Linguists tend to underestimate their educational and societal role, but linguistics matters. Therefore, this article is a plea for linguists act accordingly fulfill important role boldly creatively. By dealing with pedagogical aspects of Romance linguistics, an area which I call Pedagogical Linguistics (RPL), highlight the crucial in various contexts languages how all involved parties benefit ...

This paper is about the changing relationship between humanitarian aid and ‘politics’. Specifically, it is concerned to unpack the much touted calls for increased ‘coherence’ between political and humanitarian responses to complex emergencies. It argues that by sleight of hand, the coherence agenda has been reinterpreted such that humanitarian action has become the primary form of political act...

Inspired by evolutionary biology, the term evolutionary linguistics has been used recently by linguists such as Croft (2008), McMahon & McMahon (2013), and myself (Mufwene 2013a, 2013b) to characterize the kind of research being done today on language evolution that focuses not only on the phylogenetic emergence of language but also, or alternatively, on language speciation and the emergence of...

Computational linguistics and corpus linguistics are closely-related disciplines: they both exploit electronic corpora, extract various kinds of linguistic information from them, and make use of the same methods to acquire this information. Moreover, both were heavily affected by "paradigm shifts" from the prevailing empiricism of the 1950s, to rationalism, then back again with a revival of emp...