#when i think about that i think 'oh man i could totally be a syntactician working with HPSG'

[fractallogic]

every once in a while, I do stuff in a linguistic subfield that I see as at least borderline syntaxy (which is because the profs here who do things like distributed morphology and lexical semantics are also syntacticians), and I think “you know I can’t remember why I didn’t really care for syntax; maybe I feel better about it now?” and then I read something even just vaguely touching on syntax and go NOPE

so, you know, sort of like verbal telicity, there are very fine-grained distinctions between what I do and what other people do that make them seem similar but they are in fact extremely different

(cf. “walked home” and “walked around” with the construction “in an hour”)

like honestly it’s also the same thing with phonology and my advisor. he like, is adamant that I’m a closet phonologist and I just don’t want to say that I am because of my horrific experience during my first semester, but NO. ACTUALLY. NO. I think about actual phonological things and go NOPE this is dumb morphology could explain this better

...in which I realize for reals and for serious that I really am absolutely 100% a word

so anyways I’m going to go back to reading about coordination so that I can talk better about things like “coordination reduction” and other aspects of syntactic ergativity in class today

(also you know how you spend time looking over your slides and going “oh yeah I totally know what I want to talk about here” and then while you’re thinking that it’s so obvious that you don’t make any notes, and then you come back to it the next day and you’re like “...wtf does any of this mean”?

yeah that happens literally every single class period)

#and by 'profs' i actually mean 'morphologymom' #also this happens whenever i think about HPSG #when i think about that i think 'oh man i could totally be a syntactician working with HPSG' #no actually i like HPSG because it reflects all of the lexical semantic parts of verbs