tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post3846482408467452603..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Athens in MayNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-42486565125694635362015-04-29T02:31:18.598-07:002015-04-29T02:31:18.598-07:00I love it when people stream or post video of lect...I love it when people stream or post video of lectures, but in my experience the question period following it is rarely something you can follow, given the logistical problems of getting the microphones close enough to whoever's talking and aiming and focusing the camera quickly enough. Since this event is supposed to be a series of big discussions, not centered around presentations, I don't know how to solve those logistical problems and we currently have no way of videotaping or streaming the event. <br /><br />On the other hand, at least my colleague Gillian Ramchand is planning to live-blog the event, and I'm sure Norbert will be having a thing or two to say as well!Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-35480741711284254752015-04-28T15:20:21.936-07:002015-04-28T15:20:21.936-07:00Speaking as one of those youngsters in the field.....Speaking as one of those youngsters in the field...While I won't be able to attend, I am very much interested in getting a glimpse of the content of this event, especially with as ambitious a goal as "reaffirming the theoretical core of the discipline". Any chance there will be some audio/video documentation of the proceedings, beyond the final white paper?William Krugerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00396986818767380148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-82820850109596367112015-04-18T03:40:22.609-07:002015-04-18T03:40:22.609-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00971771924223348187noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-69348354242795894032015-04-14T11:47:01.943-07:002015-04-14T11:47:01.943-07:00Thanks Peter. Re: “immigration reform”. My concern...Thanks Peter. Re: “immigration reform”. My concern was less about being “doctrinaire”, and more about how the borders of the field are defined. People have a relatively well-defined notion of what syntactic research looks like, and as one moves further from that prototype there is (inevitably) a point where they will say, “no, that no longer counts as doing syntax”. My hunch is that one reaches that boundary sooner in syntax than in modern phonology or semantics (though casual discussions today make me less certain). We’ll happily define syntax as (roughly) the study of that part of the mental language faculty that deals with sentence structure, and in studying that mental capacity there are lots of things that one can ask, including the foundational concerns that Norbert lays out above (Plato’s Problem, etc.). But in practice, the work stays fairly close to the established prototype. If you stray from the standard Marr level, or take Plato’s Problem a little too seriously, or spend a lot of time using different tools, then you’re no longer doing syntax, you’ve moved into another field. I’m loathe to use a personal example, but in my own case, I feel like I’ve been interested in similar questions about the mental capacity for syntax for a long time, and for my first job I was even hired as a syntactician. But I think it’s fairly clear that I lost my syntactic passport many years ago (and I also stopped self-classifying as such). My hunch is that in phonology one can stray a little further from the prototype without risking citizenship, and in semantics there’s more of a mix of views on border control.<br /><br />In the case of Plato’s Problem — I focus on this one because it’s one that has broad acceptance as a problem that syntacticians are accountable to — I think that the main progress in recent years has involved learning just how hard it is. Perhaps much harder than we would have imagined 40 years ago. We now have many advantages that mean that it should be possible to approach this rather more seriously than was possible a couple of decades ago. We know much more about the richness of the endstate, we can describe and analyze the primary linguistic data much better, we can make much more confident claims about what learners can and can’t extract from the PLD. This is wonderful. But it would be optimistic to call this a crowded research area currently. And if somebody does roll up their sleeves and start to dig into all of these pieces of the problem, then it no longer looks like “doing syntax”. Meanwhile, in other departments (e.g., psychology) there’s not much of a home for this kind of work either, because if you don’t believe in the richness of the endstate, then there’s no problem to answer to. Net result: Plato’s Problem is oddly under-explored these days. That’s unfortunate, given that it’s one of the better motivations for a restrictive theory of syntax.