Category: Presentation of self in everyday life

Our vocation

If you’re a linguist: well, why?

One thing that stands out about the life of the professional linguist is what Chomsky has the responsibility of intellectuals, to “speak to the truth and to expose lies”, in this case uncomfortable truths about language and its role in society. Certainly this responsibility—and privilege, as Chomsky also points out—is inspiration for many linguists. But other motives abound. I for one am more drawn to learning about (an admittedly narrow corner) of human nature than I am to speaking truth to power, and most likely would have ended in some other area of social science had I not discovered the field. And there’s nothing wrong with a linguist who is most of all drawn to little logic puzzles, so long as these puzzles are ultimately grounded in those questions about human nature. (I do reject, categorically, those who say that linguists ought to be doing nothing than “Word Sudoku” or “Wordle with more steps”. Maybe there are people who work solely in those modes, and if so I wish them a very happy alt-ac career transition.)

I think the truths about human nature uncovered by the epistemology-obsessed generativists—including those of the armchair variety—has something to say about the proper organization of society. But one is more likely to get such messages from sociolinguists. Sociolinguists correctly point out that we have unexamined, corrosive ideologies about language, languages, and their speakers that are mostly contrary to the liberal values most of us profess, and they certainly are well-positioned to speak these truths. That said, I do not agree with an often-implicit assumption that sociolinguistics is somehow a more noble vocation than other topics in the field. The “discourse” on this is often fought as a proxy war over hiring: e.g., one I’ve heard before is “Why doesn’t MIT’s linguistics faculty include a sociolinguist?” First off, it sort of does: it includes one of the world’s foremost creolists, who has written extensively about the role of creole studies in neocolonialism and white supremacy. Whether or not a creolist is a sociolinguist is probably more a matter of self-identity than one of observable fact, but there’s no question that creole studies has a lot to give to—but also a both a lot to answer for on—the problem of linguistic equality. Should the well-rounded linguist have studied sociolinguistics? Absolutely. But there are probably many other areas, topics, or even theories you think that any well-rounded linguist ought to have studied but which are not required or widely taught, and these rarely provoke such discourse.

Generativism and anti-linguistics

I strongly identify with the generativist program. I recognize and accept that there are other ways to study language; some of these (e.g., any reasonably careful documentary work) contribute to generativist discourse and many of those that don’t are still prosocial. I for one would love to see the humanist aspect of documentation get more recognition. (Why don’t humanities programs hire linguists engaged in documentation and translation efforts?) But I’m most interested in the scientific aspects of language and think that generativism basically encompasses the big questions in this area, and some of the questions it doesn’t encompass just aren’t very important.

I don’t think it’s really ideal to brand generativism as Chomskyanism, which is the term anti-generativists tend to use. Certainly Chomsky is the plurality contributor to the program, but I think it gives undue credit to a single individual when there are so many others worth recognizing. I suspect the reason anti-generativists prefer it is they tend to see generativism as a cult of personality and perhaps want to trade on the repute of Chomsky’s (admittedly, extremely idiosyncratic but conceptually unrelated) political commitments. In evolutionary biology, it is common to refer to the modern theory of natural as the neo-Darwinian synthesis or modern synthesis. This makes sense because in 2024 there are no “strict Darwinists”, since subsequent work has integrated his monumental contributions with Mendelian and molecular genetics. Similarly, linguistics has no “strict Chomskyans”, even though we linguists eagerly awake our Mendel and our Crick & Watson.

The thing that sticks with me about the anti-generativist contingent is how disunited and disorganized they are. Anti-generativists are mostly a sincere lot (generativists too), but their attitudes are greatly shaped by negative polarization and as such, they have strange bedfellows. On the anti-generativist internet, you’ll see Adorno-disciple social constructivists talking at cross-purposes with construction grammarians, self-identified leftist/radical sociolinguists palling around with neocon consent-manufacturing journalists, experimental psycholinguists who reserve all their respect for exactly one out-of-practice fieldworker, tensorbros who don’t read books, and a few really mad, really old Boomers who never managed to build a movement around their heresy. By all accounts these people ought to hate each other. (And maybe, deep down, they do.)

In the worst case these conservations tend to veer away from constructive critique to a kind of anti-linguistics which devalues any form of language analysis that isn’t legible either as social activism or white-coat-wearing lab science. I for one can’t take your opinion about the science of language seriously if you can’t do the “armchair linguistics” that forms the descriptive-empirical base of the field. There are anti-generativists who clear this low bar, but not many. You don’t have to be a genius to do linguistics, but you do sort of have to be a linguist.

