Since its publication in July 2020, the Open Letter to the LSA regarding Steven Pinker has evoked many passionate reactions. The letter argued that Pinker's public statements are inconsistent with the LSA’s anti-racist values, asking to revoke Pinker's status as LSA Fellow and to remove him from the LSA's list of Media Experts. Signed by 600+ linguists, the letter has generated vigorous debate within and outside linguistics. This talk pushes the discussion forward by analyzing the responses to the letter using the tools of our profession – pragmatics and discourse analysis – and further suggesting an approach for examining the power of all individuals in the field.

This article examines the distribution of gender in arguments in example sentences in contemporary linguistics publications. Prior studies have shown that example sentences in syntax textbooks systematically underrepresent women and perpetuate gender stereotypes (Macaulay & Brice 1994, 1997, Pabst et al. 2018). Here we examine example sentences in articles published over the past twenty years in Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and find striking similarities to this prior work. Among our findings, we show a stark imbalance of male (N = 12,117) to female (N = 5,571) arguments, where male-gendered arguments are more likely to be subjects, and female-gendered arguments nonsubjects. We show that femalegendered arguments are more likely to be referred to using a kinship term, to exhibit positive emotions, and to be the object of affection, whereas male-gendered arguments are more likely to have occupations, to exhibit negative emotions, and to perpetrate violence. We show that this pattern has remained stable, with little change, over the course of the twenty years that we examine, leading up to the present day. We conclude with a brief discussion of possible remedies and suggestions for improvement.*

Phonetic aspects of many languages have been documented, though the breadth and focus of such documentation varies substantially. In this survey, phonetic aspects (here called ‘categories’) that are typically reported were assessed in three English-language collections – the Illustrations of the IPA from the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, articles from the Journal of Phonetics, and papers from the Ladefoged/Maddieson Sounds of the World’s Languages (SOWL) documentation project. Categories were defined for consonants (e.g. Voice Onset Time (VOT) and frication spectrum; 10 in total), vowels (e.g. formants and duration; 7 in total) and suprasegmentals (e.g. stress and distinctive vowel length, 6 in total). The Illustrations, due to their brevity, had, on average, limited coverage of the selected categories (12% of the 23 categories). Journal of Phonetics articles were typically theoretically motivated, but 64 had sufficient measurements to count as phonetic documentation; these also covered 12% of the categories. The SOWL studies, designed to cover as much of the phonetic structure as feasible in an article-length treatment, achieved 41% coverage on average. Four book-length studies were also examined, with an average of 49% coverage. Phonetic properties of many language families have been studied, though Indo-European is still disproportionately represented. Physiological measures were excluded as being less common, and perceptual measures were excluded as being typically more theoretical. This preliminary study indicates that certain acoustic properties of languages are typically measured and may be considered as an impetus for later, fuller coverage, but broader consensus on the categories is needed. Current and future documentation efforts would benefit these considerations being addressed.

This article examines the distribution of gender in arguments in example sentences in contemporary linguistics publications. Prior studies have shown that example sentences in syntax textbooks systematically underrepresent women and perpetuate gender stereotypes (Macaulay & Brice 1994, 1997, Pabst et al. 2018). Here we examine example sentences in articles published over the past twenty years in Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and find striking similarities to this prior work. Among our findings, we show a stark imbalance of male (N = 12,117) to female (N = 5,571) arguments, where male-gendered arguments are more likely to be subjects, and female-gendered arguments nonsubjects. We show that femalegendered arguments are more likely to be referred to using a kinship term, to exhibit positive emotions, and to be the object of affection, whereas male-gendered arguments are more likely to have occupations, to exhibit negative emotions, and to perpetrate violence. We show that this pattern has remained stable, with little change, over the course of the twenty years that we examine, leading up to the present day. We conclude with a brief discussion of possible remedies and suggestions for improvement.*

The study of sound change is foundational to traditional historical linguistics, particularly the linguistic comparative method. It is well established that the phonology of modern languages encodes useful data for studying the history of those languages, and their genetic relationships to one another. However, phonology has typically been the means to the end, enabling the comparative method, and coding of a comparative lexicon for cognacy. Once coded, the particular sounds involved no longer factor into the analysis. This study examines whether the phoneme inventories and phonotactic profiles of a set of languages themselves contain phylogenetic signal detectable using established statistical tests D statistic (Fritz & Purvis 2010), K (Blomberg et al 2003), and NeighborNet delta score (Holland et al 2002) and Q-residual (Gray et al 2010). This study adds to the growing body of work on the use of phonological traits in computational phylogenetics for linguistics. Using data from 20 Tai lects from the Kra-Dai language family, this study confirms and extends previous findings. This includes detection of strong phylogenetic signal in phoneme frequency and biphone transition probabilities, but also relatively strong phylogenetic signal detected in even coarse-grained phoneme and biphone presence/absence, which previous work was unable to do.

With the introduction of automatic methods for examining both the acoustic and articulatory aspects of speech, our knowledge of the phonetic details of well-studied languages has grown substantially. Research on the phonetics of under-documented languages has expanded, but the breadth of coverage remains a challenge. What topics within the sound systems of these languages should be documented? With an ultimate aim of a reasonably complete typological assessment, should researchers focus on particular language families or phenomena and exclude others? Here, a survey of several hundred articles was undertaken, examining three major venues in the phonetics literature: Journal of Phonetics, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, and publications from the UCLA Languages of the World project (which appeared in various venues). 20 features were found to be addressed in many studies, and a rough guide to the coverage for a language can be seen in the total number of features reported in a study. Coverage has increased over time, but most studies still address a small percentage of the phonetic substance of the target language. Coverage across language family and region also increased but is still skewed toward Indo-European languages. Future directions and recommendations will be presented.

Forced alignment automatically aligns audio recordings of spoken language with transcripts at the segment level, greatly reducing the time required to prepare data for phonetic analysis. However, existing algorithms are mostly trained on a few welldocumented languages. We test the performance of three algorithms against manually aligned data. For at least some tasks, unsupervised alignment (either based on English or trained from a small corpus) is sufficiently reliable for it to be used on legacy data for low-resource languages. Descriptive phonetic work on vowel inventories and prosody can be accurately captured by automatic alignment with minimal training data. Consonants provided significantly more challenges for forced alignment.

Abstract