Old Academic Stuff

This is a page for some of my old stuff from grad school. Very incomplete. I might add more as I find it.

Old Papers from my Ph.D. program

Some countercyclic problems at the nexus of phonology and syntax (May 2016)

The idea is that alternations in languages that seem strange all occur because they are attempts to try to optimize between phonological and semantic constraints. Syntax is not an autonomous engine with idiosyncratic constraints, but just a shorthand we use to talk about these strange things that happen to make phonological structure acceptable to semantic structure or vice versa. I argue that extraposition, the EPP and some other things all are phonological repairs and we don't have to posit some extra constraints in the language faculty to model them ad hoc.

Scope Markings and Serial Phrase Parsing (May 2017)

A very short paper I wrote for a phonology class. Not even sure it gets the point across, but I really like this idea. Languages like German can have residual wh- words in places through which they have been raised: scope markers. I noticed a formal similarity with noun phase stressing in a cited Kimper article on Bengali. I argue that German scope marking is actually the same pheonomenon, based on that interesting idea that Richards had about phonology driving wh- movement.

Syntax without Syntax: Prosodically-driven word order (September 2017)

I argue that syntactic word order is just an epiphenomenon of prosodic, rather than "syntactic" parameters. Ultimately, all languages simply place subjects, objects and verbs where they will recieve the appropriate stress level, and where this is ties in with independent prosodic rules of each language. I use Optimality Theory to model this as some cruel joke and because this was a qualifying paper and I had to do something conventional. I don't really take it seriously as a scientific tool, but it’s just kind of a fun troll to do syntax with OT and have it solve some data problem generative stuff can’t really do.

Indo-European Particles and Head-Movement-driven Word Order Change (November 2017)

A flippantly written papre with a somewhat interesting idea. A historical linguistics paper written for a generative syntax class.

A Critique of "Reason" (December 2017)

Not linguistics. On my issues with the Kahneman and Tversy's "heuristics and biases" program, with various support from Gigerenzer and Taleb. I wrote this for a class of Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini's I took which if I remember right was technically an economics/neuroscience class.

Scope without Syntax: A Game Theoretic Approach (April 2018)

I argue that Chomskyan syntax is not equipped to properly deal with quantifier scope interpretations. I present a framework that assumes that speakers use and assume their languages' constructions to communicate scope given certain universal constraints assuming the priority of surface scope and economy principles. Nearly all normal and abnormal scope judgments fall out for free from this method, which is analyzed with Game Theory. At the end: flexible syntax (across either a whole language or a specific construction) ends up entailing universal surface scope, while syntactic rigidity causes scope ambiguity.

Passing comments on neural nets and the Shivasutras (April 2018)

This is actually probably a ditsy paper, but it was my last paper I wrote in graduate school and for a class I never actually went to. I don't really remember what it was even a class on.

I had been reading classical Indian/Vedic grammars and the Paninian stuff. We had been talking about the "interpretability" (or lack-thereof) of Neural Nets so I wrote a little piece on the Shivasutras, which order the phonemes of Sanskrit in a unique order to be able to refer to them in Paninian grammars with the greatest economy. I make the statement that these classes of phonemes are analogous to the intermediate nodes of a neural net, which often appear to have no real-life relevance, but one often appears at an extra level of abstraction. For example, it becomes very easy to model the Indo-European ablaut system via the Shivasutras since different lines show the different grades. Sanskrit grammarians of course had no direct knowledge of Proto-Indo-European but in the interest of formal economy, end up discovering aspects of its grammar.

The Indo-European Handouts

Since I had a background in classical languages and Indo-European studies, a couple of my friends wanted to put together a little reading group to learn about Indo-European stuff. We covered all the basics of Indo-European grammar and reconstruction and basic lore, although we fizzled out after only a couple weeks.

1. Week 1: Basics and Phonology (handout)
2. Week 2: Ablaut, Morphology and Indo-Hittite (handout)
3. Week 3: Divergence and Syntax (handout, examples)
4. Week 4: Paleohistory and Migration (handout)
5. Week 5: Greek, individual languages (handout on Greek)
6. We got lazy after this and the group ended! Good while it lasted. I had prepared this handout for the sixth week which never happened.

Video Talks

The embedded videos here are from PeerTube. These are all on YouTube if you prefer (to see all the extra comments or whatever).

Biolinguistic Clarity in Generative Syntax (2015)

Shortly after I finished by M.A. at the University of Georgia, I ended up returning to help with a conference they had started recently. Some guy canceled at the last minute the day before, so I volunteered to invent a talk in 24 hours. It was more of a comedy routine, but here it is. I consider the actual ideas behind this talk underdeveloped and totally superseded by the ideas I illustrate above in those paper on syntax and phonology, but this is a good idea of the kinds of things I was thinking around 2015.

Language as Synesthesia (2017)

slides

Tom Bever had a cognitive science seminar for graduate students and this was my presentation for it. Most of the other grad students were in cogsci or philosophy, nonetheless, I did a pretty linguistics-heavy talk.

"Linguistics Isn't 60 Years Old!" (2018)

slides

My last semester at Arizona, Simin invited me to present a day in one of her grad classes on the history of linguistic thought. I talk about Paninian/Sanskrit grammar in Classical India.

As we talk about at the end, originally we planned to make this a series (I even thought of making it a goodbye tour), but that never happened. No one will ever know my hot takes on medieval European grammar.

Audio Talks

• "Chomsky Joins Us in Hell" (YouTube video) – Me and my roomate talk about when Chomsky relocated to our department from MIT.
• Quantifier Scope is Just All Fun and Games – I gave a teaser presentation for prospective students on my quantifier scope project mentioned above. It's also on PeerTube and YouTube, but no video.
• Neuroscience and decision-making graduate seminar presentation – Begins around 1:20. Sort of bad quality audio at the beginning. Slides

Other presentations

I have some slides and stuff from other presentations, and I might upload them here when I get the chance.

• UGA colloquium – a very old talk from my Master's program. Was more of a comedy routine, but you can look at it and only guess what my hilarious jokes were.
• For the Quantifier Scope with Game Theory project I have a couple presentation slides: Synsalon presentation and another one.
• The Greek Alphabet – presentation I did in my friend’s class once.
• Handouts I made the syntax class I did: Head Movement (sort of modeled off a lecture Andrew Carnie would give) and on page A Guide to Generative Syntax.
• Also a presentation on constituency I did in that class.