I spent some time studying linguistics for several reasons:
- I have interest in prehistory and historical linguistics and language relatedness is one of the best ways at assertaining cultural and historical information embedded in language itself.
- I have been interested in language as a tool for psychological study and cognitive science. In addition to using linguistics for neurological or experimental studies, it also encodes lower-level cognitive distinctions.
I also studied linguistics in a formal setting. I got a Master’s at the University of Georgia and uncerimoniously left a Ph.D. program being ABD at the University of Arizona (this was during the Trump election when things were especially cultish, so I abandoned ship, although I only imagine they’ve only gotten worse).
Personal Background
I taught myself Latin and Greek when I was a teenager. I also attempted to learn Arabic and Sanskrit at that time, but there were not sufficient resources around me for it. From Latin, I developed reading knowledge of most Romance languages, I started speaking Spanish in college. I also minored in Chinese and lived in China for a brief period.
Modern Generative Linguistics
I don’t keep up with the field much after leaving the academic discipline just because what academic linguists focus on in so-called “Generative Linguistics” is what is effectively a Glass Bead Game: it exists institutionally because it is a fun formal game that allows people to implement unimportant or mundane observations about languages into some formal scheme without any fear of falsifiability.
Most of what I was interested in in the field was that of my own making: attempting to derive the syntactic traits or tendencies of different languages from the semantic and prosodic contraints. E.g. I wrote a qualifying paper on an Optimality Theoretic account of how languages’ intonational/prosodic rules can be what actually drive word order. I don’t give any special privilege to Optimality Theory, in fact, the paper was nearly satirical since to many, using a formal tool usually reserved for phonology for syntax seems like a big troll. Nonetheless, the underlying intuition, that language-specific prosodic rules drive word-order I have come to believe is almost an inevitability.
I wrote another qualifying paper which was a Game Theoretic anysis of quantifier scope where I argued that the availability of certain readings of quantifier scope