The Eclectic Company
Language & Linguistics

  The Chomskybot  Languages in General  Phonetics and Phonology  Applied Linguistics
  Grammar of English  History of English  Metaphor  Universities  People  Net Links 
  Computational Linguistics  Software  Books and Journals  Miscellaneous  
   
There is a surprisingly large variety of linguistic resources on the Web already,
with plenty more no doubt to follow.

  • One can already, for instance, read the LINGUIST List on the Web.
  • One can now peruse the definitive bibliography of the late Dwight Bolinger prepared by his son and literary executor.
    (It includes a lovely picture of Bolinger, in a characteristic pose.)
  • One can see the full text (and the attached bibliography) of the LSA Resolution on "Ebonics" from the recent Annual Meeting.
    (I was there and can vouch that it was unanimous; in fact, we had a bit of trouble getting some folks to agree to call the press reports only "incorrect and demeaning", instead of far stronger language. But, amazingly, several hundred linguists in the same room managed to discuss, edit, and resoundingly approve the resolution in under an hour. No doubt the fact that it was almost dinner time helped.)
  • On Usenet, one can read sci.lang, a newsgroup for language scientists, i.e, linguists.
    Alternatively, one can read alt.usage.english, a Usenet newsgroup specializing in English usage, popular grammar, idioms, etymology, and prescriptivist theories.
    (Incidentally, I am apparently one of the few linguists inhabiting a.u.e with the /xucpe/ -- or simply poor judgement -- to post there often. I have ulterior motives, of course: I've put a couple of collections of my postings to a.u.e on various topics relating to English grammar, phonology, and usage up on the Web)
  • One can also look up the "genetic" provenance of any language through the electronic wizardry of the Summer Institute of Linguistics's Ethnologue, including the Top 100 Languages.
    (I put genetic in scare quotes to remind myself that a so-called "genetics"
    with no provision for sex is a pretty lame excuse for a metaphor)
  • One can look up any modern English verb to see what syntactic peculiarities it may have and what grammatical classes it belongs to in the Verb Index from Beth Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation (U Chicago Press 1993).
    (To see all the details, of course, you should buy the book;
    but if you have it, you can check any verb in it online.)
  • University of Michigan people (faculty, staff, students) can benefit from our site license to look up the Indo-European root of any English word in the American Heritage Dictionary, part of the Humanities Text Initiative.
    (On the "Basic Searches" page, click the arrow by Lookup and select Indo-European Roots, then type in the word and Search)
    University of Michigan people can also access almost all current Linguistics journals online, courtesy of the UM Library.
  • There is a great deal of data available now. One can seize the opportunity to grep a huge corpus of English text, searching for words and their context, in the CobuildDirect Demo.
    (The definition of grep is provided courtesy of the Jargon File,
    an autolexicographic project of impressive sophistication.)
  • Even more thrilling, anyone (even non-LDC members) can now set up a guest account with the Linguistic Data Consortium in order to access the Brown Corpus, among others.
  • One can now access COSWL's 1993 collection of Language and Gender Syllabi
    (Syllabi from 26 different courses, from all over the world, in many disciplines, from many viewpoints, all on the same topic.)
  • Or, for those irritating little questions, like "What are Linguistics, anyway?",
    one now has choices: Linguistics is (as we have known all the time) fun.
  • One may now read about an innovative approach to Swahili noun classification by Ellen Contini-Morava of the University of Virginia, and even search a database of Swahili nouns
    (Swahili is a Bantu language, which, as all linguists know, means it has
    an elaborate system of prefixal agreement, based on an elaborate system
    of noun classes, like Indo-European gender on steroids.)
  • Or one can approach linguistics via a species of constructivism, by perusing Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit,
    (which contains all the information any SF writer would need to make up a reasonable alien language. And serves as quite a good introduction to linguistic concepts for beginners, to boot.)
  • One can even contemplate the Words (or rather the Phrases) of The Master,
    finding near-infinite wisdom in their universality and optimality.
    (Parenthetically, The Chomskybot seems to have become something of a popular icon. We had over 150,000 hits on it the first year it was up, and have found it widely linked, and even imitated, the sincerest form of flattery.)


  • Following is a more-or-less categorized (and irregularly annotated) list of the linguistic resources (i.e, resources of, by, and for linguists) that I've chanced across on the Web.

  • Languages in General

  • The Human Language Page at Willamette
  • Yamada Language Guides
  • Travellers' Languages
  • "Model" Languages, i.e, made-up ones.
  • American Sign Language and related sites
  • The Ojibwe Language, which is after all the native language of Michigan
  • Gamilaraay Dictionary, a real Australian language in all its glory
  • Mark Twain's The Awful German Language
  • Hungarian-English and English-Hungarian Dictionary
  • Internet Accesses of Chinese Language Data
  • On-Line Dictionaries, from Robert Beard at Bucknell
  • On-Line Grammars, ditto.
  • Latin & Greek sources
  • Phonetics and Phonology   (Many of these use heavy graphics and sound resources).

  • Sounds of the World's Animals
  • Cours de phonétique   (en Français, naturellement)
  • Berkeley Phonology Lab
  • Canadian Raising (/ay, aw/ ==> [@y, @w] before voiceless obstruents)
  • Online Speech Synthesizer
  • Applied   All Linguistics is Applied Linguistics. So, what else is new?

