Tag: Applied linguistics

5 things everybody should know about language: Outline of linguistics' contribution to the liberal arts curriculum

by Dominik Lukeš · 2014-01-01

Drafty This was written in some haste and needs further refinement. Maybe one day that will come. For now, it will be left as it stands. Background This post outlines what I think are the key learnings from the output of the research of the field of linguistics that should be reflected in the general…

Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism

by Dominik Lukeš · 2012-08-09

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Teacher in primary school in northern Laos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is "knowledge is power". It is used to refer not just to…

Language learning in literature as a source domain for generative metaphors about anything

by Dominik Lukeš · 2011-06-01

In my thinking about things human, I often like to draw on the domain of second language learning as the source of analogies. The problem is that relatively few people in the English speaking world have experience with language learning to such an extent that they can actually map things onto it. In fact, in…