Transneptune

I think those are the truest self-identifications ever applied to me. Everything else about me is relatively ancillary.

Yesterday, I got to take the first steps on actually being a teacher. Today, I got to resume being a student. I’m taking two classes this semester: Syntactic Theory with Barbara Fox, and History of Linguistics in the 20th Century with David Rood.

Both classes have a historical bent, the latter obviously, but the former in that it is taking us through the development of discourse-functional syntax from the seventies (when people began to think that Chomsky’s approach might have some weaknesses) up to now, decade by decade.

Barbara was giving an overview of some of the ideas in discourse-functional syntax, and one really interesting idea stood out: some people have described syntax as being fossilized discourse. I find this idea wonderful—it opens, potentially, a mechanism for answering some of the “why”s that have, in my experience, always been dismissed or hand-waved as part of the set of arbitrary systems in language. Of course, as Barbara warned us, in this field, there are many more questions and notions than answers. That’s OK by me.

History of Linguistics was interesting, too. We had occasion to read some in French, and I am looking forward to reading de Saussure in French. Sadly, no one in the class speaks German—David was thrown for a bit of a loop there, and is gonna try to find some translations or workarounds for all the Prague-school stuff he was going to have us read in German.

This should be good.

Tags: academic quips, cognitive linguistics, learning, teaching by kit
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The internet is a weirdly wonderful place sometimes.

I was playing TF2 last night, and first off, I ended up playing with some of my internet idols: Lore Sjöberg and Mark Rosenfelder. I knew I was playing with Lore—both recognizing his voice and having his steam username. But when I was playing as a medic and healing someone with the username Zompist, I knew it was Rosenfelder, and was excited.

And the internet makes that kind of contact easy—we were all there to play a game together. I just happened to wander into the right place. It’s not like there was much meaningful communication, as we were mostly focused on the game, but that’s almost the point. It was casual.

Later, with different people, there was another weird and awesome moment. In an arena game, it had gotten down to a Sniper and a Heavy. Without words, they faced each other and the Heavy swapped to melee. So did the Sniper. And they duked it out hand-to-hand. The Heavy even gave the Sniper his Sandvich.

OK, that paragraph won’t mean much to you unless you know TF2. But it was cool.

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On another note, I’m increasingly thinking about grad school and what I’ll do there. I’m quite excited. I have an apartment, I have friends, I have research questions. The latest notion to pop into my head is that twin languages are really interesting. We’ll see if I keep at that, but it serves as a good reminder for me of all the strange little corners of human language that don’t get enough attention.

Tags: brunching, research questions, tf2, twin languages, zompist by kit
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I sat in on a seminar at Berkeley. Fantastic. I feel like a fish back in water, my mind latching on to novel approaches to familiar problems—the Problem, really. Human language, what is its form? What are its possible forms?

There are reasons I love Cyteen.

The department seems to offer the most wonderful mix of field work and cognitive theory. The brain is most certainly not a Von Neumann architecture computer, though I think that the arguments for considering it a species of computer are compelling. And to talk of Language, of course you need a broad spectrum of data.

Tags: berkeley, cognitive science, cyteen by kit
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This is kind of hilariously misguided, I think.

Also: moving east in two weeks.  Looking forward to seeing folks.

Tags: bad ideas, east by kit
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Mark Rosenfelder, over at Zompist’s E-Z Rant Page, has just posted a very interesting review indeed.  I’m glad to see him talking about this; Chomsky’s approach to data has been offending me for a while now, and Rosenfelder is one of my earliest linguistical influences, though essentially a lay one.  Check it out; I’m gonna see about getting the book.

Tags: data-driven linguistics, zompist by kit
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One can in fact view construction-based theories of syntax as upholding standards of grammar coverage that the original proponents of generative grammar abandoned, as they sought to reduce the theory’s dependence on linguistic facts. Chomsky (1995: 435) describes this shift in the goals of grammarians as follows:  “A look at the earliest work from the mid-1950s will show that many phenomena that fell within the rich descriptive apparatus then postulated, often with accounts of no little interest and insight, lack any serious analysis within the much narrower theories motivated by the search for explanatory adequacy, and remain among the huge mass of constructions for which no principled explanation exists—again, not an unusual concomitant of progress”. It seems safe to say that most proponents of construction-based syntax would not consider the loss of insightful and interesting accounts a mark of progress, and find the search for putatively narrower theories of explanatory adequacy unrequited.

From Kay & Michaelis, forthcoming.  I am in love with construction grammar.  Just re-read the first sentence there.  That is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long while.  I think I might just be an academic at heart.  (But it’s funny because it’s true!)

Tags: academic culture, construction grammar by kit
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I just met R.M.W. Dixon!  That’s the dude who wrote Ergativity, which I keep in an honored position at my bedside.  I kinda can’t deal with the awesome.  The worst part?  He’s been in Boulder all summer so far and is leaving tomorrow.

Tags: ergativity, famous people, rmw dixon by kit
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Of all the people in the lab whose native language is not English, only one* speaks an Indo-European language (German).  We have:

• Turkish
• Finnish
• Tamil
• Chinese (I’m not certain what specific languages Xin and Wei speak)

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* I say this a bit preemptively; I’m not certain what Dhaval’s native language is.  I had assumed it’s something Dravidian.

Tags: dravidian, finno-ugric, languages, sino-tibetan, turkic by kit
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Yesterday was good in many, many ways.  Primarily, I attended a talk at UC Boulder by Adele Goldberg, which was excellent.  She argued clearly, presented an interesting but convincing account of the facts observed in her studies (hear that, Chomsky?  Real data!) and also presented a theory that seemed maybe, just maybe, implementable in the context of Machine Learning.  This is all good.

Further, though, I got to have a bit of a talk with Leah, whom I’ve not talked with in too long, and also, finally, saw a red fox here—actually, two!  That is what I call an evening.

If I didn’t have to head off to work shortly, I’d write more.  Ask me about any of these things, and I’ll gladly elaborate.

Tags: construction grammar, foxes, linguistics by kit
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One quick note before I go to bed: I have just discovered that one of my idols, C.J. Cherryh* is on the board of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, the product of a near-idol of mine, Nicholas Ostler. And, of course, it is not just the conjunction of two people of Coolness, but also that they overlap in the domain of endangered language activism. Too much for me to handle!

Also worth noting, all of them have rather outdated-looking sites, except Ostler, for whom I cannot find a personal site at all.

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* Cherryh is actually responsible for my interest in linguistics. Lon story short, her introductory Latin lessons caused me to act on my passive earlier interest in Latin, which in turn got me interested in making up languages, which in turn got me interested in seeing how human language actually worked. And here I am today.

Tags: c.j. cherryh, endangered language, idols, linguistics, nicholas ostler by kit
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