Sexism row prompts Oxford Dictionaries to review language used in definitions

Oxford Dictionaries has said it will review the example sentences it uses for the adjective “rabid” after being accused of sexism over its current example: “a rabid feminist”. The dictionary publisher, part of Oxford University Press, was taken to task by the Canadian anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan, after he noticed that the word “rabid”, defined by the dictionary as “having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something”, used the example phrase “rabid feminist”. Oman-Reagan tweeted about it to the publisher, suggesting they change it. Oman-Reagan,…

[Resource] Corpus ‘Australia 2015/2016’

The corpus ‘Australia 2015/2016’ includes all articles from major Australian newspapers published from August 2015 to July 2016 that include the key term ‘Australia’ or ‘Australian(s)’ in the title. Altogether, the corpus contains over 7 million tokens in almost 13,000 articles from 18 newspapers. The corpus thus reflects one year of printed media coverage of topics directly relevant to Australia. Download Australia2015/2016 Corpus here Download word frequencies from this corpus here

The Tony Kent Strix Annual Lecture – Geological Society, London, 31/10/2016

The 2016 Lecture will be given by Peter Ingwersen, Professor Emeritus at The Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, at the Geological Society in London during the afternoon of Monday 31st October. Professor Ingwersen won the award in 2015. There will be two speakers: following an introductory paper by Stephen Robertson – Search: then and now — with particular reference to the web, in which delegates will hear how we have reached the point at which Google is their primary or even sole entry-point to the…

Free MIT courses on linguistics

Here is a list of undergraduate and graduate courses that MIT has placed online so anyone can complete at their own pace. They cover syntax, phonology and semantics. I have maintained the links so clicking on any of them should redirect you to each course’s webpage. Course # Course Title Level 24.244 Modal Logic Undergraduate 24.903 Language and its Structure III: Semantics and Pragmatics Undergraduate 24.906J Linguistic Studies of Bilingualism Undergraduate 24.91 Topics in Linguistic Theory: Propositional Attitudes Undergraduate 24.91 Topics in Linguistics Theory Undergraduate 21A.212 Myth, Ritual, and Symbolism…

Branger. Debression.Oexit. Zumxit. Why Did Brexit Trigger a Brexplosion of Wordplay?

Branger. Debression.Oexit. Zumxit. Why Did Brexit Trigger a Brexplosion of Wordplay? By John Kelly Stocks plunged. Political parties imploded. Fear flared. Europe as we know it quaked. The world freaked out last Friday after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, or “Brexit,” the now-household blend of British and exit the process is going by. And across the media, the shocking results triggered a paroxysm—abravalanche, a mass brysteria—of Brexit-induced portmanteaus. Welcome to Portmantexia, as linguist Arnold Zwicky has christened this brave new world: Many U.K. citizens who voted to Bremain…