Any time I read a paper that begins, roughly, “there is a growing consensus that P“, there is not in fact, as far as I can tell, a growing consensus in support of P.
Asides
It’s “Penn”
This is probably a losing battle at this point, but the University of Pennsylvania’s short name is and has always been Penn and UPenn is something of a shibboleth (probably derived from the the URL upenn.edu).
Citation practices
In a previous post I talked about an exception to the general rule that you should expand acronyms: sometimes what the acronym expands to is a clear joke made up after the fact. This is an instance of a more general principle: you should provide, via citations, information the reader needs to know or stands to benefit from. To that point, nobody has ever really cared about the mere fact that you “used R (R Core Team 2021)”. It’s usually not relevant. R is one of hundreds of Turing-complete programming environments, and most of the things it can do can be done in any other language. Your work almost surely can be replicated in other environments. It might be interesting to mention this if a major point of your paper is that wrote, say, a new open-source software package for R: there the reader needs to know what platform this library targets. But otherwise it’s just cruft.
Isaacson and Lewis
It’s amusing to me that Walter Isaacson and Michael Lewis—who happened to go to the same elite private high school in New Orleans, just a few years apart—are finally having their oeuvres as favorable stenographers for the rich and powerful reassessed more or less simultaneously. Isaacson clearly met his match with Elon Musk, a deeply incurious abuser who gave Isaacson quite minimal access; Lewis does seem to be one of a handful of people who actually believed in that ethical altruism nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was cooking up. Good riddance, I say.
Myths about writing systems
In collaboration with Richard Sproat, I just published a short position paper on “myths about writing systems” in NLP to appear in the proceedings for CAWL, the ACL Workshop on Computation and Writing Systems. I think it will be most of all useful to reviewers and editors who need a resource to combat nonsense like Persian is a right-to-left language and want to suggest a correction. Take a look here.
Being mad online
[A spiritual sucessor to this post…]
I recently realized that a lot of young linguists think the thought leaders in the field are the same people who are the most Mad Online. I can assure you that is not so true.
“Hi both”
I recently noticed that I have been receiving emails, addressed to multiple recipients, with the salutation
Hi both,
In fact I appear to have 34 of them in one of my many inboxes, including two received from different authors today. For me, this is sharply ungrammatical, though I am not sure why. Both is unobjectionable in subject or object position (e.g., Both liked limoncello, She fancies both, etc.) so I am not sure why it is bad in a salutation. A very informal survey of the people who have sent it to me shows two speakers for whom English is their second language (though both have extremely high proficiency) but also several native speakers too. Any ideas?
Do surface representations contain phonemes?
An interesting philosophical question: if a phoneme present in underlying representation surfaces faithfully, does the surface representation “contain” that phoneme, or is it better to say faithful phonemes have been vacuously transduced to an (allo)phone with the same specification?
Noam and Bill are friends
One of the more confusing slanders against generativism is the belief that it has all somehow been undone by William Labov and the tradition of variationist sociolinguistics. I have bad news: Noam and Bill are friends. I saw them chopping it up once, in Philadelphia, and I have to assume they were making fun of functionalists. Bill has nice things to say about the generativist program in his classic paper on negative concord; Noam has some interesting comments about how the acquirenda probably involve multiple competing grammars in that Piaget lecture book. They both think functionalism is wildly overrated. And of course, the i-language perspective that Noam brings is an absolute essential to dialogues about language ideologies, language change, stigma and stratification, and so forth that we associate with Bill.
Industry postdocs
I find the very idea of industry postdocs funny (funny-sad, though). Sure, it makes sense for the academy, with all of its scarcities, to make use of precarious, casualized post-graduate labor, but to extend this to the tech sector is vaguely monstrous. It’s extra funny (but funny-sad too) when you hear of a senior professor doing an industry postdoc at a company with a name like baz.ly during their sabbatical.