne Moe of Seattle Pacific University
• Collection of video clips illustrating violations of Grice’s converstaional maxims posted by YouTube channel by ricpot

Language and Gender

• What’s in a name? Christine Mallinson’s 2017 article about gender biases in language among many others kicks off this article from The Atlantic about naming conventions in the United States and how people get their last names
• Who is interrupted? The Guardian‘s report on rule changes at the Supreme Court sites a 2017 study and another one in 2020 that demonstrated that female justices were more frequently interrupted by both lawyers and other justices than the male justices on the courts. The rule changes that have followed from these revelations allow female justices equal time to speak without interruption, and has the added bonus of more verbal input from Justice Thomas