Category: Linguistics
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Erudite Demons and their Discontents
The LSA letter (which can be read here) asks for Steven Pinker to be removed as a fellow and taken off the media list. This (no matter what your stance) bold move has caused quite the series of wails and hand-wringing from linguists, cranks, and crank linguists. It’s made them big mad. Why? Well, free…
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Review of Andrea Moro’s The Boundaries of Babel (2008)
Andrea Moro’s 2008 book The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages (hereafter Boundaries) can be best described as a book set on the justification and exploration of some of the more probing questions regarding the formal study of language in the generative tradition and its intersection with neuroscience. Moro, professor…
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“The” African-Americans/Hispanics/Latinos
Political season is great for linguists. It’s usually a playground of rhetoric, discourse, and weird terms that come into common parlance. This season is no different. Recently, Donald Trump has dug a deeper hole for himself in the debates by saying, at the second debate, “I’m going to help the African-Americans. I’m going to help…
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Information Structure and Syntax Series: Prologue
There’s much about theoretical syntax that is either misunderstood or flat-out misrepresented. Often, this comes from the fact that syntactic theories are complex and hard to present in a concise and easy to understand manner. There’s simply too much of the stuff floating around to be able to effectively read every line of every work…
Minimal yet Optimal 