language and thought

Language and Spatial Cognition

Your native language does more than just give you words for "left" and "right"; its very grammar shapes how you…

6 days ago

Autohyponymy: The Word Inside

Can a word be a specific type of itself? This article introduces autohyponymy, a fascinating linguistic quirk where words like…

6 days ago

The Mass-Count Distinction

Why can you count 'chairs' but not 'furniture'? This linguistic puzzle is explained by the mass-count distinction, a fundamental rule…

6 days ago

Syntactic Priming: The Echo

Ever found yourself accidentally copying the sentence structure of the person you're talking to? This isn't a coincidence; it's a…

6 days ago

Constructing a Field Dictionary from Scratch

Imagine being the first outsider to document a language with no written form. How would you create its first-ever dictionary?…

1 month ago

Logophoricity: The Grammar of Point of View

How do we know who "he" is in the sentence "John said he was tired"? While English leaves it ambiguous,…

1 month ago

One Slice, One Loaf: The Logic of Measure Words

Ever wondered why you can't say "one rice" in English or "one bread" in Chinese? This post dives into the…

1 month ago

The Grammar of a Bluff: Linguistics at the Poker Table

Beyond the cards and chips, the poker table is a battlefield of language where every action is a speech act.…

1 month ago

The ‘Gavagai’ Problem: How We Map Words to Reality

Imagine a speaker in a new language points to a rabbit and says "gavagai." How do you know if it…

1 month ago

How a Phoneme is Born

Language sounds are always in flux, but where do new ones come from? This article explores the fascinating linguistic process…

1 month ago

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