<br /><br />[To be clear, in case there’s any misunderstanding. Nothing that I say here should imply anything negative about the work that is done in syntax, nor do I doubt the legions of interesting findings in that area. And I don’t much care which passport I carry myself. But I do worry about the degree to which the field is defined by its workflow rather than its over-arching questions.]Colin Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724709677503698323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-31683736584398881492015-04-13T13:05:08.513-07:002015-04-13T13:05:08.513-07:00Hey, if you'd like more young people, the fine...Hey, if you'd like more young people, the fine & <30 linguists collecting interviews for the linguistics podcast 'the polemical brain' would love to come and cover this event for a professional & public English-speaking audience. Unfortunately, we have no access to funding to come over in this capacity. Perhaps someone might suggest a source of funding? Maxim Baruhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01889104131534548077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-37667077744639877482015-04-13T08:33:32.474-07:002015-04-13T08:33:32.474-07:00Thanks to the various contributors above, we will ...Thanks to the various contributors above, we will definitely bring this input along to the round-table itself! Just a couple of brief additional comments.<br /><br />Unlike David P, I am not sure that we have an _excellent_ sense of "[…] a good sense of big, burning questions, and of what it might look like to make progress on them". First, it would be a bad sign if we came up with big, burning questions every day, as David P also says. Second, what exactly identifies something as a big, burning question? Opinions and taste differ, but some factors that come to mind: 1) it is a question whose answer goes beyond the empirical domain that is being investigated. So the nature of government, binding, agree, phases, movement are big questions because they say something general about the architecture of I-language, not just the particular set of facts that one is looking at. 2) it is a question where links to other areas of linguistics and potentially cognitive science more generally can be clearly identified. Here I am thinking of questions relating to acquisition, to processing, to semantics, to typology, etc. 3) It is a question which carries a certain amount of risk. That is, the question has to be daring enough in the sense that the answer is not easily available, but it cannot be too daring such that negative results won’t yield results that are relevant or important. Otherwise it won’t be funded or grad students wouldn’t want to work on it. 4) It is a question that cannot be investigated by a single scholar. That could maybe done previously within generative syntax, but I would claim not really anymore. Our knowledge is too comprehensive (which is a good thing) and the complexity is such that one needs to master a wide variety of skills in order to be able to investigate phenomenon x adequately.<br /><br />In general, a big question is probably one where the potential for big impact is present. When writing grant applications, we have to think about the factors mentioned above all the time, and I tend to think that big questions are those that go in grants and sometimes in dissertations. That doesn't mean that all dissertations actually deal with a big issue, but most students do try to relate their study or studies to a question that their dissertation has made some progress towards illuminating/solving. <br /><br />Breakthroughs are different from big questions. Breakthroughs concerning one question can come when actually trying to solve another question, be it small or big. I totally agree that we have made a lot of very important discoveries over the past 50 years and that we also have made quite a few breakthroughs.<br /><br />There's no doubt that the field has an excellent sense of good questions to be asked. My feeling, which is undoubtedly personal and a matter of taste, is that in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and the early 1990s, it was clearER to the field what the _big_ questions were. But maybe my impression from back then is wrong (granted, I wasn't around). <br /><br />Asking and trying to solve the big and daring questions typically require teams, not individual scholars. That's a good reason why, at least in Europe, grants usually come with a number of positions. One individual alone cannot solve the questions and they very often require collaboration across sub-disciplines and disciplines, the way Colin described. I think syntax is slowly changing, but I think we would benefit from doing more joint work and thinking about our research questions in ways that explicitly require teamwork. Syntacticians would benefit from that, and hey, it's also much more fun!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11941223424857041110noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-6451882261564110652015-04-13T04:53:34.433-07:002015-04-13T04:53:34.433-07:00Colin: You’re making lots of very good points. You...Colin: You’re making lots of very good points. You should come to the conference! A few reactions:<br /><br />You note that in the past “there were important results that were taken up by the community almost right away” and wonder whether “the Jobs and Wozniak era” of linguistics is over. I would say it’s relative: Yes, the field is different now: it has an impressive canon of results, as Norbert says, the theory underpinning it is more mature, and it is bigger with more specialization (requiring more collaboration for far-reaching results); all of this means that the chances of a bright young turk’s new idea turning everything on its head overnight are reduced (and it’s not clear that that is bad news).