Some words on SyntaxFest 2010 and how different programs make different linguists

As I mentioned last Friday, in June my classmates and I went to SyntaxFest 2010. SyntaxFest was held in Bloomington, Indiana at Indiana University.  It was technically called a "workshop," but I'm more inclined to refer to it as a summer school. SyntaxFest was a four-day even that featured Norbert Hornstein, Jason Merchant, Željko Bošković, and Norvin Richards.  Howard Lasnik was also scheduled to be to be there but had to cancel at the last minute.

A grotesque on the roof of Maxwell Hall, Indiana University

I think one of the most interesting aspects of spending four days with four top-notch linguists and a group of students is the mix of backgrounds and the subtle differences in approaches that come with them.  I particularly remember a Berkley student politely objecting to a statement about pro-drop.  The presenter, if I recall correctly, was explaining pro-drop in terms of prosody.  Her objection was along the lines of not wanting to lose descriptive adequacy by moving away from the assessment that pro-drop languages were by and large those that were morphologically rich.  My mind immediately went to the obvious criticisms of her objection:  (1) linking pro-drop to morphologically rich languages is not empirically sound because Japanese also has pro-drop though it's less morphologically rich than English and (2) even if it were empirically sound, linking them does not help us in any way with explanatory adequacy.

And then it hit me that she probably doesn't work with Romance languages, or she would have read the relevant papers (excuse me for not citing them here, but I can provide them upon request).  So, out of all this, I learned to appreciate that who we're exposed to in our formation as linguists (both professors and literature) has a huge impact on our linguistic world views.  I probably knew that from a logical standpoint, but it takes seeing it firsthand to internalize it.