  • The English Language Institute, at the University of Michigan
    The one, the only.
  • The Center for Applied Linguistics
  • Charles University Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
  • Birkbeck resources:
  • WWW Virtual Library for Applied Linguistics
  • Birkbeck Applied
  • Interlanguage Centre
  • Larry Selinker
  • The English Language  Loving or livid

  • Grammar, Usage, & Style  My Language, Write Or Rong
  • Frequently Asked Questions about English grammar and usage, Series 1 and 2
    by (* ahem *) John Lawler
  • Jack Lynch's Literary Research Tools and Grammar and Style Notes
  • English Grammar
  • Literary Stylistics, EL 307, NUS
  • Introduction to Critical Reading, at Pitt
  • C.-J. Bailey's Orchid Land Publications
  • ESL, EFL and CALL
  • 1918 Strunk's Elements of Style, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's 1919 The Oxford Book of English Verse, complete
  • English 88: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry by Al Filreis at U Pennsylvania.
  • Verb Index from Levin (1993)
  • History  From Beowulf to Netscape
  • Old English Pages, and Hwæt!, both from Cathy Ball at Georgetown
  • Middle English
  • English 016 Narrative fiction, from Georgetown U.
  • Man's Reach Must Exceed his Grasp; or, What's a Metaphor?

  • George Lakoff, my thesis advisor, is on the Web now.
  • Design for a Theory of Meaning , by Mark Turner
  • Tony Veale's Metaphor Home Page
  • Metaphor and Metonymy Group (at Leicester and Nottingham)
  • Body Metaphors
  • "Metaphors We Compute By", by Yours Truly
  • "Feelings Stuck in a GUI web: metaphors, image-schemata, and designing the human computer interface"
  • Walkabout: Cyberspace as Place
  • Metaphor and Analogy Page Lots of interesting stuff, most by Tony Veale
  • Universities   (Well, not complete universities. Just the important parts.)

  • University of Michigan Linguistics Department home sweet home page
  • Georgetown Linguistics
  • The LINGUIST List of Linguistics Programs
  • University of Chicago
  • Cornell University
    site of the 1997 LSA Summer Institute.
  • University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana
    site of the 1999 LSA Summer Institute
  • University of California at Santa Barbara
    site of the 2001 LSA Summer Institute
  • Stockholm University Linguistics Dept.
  • Yahoo's list of Linguistics Departments
  • Carnegie-Mellon
  • Ohio State University Linguistics Dept
  • Rochester Linguistics Links
  • Eastern Michigan University Linguistics Program
  • Cal State Fullerton
  • Computational Linguistics Extremely well-represented on the Net,
    for fairly obvious reasons. There are many, many more resources one can track down.

  • NLP resources by Chris Manning
  • Dragomir Radev of the UM's School of Information
  • More NLP resources from the online appendices of
    Using Computers in Linguistics: Principles and Practice
  • Computational Linguistics Sites in the U.K.
  • Nordic Computational Linguistics Network
  • Introduction to Computational Linguistics at Georgetown
  • Indonesian Machine Translation, a particularly nice example of the genre
  • Computational Linguistics E-Prints
  • Computational Linguistics Sites in Germany
  • The ACL NLP/CL Universe, at Columbia University
  • ECHO - EURODICAUTOM
  • People

  • James D. McCawley (1938-1999)
    Jim's Home Page with his full bibliography
  • Helen Dry and Anthony Manuel Rodrigues Aristar
  • Geoffrey R. Sampson
  • Matthew Dryer
  • Bill Baxter
  • San Duanmu
  • Jerry Morgan and Georgia Green
  • Östen Dahl
  • Geoff Nunberg (as heard on Fresh Air®)
  • Alicia Beckford Wassink
  • Jimmy Harnsberger
  • Rob Malouf
  • Ed Keenan
  • Len Talmy
  • Rick Wojcik
  • T. Daniel Seely
  • Bridget Copley
  • Ivan Sag
  • Larry Horn
  • Bert Peeters
  • Ellen Prince
  • Geoff Pullum
  • Dr. Michael A. Covington
  • Net links  Valuable resources.

  • Net Resources of Interest to Linguists, from the English Department of Mississippi State University.
  • University of Pennsylvania's Linguistics Links
    (with some kind words for these pages. Thanks, folks)
  • Umich Linguistics Archives  Texts, bibliographies, software, fonts, etc.
    ... and the whole Umich Archive is right upstairs.
  • Reference Shelf
  • Yahoo Languages & Linguistics
  • Language and Linguistics  from Rick Wojcik
  • EINet: Language
  • Books and Journals  A very small sample of what's out there

  • Internet bookshop
  • Index to the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics from Elsevier.
    (European mirror in the Netherlands)
  • John Benjamins
    There really is a John Benjamins, by the way. I met him at LSA once.
  • Chicago Linguistic Society
  • Blackwells Linguistics Catalogue and Linguistic Resources
  • Roget's Thesaurus, 1911 edition
  • Language, journal of the Linguistic Society of America
  • The Chicago Linguistic Society
  • Software

  • WordNet and WordNet 1.5 on the Web
  • Comp-jugador provides conjugations of Spanish verbs online.
  • Miscellaneous

  • Association for Linguistic Typology
  • Yahoo - Business:Corporations:Languages (didn't think there were any, did you?)
  • Meta Text Analysis
  • alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb Must be experienced; a real net.unique.
  • CFP: Symposium: Theories and Metaphors of Cyberspace; how to publish and perish.
  • The Requirements of a Computing Environment for Linguistic Research,
    by Gary Simons of the SIL (to be published in our upcoming book)
  • General Semantics (in French)
  • The LINGUIST Gratuitous Pig
  • McCarthy on Concepts, a very interesting proposal.
  • The Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford (CogSci-based)
  • GOODSPEED DAY
  • Chomsky interview in geekgirl #2

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    Last change 1/11/01 John Lawler     The Eclectic Company