<br /><br />On the other hand, the field is still small and young compared to others, and the possibilities for a young person to make a significant impact are still vastly greater in our field than in those others. We all know countless recent cases where a PhD dissertation or a single-authored paper written by a graduate student is widely cited and influential. I believe that the situation is at least quantitively different in other fields. <br /><br />On a different note, and just for the record, I don’t think I share your sense that syntax is more doctrinaire than phonology or semantics. Or maybe I just don’t realize that my passport has been revoked!<br />Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-72899324569797183462015-04-13T04:42:18.375-07:002015-04-13T04:42:18.375-07:00I wonder whether other fields spend as much time i...I wonder whether other fields spend as much time in introspection and self-worry as syntax does. I think not, and I'm not sure it's warranted or even healthy. I think the field has an excellent sense of "a good sense of big, burning questions, and of what it might look like to make progress on them". If the field is not generating brand-new big burning questions on a daily basis, but working on subquestions that we think may contribute to serious progess, that's a sign of seriousness, not a cause for worry. If you build for them, the breakthroughs will come. And they do.<br /><br />I at least, find I learn something new and exciting about syntax more or less every week (from students, from papers and from talks), and can think of various breakthroughs and discoveries of recent years that could be identified as such almost immediately. The <a href="http://web.mit.edu/Linguistics/people/faculty/pesetsky/Pesetsky_LSA_plenary_talk_slides_2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">slides from my 2013 LSA plenary</a> have some examples — I have in mind especially the list of discoveries (p.71) that in a better world would have been hailed in the popular press, as well as the newer material with which I began that talk. I could add to that list things like the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC), or, in a more general vein, the logic for syntactic explanation that Colin and Norbert's new Maryland colleague Omer Preminger championed in his recent MIT dissertation and LI monograph.<br /><br />It could be that we will improve the status or health of our subdiscipline by looking to other successful fields that we envy for one reason or another — and modeling ourselves on them, as Colin seems to suggest. But it could also turn out that the result would be a cargo-cult facsimile of some other field that does us no good at all — because our field is at a different stage or needs to tackle different kinds of questions. I have neither the wisdom nor a sufficiently accurate crystal ball to judge this, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. I think the best collective strategy of the field is for us all to follow our hunches and do what we think is best — and to avoid overexercising our normative instincts with respect to our colleagues. My hope is that there are — and will continue to be — enough smart syntacticians trying enough different approaches to inquiry that the breakthroughs happen, whatever research infrastructure they may require. We could use more syntacticians. But I see no slowdown in the number of brilliant, energetic young people who want to contribute to our subfield, so on this matter, at least, I'm an optimist.David Pesetskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09666557087629655596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-67299056830616131392015-04-13T00:11:01.513-07:002015-04-13T00:11:01.513-07:00I have been organizing at least one conference a y...I have been organizing at least one conference a year for about twenty years, and I know that organizing a conversation with a lot of interlocutors is a challenge. We are scheduling lots of discussion time and granting commensurately less floor time to individuals than in a traditional conference, so keeping the discussions on topic will be especially demanding. The SWOT-style questions that Norbert posted are part of an attempt to manage the discussion periods. The invitees’ advance responses to those questions will give us an idea of who has a lot to say about what, and will allow us to organize the event into some thematic sessions. Hopefully this will contribute to keeping the various discussions on track, which will hopefully make it easier for everybody who has something to say to say it. Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-40151217551627882602015-04-12T20:41:20.331-07:002015-04-12T20:41:20.331-07:00I've decided to schlep over to Europe for this...I've decided to schlep over to Europe for this. One thing I'm wondering about is the format. There are a lot of invited speakers. That's great, of course, but I wonder how easy it will be to actually run a ' round-table' in such a way that the younger researchers have a chance to make a significant contribution?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00971771924223348187noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-5466373157150724452015-04-12T18:50:11.423-07:002015-04-12T18:50:11.423-07:00Peter: you raise a couple of interesting points, w...Peter: you raise a couple of interesting points, which makes me wonder whether things have changed over the years. You say that it takes a while before one can tell whether a breakthrough has occurred. But my impression is that this wasn’t the case in the past, where there was rapid recognition of important and impactful results. We can easily think of cases where there were important results that were taken up by the community almost right away. Also, you imply that to find the “broad perspective” that you want for the meeting you needed to gravitate towards older folk, and Norbert worries that “the young may have forgotten these questions”, in talking about some important and long-standing questions. Assuming that you’re both right, this raises concerns about the health of the field. <br /><br />To be clear: I have no beef with any of the fine people who will be gathering in Athens, and I think that we can all hope to see live(ly) blogging on FoL from the meeting. Norbert will offer tutorials, I presume. The concern is about signs of the vitality of a field, which can also help to attract talent, drive new positions, bring sustained funding, interest from outside, etc. In the sprit of Norbert’s solicitation, I’ll offer 3 suggestions for the "road ahead".