The Department of Maltese within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta is hosting a public lecture on language and metalanguage at the Valletta Campus in St Paul Street, Valletta, on January 24 at 5pm.

The lecture, titled ‘Language and metalanguage: how I started to worry about linguistics and not because of ChatGPT’, will be delivered by Slavomír Čéplö.

A spectre is haunting modern linguistics: the spectre of LLMs or large language models. LLMs create new content in response to user commands based on their training data and are trained on huge amounts of text sources. 

However, in his talk, Čéplö will not mention ChatGPT et al. Instead, he will be talking about older and endemic issues that plague modern linguistics, such as groupthink, myopia, metalanguage and the proliferation of handbooks. He will attempt to show what is wrong with all those things, why one should care and possibly how to fix them.

Čéplö earned his PhD in mathematical linguistics from the Charles University in Prague in 2018. He has published on Maltese, Arabic dialectology, Creole linguistics and Christian apocrypha. He has been collaborating with the Department of Maltese for a number of years.

The lecture, being held in Meeting Room 102, is open to staff, students and the public. Those who would like to attend do not need to register in advance. 

For more information, look up the event, which is being coordinated by Michael Spagnol, on Facebook.