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…
Radical Resolutions: A Brief Manifesto
What does it mean to live a radical life? I wouldn’t know. That is something foreign to my otherwise middle-class suburban existence that I’ve enjoyed for the greater part of my life. My understanding of its meaning is not particularly accurate or useful. And, quite frankly, I doubt I have the wherewithal and intelligence to…
An Analysis and Reflection on Doug Jones’ Election Victory.
INTRODUCTION: Last Tuesday, December 15th, was a historic day in Alabama. For the first time in 25 years, a Democrat will be sent to Washington as a representative in the Senate. This is quite the feat: Alabama is stereotypically and historically a heavily conservative state. This is why Doug Jones’ narrow victory is so astonishing.…
What do we mean when we say we are political?
The biggest issue with Democrats, that I see, is the capitulation to the insidious creep of neoliberal worldviews into everyday life. Like students are taught to operate within “the real world” as if it were something that they cannot engage with and change, politics is presented as something that exists outside of our everyday lives.…
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…
A New Year: LSA 2017 and Updates on Future Posts.
I am only a few days into 2017 and it is already shaping up to be a productive year (President-Elects notwithstanding). I have just spent a weekend in Austin, TX, visiting the city while popping in to the Linguistic Society of America’s 2017 meeting, and it was fantastic! I was only there for a day,…
This Thanksgiving, consider the language of natives.
As we have celebrated Thanksgiving today, I think it would behoove everyone to take a closer look into the events surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline. There is a disturbing amount of force being placed by the state on behalf of big corporations, which should be disconcerting to anyone who has an interest in freedom in…
[Podcast] Reflections on the Trump Election feat. Connor McCarty
Corrections: Stephen Bannon is potential counselor; Reince Priebus is potential Chief-of-Staff. Additions: The Fox News show was Special Report with Bret Baier
“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…
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…
Introduction
Now that I am free from the cold, clammy grips of graduate school, I can now spend time on not taking anything academic seriously. I only joke; however, it is the case that the pressures and schedule of a grad student life are no longer upon me, and that after a bit of respite I…
Minimal yet Optimal 