<br /><br />1. Recognizing breakthroughs. There needs to be a good sense of big, burning questions, and of what it might look like to make progress on them. Peter and Norbert might be right that it takes years to tell, or that it’s hard to get people to engage with those types of questions. If so, then we have a problem. If people don’t know the big questions, or don’t recognize breakthroughs until many years later, then that’s a pretty good incentive to work on something else. You can do better at getting a job and getting tenure by going after smaller problems that yield respected publications on a manageable time scale.<br /><br />2. Beyond a cottage industry. Back in the day, when the field was younger and smaller, it was not uncommon for people to make a big splash early in their career with a relatively small scale piece of work, often unpublished. It was like the Jobs and Wozniak era, where a couple of kids could take the world by storm with something they built in the garage. But while the tech industry has moved on, syntax is still largely a cottage/garage industry. I’m sure there’s still a lot of room for that, but perhaps breakthroughs on some of the bigger questions [see (1)] will require larger scale projects involving concerted collaborations. For example, Norbert points out the limited progress on questions involving Plato’s Problem (PP), and I agree with him. I suspect that making real progress on that front will require collaborations among people with quite different expertise (different language groups, different methods, different types of linguistic analysis, etc.). In fields like neurobiology and physics it is taken for granted that some things have got to be done by teams, but syntax is mostly not configured that way. For instance, there are some well regarded graduate programs that still explicitly discourage students and faculty from collaborating.<br /><br />3. Immigration reform. Semantics and phonology have more porous border control than does syntax. In contemporary semantics and phonology people are pursuing old chestnuts and new questions using established and new-fangled approaches, and that work is still considered to be semantics or phonology. For the most part, this is serving them well. Syntax has been less welcoming. If you become too wayward, then you risk losing your passport. A more enlightened immigration policy might help with (1) or (2). Colin Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724709677503698323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-45891633355726592342015-04-12T12:49:05.002-07:002015-04-12T12:49:05.002-07:00I agree that getting younger practitioners would h...I agree that getting younger practitioners would have been nice, but as I am just a (late) invitee I leave the decision procedure to the organizers (I see Peter made a comment above). <br /><br />Let me address your second point: is there anything here that couldn't have been asked 10 years ago? Well, as a matter of fact I think there is. Take the questions regarding binding and AGREE. We now have several different analyses of binding for example that are quite different from the GB binding theory. The question of the comparative minimalist utility of these wrt Darwin's Problem could not have been asked a decade ago as these analyses were not well developed then. So too with my obsession about headedness. One important current view, due in part to Chomsky, is that labels are phrasal titivations added at Spell Out for the benefit of interface interpretation. If a consequence of dumping AGREE is that this needs revision then this is also not a question that could have been addressed before as the before account had very different views of labels and their role in the syntax and semantic interface. <br /><br />The question that could have been asked more than a decade ago has to do with islands. I know you have a fondness for island phenomena so I am not surprised this one may have caught your attention. However, the question has, IMO, been ignored and the direction of phase theory has not been to embrace it. This is especially true if one extends one's thinking to antecedent government effects. So could it have been asked earlier? Yes. Have we made any progress? Well, in part. The whole ellipsis industry has shed interesting light on how to conceive of islands. A more updated version of my worry might be what to do with ECP effects if indeed islands are effectively PF phenomena. Again, this question could not have been posed before the Merchant Lasnik work gained acceptance. This is about a decade old, but it has been a hotbed of activity and its consequences are now being carefully mulled over.