linguistics

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MIT-led team finds language without numbers

An Amazonian language has no word to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT-led team. Only 300 people speak the language, all of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil. June 24, 2008

No easy answers in evolution of human language

The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says MIT Professor Robert Berwick, who will discuss his work Feb. 17 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. February 17, 2008

MIT research among Nature magazine's best of 2007

Nature's editors have picked their favorite 18 research papers of 2007, including three studies involving MIT scientists. Topics of the MIT papers include the search for extrasolar planets, a new technique for weighing single cells and the future of irregular verbs. January 14, 2008

Predicting the future of the past tense

Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in English, according to a formula developed by MIT and Harvard University mathematicians using evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years. October 15, 2007

Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar

The controversy over certain studies of the Pirahã language is making headlines, unusual for the field of linguistics. MIT's David Pesetsky has thrown doubt upon many of linguist Daniel L. Everett's claims about Pirahã's cultural and linguistic uniqueness. April 23, 2007

Army linguist learns language of leadership

Lynne McCann served as chief of the Army's Foreign Language Proponency Office before she came to MIT Sloan, and the M.B.A. student had seen a lot of the world, but she found a world within her classrooms and among her classmates. November 22, 2006

Anti-microbial 'grammar' underlies health advance

In most languages, sentences only make sense if the words are placed in the right order. Now, MIT researchers and an IBM colleague have used grammatical principles to help their search for new antimicrobial medicines. October 19, 2006

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