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.

Semester Wrap-up

So, it's finals week here on campus and everybody's gone a little nuts. Some folks have less to do than others--sadly I'm in the others category here--but nobody's safe from the craziness. A couple of weeks ago UIC held the In/Between Conference, which was the first conference in a long time that hosted talks from both the literature and linguistics sections. Good stuff.

Now it's time to sit down and write. Easier said than done, my friends. Yesterday I managed to make red bean empanadas because I was trying to do work. That's what I do: when it's time to sit down and do work I discover 600 other things that I can be doing. A friend of mine with a similar affliction once told me that there are days when she'd rather scrub her bathroom than sit down and work. I don't know what the real problem is, but I'm told it's especially bad when thesis-writing.

On a different note, this week was the Chicago Latino Film Festival, and a friend of mine and I went to see Ella es el matador (She is the matador).

I'm not into bullfighting, but I learned something about (1) how bullfighting works, (2) why people like it, (3) how one becomes a bullfighter, and (4) how being a female complicates the process. I thought it was really well-directed--I'd recommend it.

Yes, Pennsylvania

Yes, indeed, the state with the 3rd most accredited universities (which happens 33rd in physical size) is Pennsylvania.  I would have thought that it would have ranked higher on size, myself.  As to the French Market, I didn't really taste any cheeses, but there's certainly cow-shaped cheeses--quite the sight, lemme tell you.  I would, however, recommend the patisserie and its many lovely pastries.  Mmm!

On a linguistic note, there's a conference coming up in Bloomington, Indiana called SyntaxFest 2010.  The dates are the 15-18th of June, and it's going to feature a whole slew of achieved syntacticians: Lasnik, Bošković, Hornsein, Merchant, and Roberts are the invited speakers.  Now, the reason that I mention it is that on Thursday of this week, April 1st, early registration ends, so if you're thinking of going, the time to register is now.