<br /><br />I should add, that one of my desires is to see OLD questions, ones that were more central, revived. Moreover, I think that the "young" may have forgotten these questions, so a dose of the "old" may be useful here. I should also add, that in my admittedly limited experience, the kinds of questions the organizers are asking to be addressed have dropped out of a lot of contemporary syntactic discussion. I know that it has been incredibly difficult to get any linguists to discuss the kinds of questions we have been asked to address (see the wheezing Hilbert Questions effort). So the organizers are to be commended for trying to get such a discussion rolling. Hopefully, the old farts will be put in their place by the poster giving young Turks. Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-42245217571111009782015-04-12T12:44:31.072-07:002015-04-12T12:44:31.072-07:00Colin: I think that at least in theoretical syntax...Colin: I think that at least in theoretical syntax, it is hard to evaluate something accurately as a breakthrough before it has been around for a while, and people have had a chance to challenge it from different angles, or to explore its consequences for the other parts of the theory that it impacts. Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-37506758059816341682015-04-12T12:08:38.107-07:002015-04-12T12:08:38.107-07:00Utpal: if the 90s feels recent (... as it does to ...Utpal: if the 90s feels recent (... as it does to me), then you know that you're long in the tooth. But beyond being facetious, I think that conveying a sense of recent progress is important to the health of a field. Norbert raises many interesting questions in his post, but is there anything in there that couldn't have been asked 10 years ago? (Would the same be true in semantics? I don't know.) In days of yore, one of the things that attracted young talent to the field was the sense that they could make big contributions, and they could make them soon. In order to continue to attract people, it helps if they have a similar impression. And that's made easier if we can point to breakthroughs in the past 10 years, and that's even easier to recognize if those discoveries were made by people who weren't in the field 10 years ago. In some fields there are barriers to this, because of the huge lab infrastructure that it takes years to build. But linguistics has benefited from a culture that believes that one can make a big impact very young.Colin Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724709677503698323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-87863270366557443762015-04-12T11:58:44.940-07:002015-04-12T11:58:44.940-07:00Colin: Thanks for this observation. Our thought wa...Colin: Thanks for this observation. Our thought was that we could attract interested younger people with our call for posters. We considered selecting the entire program through a call for papers but decided that it would be too much like other events, e.g. GLOW. Our list of invitees was arrived at by consensus among the organizers after a long back-and-forth during which a very long list of suggestions was pared down to one of a manageable length. The process has the usual shortcomings and obviously many excellent people couldn't be included. In general, it was easier for us to agree on people with a clear track record and long experience than on those without, given the kind of broad perspective we were hoping to achieve for the general discussion.Peter Svenoniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09436844670309091617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-55069569462817724922015-04-12T11:39:35.038-07:002015-04-12T11:39:35.038-07:00Colin: In say the late 70s, you wouldn't have ...Colin: In say the late 70s, you wouldn't have had many people who were doing GG who had their doctorates 15 years ago :) Most ppl on the list are slightly above 50, though and many received their doctorates in the 90s or later, it ain't that bad :) But yeah, the really younger people seem to all be presenting posters :(Utpalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18166651069703369369noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-42937604816460664452015-04-12T11:09:55.403-07:002015-04-12T11:09:55.403-07:00With due respect to all of the fine individuals wh...With due respect to all of the fine individuals who are going, it's hard not to be struck by the incongruity between the title of the conference and the range of featured voices. Among the long list of invited speakers there's only one person who is both < 50 and graduated in the 21st century. I'm sure everybody will have sage things to offer about the future, but the distribution does not exude confidence in the future. Would a similar meeting about syntax held in the 70s or 80s have had a similar distribution? Colin Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724709677503698323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-49972565132120529612015-04-12T02:27:41.755-07:002015-04-12T02:27:41.755-07:00This actually looks worth flying from Bangkok for....This actually looks worth flying from Bangkok for.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00971771924223348187noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-3883542573035962802015-04-12T00:56:34.637-07:002015-04-12T00:56:34.637-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00971771924223348187noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-26922087265106090352015-04-11T20:38:16.377-07:002015-04-11T20:38:16.377-07:00Kalo taksidhi. Envy Envy Envy ....Kalo taksidhi. Envy Envy Envy ....AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.com