At Speculative Grammarian, we are nothing if not practical. Having sent out several teams of disposable intrepid interns to a range of online and in-person academic conferences, we are pleased to present a list of academic audiences and things you should and should not do if they are in the audience.
Phoneticians
DO: Use IPA symbols for all data.
DON’T: Ask whether [fəˈnetɪks ɪz ˈɹiːliː lɪŋˈwɪstks].
Morphologists
DO: Mention that their ability to dissect words is practically surgical.
DON’T: Ask if they ever confuse their work with etymology, or if they can even define what a word is.
Evolutionary Linguists
DO: Caveat everything with appeals to opposable thumbs, tribal-
DON’T: Say “intrinsically unempirical speculative guesswork”.
Corpus Linguists
DO: Joke that their corpus is so big, it deserves its own zip code.
DON’T: Suggest that their work is just glorified data entry.
Machine Translation Scholars
DO: Mention that BLEU is your favorite color.
DON’T: Ask why they have never managed to get a job at Google.
Variationists
DO: Deconstruct the fiction of a standard variety.
DON’T: Open with “Ey up, lads and lasses. Listen in good ’n’ proppa, like, wi’ boaf yer lug’oles ’n’ yer maht jus’ lurn summat.”
Esperantists
DO: Wax lyrical about the how easily learnable the international language is and promote the intrinsically pacifistic nature of Esperanto and its potential to transform the tensions and challenges of the human situation by means of a regular accusative ending.
DON’T: Mention the absence of any influence from the Altaic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Semitic, Sino-
Theoretical Linguists
DO: Borrow random concepts from physics or maths and pretend they work.
DON’T: Ask the audience how many languages everyone speaks.
Computational Linguists
DO: Say you’re impressed by how they’ve turned language into code.
DON’T: Ask why computers still don’t understand sarcasm.
Generative Syntacticians
DO: Talk about your favorite trees.
DON’T: Mention anything about them having more than two branches.
Interpreting Scholars
DO: Spend time explaining to people who are already convinced why interpreting is vital and why it will always need humans.
DON’T: Ask whether we have good definitions of accuracy, impartiality, role, quality, or interpreting yet.
Sociolinguists
DO: Admire how they uncover the hidden rules that govern language in different social contexts.
DON’T: Ask them for the location of something that happens to be on the fourth floor.
New Testament Scholars
DO: Note that the Johannine Logos is an inspired choice of term, drawing on the one hand on Jewish conceptions both of the creative Word of YHWH and the notion of personified Wisdom, and on the other hand, Hellenistic views of a logical, rational and ordered cosmic principle.
DON’T: Bring up redaction criticism.
Semanticians
DO: Comment on how the true meaning of the conference can only be found through deep semantic analysis.
DON’T: Say that semantics is just arguing about definitions.
Literary Translation Scholars
DO: Gush over analyses of the poststructural power politics of contemporary publishing practices for translated vegan cookbooks.
DON’T: Ask whether you can have fries with that.
Linguistic Typologists
DO: Express your admiration for their ability to categorize the world’s languages.
DON’T: Ask why they bother with obscure languages that nobody speaks.
Semioticians
DO: Calmly give an exposition of why the study of signs is the most important discipline.
DON’T: Ask why, if semiotics is so important, there are so few jobs in it.
Shakespearianists
DO: Argue that “Prithee, good my lord, methinks if it please thee, wilt go aside, look you now?” demonstrates that Polixines cannot necessarily be read as subtextually neofeminist.
DON’T: Exit pursued by a bear.
Politeness Theoreticians
DO: Note that subjectively internalized and interpersonally relativistic socio-
DON’T: Scream “This stuff is freaking obvious, you pointless bunch of boring dullards” in their faces using higher-
Phonologists
DO: Make a light-
DON’T: Ask if phonology is just about funny symbols and strange sounds.
Discourse Analysts
DO: Note that they must be excellent at identifying the hidden agendas in conference discussions.
DON’T: Insinuate that discourse analysis is just a way to get all the best gossip.
Documentary Linguists
DO: Praise their efforts in preserving endangered languages and capturing the richness of human language before it disappears as invaluable.
DON’T: Question if documenting languages is just a fancy way to travel the world for free.
Lexicographers
DO: Commiserate with the never-
DON’T: Remind them that one of the greatest lexicographers of all time defined them as “harmless drudges”.
Historical Linguistics
DO: Mention some interesting sound correspondences and the Neogrammarian hypothesis of completely regular sound change.
DON’T: Bring up exceptions to sound correspondences.
Philosophers of Language
DO: Quote Wittgenstein and say “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
DON’T: Suggest that their debates are just linguistic navel-