Omer Preminger

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””

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!””

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]

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”

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”