Regardless of which hypothesis provides a valid account of the acquisition vs learning problematic, one solid fact remains indisputable: language or more precisely linguistic performance, parole in de Saussure’s terminology, is an exclusive human feat. It is a source of fascination and wonder, a theme which I want to highlight in today’s post through a curated list of wonderful TED Ed talks. These are educational talks that tackle a wide variety of interesting topics related to language from contentious issues in language philosophy to the syntactic and semantic mechanics of language learning. You may want to use some of these talks with your students in class to engage them in fruitful discussions about language. Check them out and share with us your feedback in our Facebook page.
1- Where do new words come from? - Marcel Danesi
2- The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli
3- Where do new words come from? - Marcel Danesi
4- How to use rhetoric to get what you want - Camille A. Langston
5- How interpreters juggle two languages at once - Ewandro Magalhaes
6- The pleasure of poetic pattern - David Silverstein
7- Does grammar matter? - Andreea S. Calude
8- How miscommunication happens (and how to avoid it) - Katherine Hampsten
9- How computers translate human language - Ioannis Papachimonas
10- How did clouds get their names? - Richard Hamblyn
11- Buffalo buffalo buffalo: One-word sentences and how they work - Emma Bryce
12- Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern
13- The language of lying — Noah Zandan
14- How languages evolve - Alex Gendler
15- Speech acts: Constative and performative - Colleen Glenney Boggs
16- A brief history of plural word...s - John McWhorter
17- Why is there a "b" in doubt? - Gina Cooke
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