In my opinion, generativism has ever been hegemonic beyond the level of individual departments, and claims otherwise are simply scurrilous. (Even MIT is a hotbed of anti-generativist reaction, after all.) But I think it would be a shame for college students to get a liberal arts education without learning about these very interesting ideas about human nature (in addition to standard consciousness-raising about prescriptivism and language ideology, which is important too.)

A thought about academic jobs

I try not to pontificate about the academic job market. I recognize that I incredibly fortunate to have the job I have. I recognize that it is hard to get such a job, that it in some sense it comes down to luck, that there are more PhDs than faculty jobs, and finally that my job is not my friend. That said…

A colleague of mine had a PhD advisee who was offered a more or less ideal tenure-track job, at an excellent state school specializing in the advisee’s subarea, in a very pleasant town. The student, believe it or not, turned it down, and is now starting more or less from scratch on the alt-ac path. I genuinely don’t understand this. Earning a PhD in your field is the one always-necessary condition for getting an faculty job, even if the skills transfer to other pursuits. The demands of a graduate program expects from you are, to a great degree, necessary to get a faculty job. There are of course extra steps—that qualifying paper has to be sent off to a journal, and so on—but in terms of effort they are nothing compared to the work needed to get your degree. If you are doing well in your PhD program and if you are enjoying your studies, why not, for as long as you are able, consider applying for faculty positions? If you are not meeting your program’s expectations, your pessimism about the academic job market is besides the point, and if you are meeting or exceeding those expectations, you really might want to consider it.

High school as signaling behavior

When you meet an adult for the first time in Cincinnati—where I grew up—it is customary to ask them where they went to high school. Even though I have had basically nothing to do with Cincinnati since I reached the age of majority, I can learn so much about someone by learning they went to St. Ursula, or Walnut Hills, or Elder, Summit Country Day, or Wyoming. (This is helped along by the fact that Cincinnati is, for historical reasons, rather Catholic.) It’s one of the first things I ask born and raised New Yorkers too, and it tends to yield a lot of information. I know half a dozen graduates of Bronx Science (including the president of my college); I believe David Pesetsky is  one of several well-known linguists who attend Horace Mann; Hunter High is also a very promising sign, as is Stuyvesant. I even know about some of the elite high schools of Illinois at this point.

While virtually all the focus on “elite institutions” is directed at undergraduate colleges, I think this is something of a misdirection. While this may seem self-serving, I think high school choice might be a stronger signal than college choice, at least in parts of the country where it is common for one (with the help and possibly financial support of one’s parents, of course) to more or less pick a high school, with many magnet and private options.

My personal experience bears this out. I went to a very good suburban public school system (Lakota) until I was 14 and the strongest students at 14 who continued on to high school in that system are not living particularly impressive lives. In contrast, my class at my very good Catholic high school (St. Xavier) includes, among other impressive individuals, two centimillionaires (though one of those two is a phony and a scoundrel). I for one did not gain much personal ambition from St. Xavier, but I did acquire a love of learning (as someone once described it to me, “a pseudo-erotic attachment to knowledge”). Also, without any particular intentionality, I attended a good (but not selective) “R1” public college, and I feel like high school left me particularly well-positioned to take advantage of it. I didn’t even seriously consider elite colleges; I grew up in a solidly middle class family where there was no particular knowledge of elite institutions, to the point that I didn’t even find out what the Ivy League was until after I’d been accepted to Penn for my PhD. Had I been drawn from a slightly higher class stratum, I might have applied to Ivys, or at least one of those pricy private liberal arts schools on the East Coast like Vassar, and had I done so, I would have taken on an onerous load of personal debt in the process. And for what? It wouldn’t have made me any better a scholar.

Stop capitalizing so much

One of the absolute scourges of student writing is the tendency to capitalize just about every multi-word noun phrase. The rule in English is pretty simple: you only capitalize proper names, and these are, roughly, the names of people, locations, or organizations. Technical concepts do not qualify. It doesn’t matter if it’s part of an acronym: we capitalize the acronym but not necessarily the full phrase. Natural language processing is not a proper name; cognitive science isn’t either; logistic regression certainly is not a proper name nor is conditional random fields or hidden Markov model or support vector machine or…

Rich people shouldn’t drive

I don’t understand why the filthy rich ever drive. Sure, I get why Ferdinand Habsburg gets into the Eva cockpit: an F1 race is the modern-day tournament. But driving is a dangerous, high-liability, cognitively taxing activity and it’s easy for the rich to offload those hazards to a specialist. I don’t understand why, for example:

In the unlikely event that I hit centimillion status, the first thing I’m doing is buying a black, under-the-radar towncar and hiring a chaffeur with good personal recommendations. And before that, when I enter decamillion territory, I’m just calling UberXen. No alternate-side parking, no DUIs for me. I don’t know about Justin, but surely Warren and Sam have something better to do than be behind the wheel. They could be power napping, meditating, watching the market, or catching up on X (“the everything app”) the back of their car instead.

