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Ryan

@ryanlepic.bsky.social

440 followers 120 following 20 posts

phd. linguist. last name rhymes with “epic”. www: sites.google.com/view/ryanlepic

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · May 7

What started as a half-baked lecture in 2023 is now an actual article in 2025. I try to define "idiom", look for them in ASL, and identify other ASL constructions, to boot. (We all complain about "reviewer 2", but I got good and helpful revisions on this one!) doi.org/10.1515/cog-... #linguistics

Idioms and other constructions in American Sign Language

Idioms are phrases like English [hit the sack], meaning ‘go to bed’. For linguists working with sign languages, a question arises: “What do idioms look like in a sign language?” This paper proposes a ...

doi.org

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Morgan Robertson @morganrobertson.bsky.social · Aug 31

Important reading as you prepare for your semester

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Chance the Lawyer @chancethelawyer.bsky.social · Aug 31

“I watched Snow White when I was a kid but I ain’t give a bitch a poison apple yet” is just an objectively great line. 😂

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Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · Aug 24

UPDATE: Abstract deadline: Nov 1, 25! Invited speakers: Corrine Occhino, Dagmar Divjak, Idan Blank, Randy Allen Harris, Gary Lupyan, Laura Michaelis, Kanishka Misra !
@dagmardivjak.bsky.social @randyallenharris.bsky.social @congramqueen.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social @kanishka.bsky.social

Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · Aug 15

📌 👉 The 14th International Construction Grammar conference will be held at Princeton, June 4-7, 2026

Usage-based analyses and Empirical methods

Stay tuned for updates!

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Aug 19

10 years ago this month, i defended my dissertation. i scrounged up two pictures from the day. linguistics is an odd, sometimes challenging field, but i’ve been incredibly privileged to learn and travel with great advisors, colleagues, and friends along the way 😌😌

Savi, Ryan, and Tessa smiling. Savi and Tessa have matching black rompers. Ryan has a blue tanktop that reads “Carol & Farrell & Karen & Sharon & Rachel”.

Ryan looking at his computer while presenting to an audience. His dissertation committee members are sitting in the front row.

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Ann Leckie @annleckie.com · Aug 9

OK so I LOLed at the dinosaurs in Central Park

www.aiweirdness.com/chatgpt-will...

ChatGPT will apologize for anything

ChatGPT will apologize for anything - even advice it definitely didn't give, and stuff it definitely didn't do. It very much regrets its recommendation that we hire a giraffe as CEO.

www.aiweirdness.com

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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · Aug 8

“A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything,” they said.

“Show me a diagram of the US presidents since FDR, with their names and years in office under their photos,” I said.

A GPT-5 generated diagram of US presidents since Franklin D. “Roesevelt” to “Goorge W Bush”, “Baruck Obama” and Donald Trump. No George HW Bush (though Ronald Reagan looks a fair bit like him), LBJ, or Joe Biden.

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Santiago Mayer @santiagomayer.com · Aug 7

Sunk-cost fallacy and cheating students are the only things keeping AI in business at this point.

Just look at how usage of ChatGPT plummets as soon as the semester ends.

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Julie A. Hochgesang @jahochcam.bsky.social · Jul 31

So glad this is out! Still wish we had the data processed in time for @jmhenner.bsky.social to use but pleased to have his contribution in more ways than 1. See below for a brief commentary re Jon, deaf linguists & participating in SiL research and doing it in a way that disrupts or crips it all

Series of 3 images of Jon during Zoom session expressing full support for open access in ASL

Zoom window of 4 participants - top left to bottom right - Frank smiling, Jon with two-handed heart gesture, Leeann smiling and Julie holding heart over heart with 🥹 face

Twitter thread showing Jon’s belief in open access work and recognition of the work it takes. Text:

Jon Henner @jmhenner - Paying participants. Assistants. Language Coders. Web coders. Web maintenance. Web systems. Technology.
This scales. If I want a project with 10 people I need to seed it thinking ahead.
5:15 PM - Dec 15, 2021

Julie A. Hochgesang, PhD @jahochcam Dec 15, 2021
Exactly

Hoping that #MoloASL will be released this upcoming summer and part of
#05S5ASL in the spring with more as the year progresses

Jon Henner @jmhenner • Dec 15, 2021
***
I don't want to collect good data and let it die on a VHS tape on my shelf like two generations ago. It needs to be available and accessible.

