Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010)

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Lingoblog continues to provide you with suggestions for your summer readings on various linguistic topics. This week we have found a biography of language researcher Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010).

In January 1999, a few years after I had moved to Denmark, I was astounded to come across an interview in the Danish weekly Weekendavisen with the renowned Danish phonetician Eli Fischer- Jørgensen (henceforth EFJ) and marveled: She is still alive! Having made her name in publications as early as the first half of the past century, in the interview EFJ still appeared intellectually unabated, and full of new writing plans yet. She even remarked that she hoped soon to finish a major work on a special liturgic form of Danish!

In …

What can linguistics do (for me)? – or how I turned (from) science (in)to art

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Cover photo: Video still from Some Islands: Pitcairn Island 2016

I write this purposefully provocative piece from Adelaide, South Australia. The University of Adelaide is where I studied linguistics as a graduate student from 2007-2011 and where I worked as a postdoctoral researcher from 2011-2013. From one of my intellectual ground zero points I want to ask myself: what did I learn about linguistics during that time? And further: what can linguistics as a discipline do for me and possibly for others? I pose these two questions because I am situated at a verge; I have begun work in earnest as an experimental documentary film maker where I am turning the arduous work of several of my jaunts of linguistic …

Description, theory and linguistics as a science – an interview with William B. McGregor

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Professor William B. McGregor is an Australian-born linguist who works at Aarhus University in Denmark. He has published various books on linguistic theory and Australian languages, which include Semiotic Grammar (1997), Verb classification in Australian languages (2002), The Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia (2004), Linguistics: An Introduction (2009, 2015 second edition) and Sign Languages of the World: A Comparative Handbook (2015, coeditor with Julie Bakken Jepsen, Goedele A. M. De Clerck and Sam Lutalo-Kiingi). He has written extensively on a wide range of topics which include optional case marking, zero-markers, Australian historical linguistics and Shua syntax. He is also the author of various grammatical descriptions of Australian languages including Warrwa, Gooniyandi and Nyulnyul.

I interviewed him in Aarhus about …