Linguistic relativity and i-language

Elif Batuman’s autofiction novel The Idiot follows Selin, a Harvard freshman in the mid 1990s. Selin initially declares her major in linguistics and describes two classes in more detail. One is with a soft-spoken professor who is said to be passionate about Turkic phonetics (no clue who this might be: anybody?) and the other is described as a Italian semanticist who wears beautiful suits (maybe this is Gennaro Chierchia; not sure). Selin is taken aback by the stridency with which her professor (presumably the Turkic phonetician) rails against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—she regrets how the professor repeatedly mentions Whorf’s day job as a fire prevention specialist—and finds linguistic relativity so intuitive she changes her major at the end of the book.

Batuman is not the only person to draw a connection between rejection of the stronger forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and generativism. Here’s the thing though: there is no real connection between these two ideas! Generativism has no particular stance on any of this. The only connection I see between these two ideas is that, when you adopt the i-language view, you simply have more interesting things to study. If you truly understand, say, poverty of the stimulus arguments, you just won’t feel the need to entertain intuitive-popular views of language because you’ll recognize that the human condition vis-à-vis language is much richer and much stranger than Whorf ever imagined.

Medical bills

Starting about two years ago, I got an unexpected medical bill in the mail. The amount wasn’t very high, but I was quite frustrated and annoyed. First, this was from a local College of Dentistry, where most procedures are free for the insured (and probably not insured too); there was no “explanation of benefits” that explained this was a co-pay, or that my insurance only covered some portion. Secondly, I hadn’t been to the College of Dentistry in quite a while, so I had no idea which of the various procedures this was or even what day I received the billed service. Third, there was no way to get more information: the absolute worst thing about this provider is that the administrative staff are some of the most overloaded and overworked people I have ever seen, and I have witnessed them just let the phone ring because they’re dealing with a huge line of in-person patients (some of whom are bleeding from their mouth). So I didn’t pay it. After a while though, the bills continued and I started to worry. Was I wasting paper for no reason? Would this harm my credit score? So I put about an hour into finding a way to actually get in touch with the billing office: turns out this was a Google Form buried somewhere on a website, and if you fill it out, a someone calls you (in my case, within the hour!), looks up your chart, and can tell you the date of service and why you were billed. Why they didn’t just include this in the bill in the first place? I have to imagine this makes it ever harder for the College to actually collect on these debts.

“Indic” considered harmful

Indic is an adjective referring to the Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi-Urdu or Bengali. These languages are spoken mostly in the northern parts of India, as well as in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives. This term can be confusing, because hundreds of millions of people in the Indian subcontinent (and nearby island nations) speak non-Indic first languages: over 250 million people, particularly in the south of India and the north of Sri Lanka, speak Dravidian languages, which include Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, and Tai-Kadai languages, and many language isolates, are also spoken in the India and the other nations of subcontinent, as is English (and French, and Portuguese). Unfortunately, there is now a trend to use Indic to mean ‘languages of the subcontinent’. See here for a prominent example. This is a new sense for Indic, and while there is probably a need for such a lexeme to express the notion (language of India or subcontinental language would work), reusing Indic, which already has a distinct and well-established sense, just adds unnecessary confusion.

A minor syntactic innovation in English: “BE crazy”

I recently became aware of an English syntactic construction I hadn’t noticed before. It involves the predicate BE crazy, which itself is nothing new, but here the subject of that predicate is, essentially, quoted speech from a second party. I myself am apparently a user of this variant. For example, a friend told me of someone who describes themselves (on an online dating platform) as someone who …likes travel and darts, and I responded, simply, Likes darts is crazy. That is to say, I am making some kind of assertion that the description “likes darts”, or perhaps the speech act of describing oneself as such, is itself a bit odd. Now in this case, the subject is simply the quotation (with the travel and part elided), and while this forms a constituent, a tensed VP, we don’t normally accept them as the subject of predicates. And I suspect constituenthood is not even required. So this is distinct from the ordinary use of BE crazy with a nominal subject.

I suspect, though I do not have the means to prove, this is a relatively recent innovation; I hear it from my peers (i.e., those of similar age, not my colleagues at work, who may be older) and students, but not often elsewhere. I also initially thought it might be associated with the Mid-Atlantic but I am no longer so sure.

Your thoughts are welcome.