Midweek Update: Devil in the White City

Hey all.  I just got back from a quick trip to see the folks, and accordingly I owe you all a few posts.  Actually, I have a really good "Thing to check out" that I just heard about, but I'll save it for Sunday.  :)

However, I just started reading Devil in the White City (on my 7 hour bus ride from Ohio) and I really like it.  It alternates between narrating the story of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the murderer who was active during it.

What is particularly interesting about this book is that its writer is not a novelist but a historian.  All the events are facts rather than speculation, but they are written in a fluid way that make you wonder what will happen next.  There are elements of foreshadowing and irony built in because, let's face it, life is ironic.

So, what I would like to be doing at the moment is eating my lovely lunch of hot and sour soup and working on this book, but alas, it is a work-day for me.  Instead I am faced with my chronic conundrum of feeling guilty whenever I read for fun.  Thus, I am working my way through an article: Lopez 2009, "Ranking the Linear Correspondence Axiom," which as it turns out is not only very readable but quite clever.  We're working on it as part of our lab meeting discussion group because we have Luis (Lopez) on hand to pester with questions.  The basic idea is that Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) is simply ranked with other prosodic rules in an Optimality Theory sort of approach.  Importantly, linearization is either a product of C-command or the mapping into PF, which allows clitic right and/or left dislocation to occur.

But, I haven't finished it yet.  The soup certainly helps, though.

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.

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.

Distibuted Morphology and You (me)

So, I've recently discovered how much I need Distributed Morphology. For those of you who don't know what DM is, it's a feature-based way of dealing with morphology in which words are broken down into nodes with feature bundles which the morphology later interprets and finds a "best fit" vocabulary item to insert. That is to say, syntax puts together all the ideas you want to express without involving the actual lexical items (just the ideas expressed in features) and only then does morphology come in and make something readable. There's some debate as to whether it's cyclic and what qualifies as a feature and so on and so forth.

Anyway, I took a class on this stuff a year and a half ago and genuinely didn't like it. I think that's because I couldn't see the use of it. Now, at that point my syntactic world was still ruled by A movement and A bar movement and Case licensing and all that. I remember quite clearly my professor trying to explain "uninterpretable features" to me in layman's terms. Now that we've had a class on Minimalism (soooo useful) I retroactively can see what the point of DM was. If syntax is features, then it makes a lot of sense for morphology to be features because then you can handle everything in one fell swoop before Spellout.

But, not knowing that DM would come back into my world, I sent a lot of my articles and handouts to be stored at my parents' house. Thus the moral of my story: this semester's bizarre theory is next semester's "aha" moment.