Omer

blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 2: “The grantification of everything”

 Posted by on 06/21/2022  Comments Off on blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 2: “The grantification of everything”
Jun 212022
 
In today’s installment of The ills of academic linguistics, I’m going to talk about grant creep: the ever-increasing reliance on external grants to fund basic functions of the modern research university (including the ability to pay living wages to graduate students, not to mention postdocs). PLEASE NOTE: For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll … [read more] blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 2: “The grantification of everything””

blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics: outlook

 Posted by on 05/23/2022  Comments Off on blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics: outlook
May 232022
 
As I mentioned at the beginning of my last post, I’m planning to write a whole series of these posts about being an academic linguist and the problems that the system, both within linguistics departments and outside of them, places in your path. Since I’m working on several of the upcoming posts in parallel, I thought I’d give … [read more] blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics: outlook”

blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 1: “No syntax for you!”

 Posted by on 05/19/2022  Comments Off on blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 1: “No syntax for you!”
May 192022
 
As I promised over here, I will be blogging at some yet-to-be-determined frequency about some of the problems endemic to academic linguistics that I’ve seen during my time in the profession. These ills, I think, are arranged in something like concentric circles: some pertain specifically to generative syntacticians; others pertain to generative linguistics in general; others pertain to linguists of any stripe; others … [read more] blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 1: “No syntax for you!””

blogpost: Norbert Hornstein – an appreciation

 Posted by on 05/12/2022  Comments Off on blogpost: Norbert Hornstein – an appreciation
May 122022
 
This weekend, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland will be hosting an event in honor of Norbert Hornstein. I am unfortunately unable to attend (due in part to … [read more]

blogpost: Some personal news

 Posted by on 03/24/2022  Comments Off on blogpost: Some personal news
Mar 242022
 
This summer, I will be leaving academia. The proximate reason for this is a desire to live & work in the same town where my wife does. The University of Maryland, it turns out, … [read more]

Slides for “Natural language without semiosis”

 Posted by on 02/26/2022  Comments Off on Slides for “Natural language without semiosis”
Feb 262022
 
In the fall of 2021, I presented some recent work titled Natural language without semiosis at a number of venues (incl. SinFonIJA 14, Cornell, Stony Brook, and MIT). Here are the slides from these presentations. (And here is the abstract.)
Nov 232021
 
Generative grammar, understood as a theory of the human capacity for linguistic cognition, is an explicitly modular theory. There are both empirical and conceptual reasons for this. I’ll get to the empirical ones later in this post; but on the conceptual front, very simple and straightforward considerations in the philosophy of science favor a modular approach over … [read more] blogpost: How minimalism hijacked modularity”

blogpost: Idioms with movement

 Posted by on 11/14/2021  6 Responses »
Nov 142021
 
At the urging of my colleague Bill Idsardi, I went looking recently for examples of idioms that obligatorily involve syntactic movement as a necessary part of the idiom. This search landed me, among other places, in Nunberg, Sag & Wasow 1994 (henceforth, NSW94), and specifically, exx. (47‑48) on p. 516. There, NSW94 puts forth what it takes to be a collection of … [read more] blogpost: Idioms with movement”
Oct 282021
 
This isn’t an original thought necessarily, but it’s one that’s been brewing in my mind for quite a while now: it really seems like some of our (academically-older) colleagues don’t grasp what social media is or what it’s for, or how it’s used by different people. I’m putting aside the motives of the actual, original replying … [read more] blogpost: Some thoughts on the recent kerfuffle over on linguistics twitter”