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Jul 31

i love reading old ASL syntax papers. everything is so straightforward. a star for this, a checkmark for that, no need to know what the signs even are or what the context was… 🫠🫠🫠

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The Onion @theonion.com · Jul 14

Ten Percent Of U.S. High School Students Graduating Without Basic Object Permanence Skills

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Jul 8

love this journey 🙏

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Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · Jul 6

finally en route to what might just be the best Ling Institute ever, in Eugene OR!
Can't wait to see old friends and meet new ones! ‪@lsa2025uo.bsky.social‬
center.uoregon.edu/LSA/2025/

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Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · Jul 5

Really infuriating stuff. There's no place for AI in the classroom. AFT needs to follow the lead of @aaup.org and understand that these technologies are part of the increasing move to corporatize the classroom.

Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · Jul 4

SMH: news that the American Federation of Teachers is partnering with Open AI and Microsoft on an AI initiative is especially disappointing because teachers’ unions can and should fight back against Big Tech’s attempts to deprofessionalize and disempower educators.

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Jun 26

“there’s a … woman? and she gives her… daughter? a … … what is that, a towel? and why is everyone barefoot?” - the perfect SVO sentence

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Jun 26

“and, you guessed it, we used alleycat row again!”

a cartoon of tweety in a cage and sylvester

ALT: a cartoon of tweety in a cage and sylvester

media.tenor.com

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The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · Jun 25

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, declared victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary after Andrew Cuomo conceded the race.

“Tonight we made history,” Mamdani said, addressing his supporters. wapo.st/44yMVoI

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Jun 20

and the second (5) copy is the one with all my notes

Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Jun 20

don’t forget to redownload copies of pdfs you have already downloaded twice!

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · Jun 19

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

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Nosferatu RBMK 🦇 @comraderobot.bsky.social · Jun 17

if i can be y’all’s dad for a second:

one of the most important things I’ve learned is that acquiring a skill is literally uncomfortable

that awful moment where you feel confused and stupid and embarrassed? it means you’re about to learn something. and it’s *mandatory* if you want to get better

ceej @ceej.online · Jun 17

I am surrounded by people who are outsourcing their own thinking to ChatGPT and they are quickly and obviously becoming dependent on it for even the most banal tasks. Once again, the "figuring it out" is the important part. Yes, you can use a crane to lift weights but you will not get stronger

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · Jun 11

like, I’m eviting it as hard as i possibly can let me live

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Mark Dingemanse @dingemansemark.bsky.social · May 27

At our faculty we have guidelines on Generative AI and research integrity: osf.io/preprints/os... . Another example: ERA Living Guidelines european-research-area.ec.europa.eu/news/living-...
I'm looking for other examples of guidelines like that, aimed at researchers. Hit me!

OSF

osf.io

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Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · May 21

I appreciated Julie Ann Dawson, former publisher of Bards and Sages, on this point.

www.404media.co/bards-and-sa...

A quote from the article:
“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” Dawson told me. “These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. Most of them don't even read recreationally. They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer. They think in terms of quantity and not quality.”

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · May 19

"We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine™ that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences."

A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine

Hey team. It’s your CEO. I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase: It’s come to my attention that some of you have been bad-mou...

buff.ly

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Ryan @ryanlepic.bsky.social · May 19

looking forward to catching parts of the 2nd ROLE collective symposium today! the short (captioned) presentations are already online, and Dr. Anna Lim is delivering the invited keynote at noon (EDT)! www.rolecollective.org #linguistics

The ROLE Collective

ROLE: Reframing Our Language Experience

www.rolecollective.org

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