everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability

I would be curious to know how your collaborators see the word "generative". Do they understand their work to fall under that? I ask because I have encountered various people defining it in a way that would not include current work in LFG, as I understand them

I just say "contemporary generative syntax"

This is from early December :(

Good to see you back!

Wow.

Musgrave nails it as always

Linguistics prof here, Singer is legit!

Great piece!

THIS

When longtime homeowners stand up at a community meeting about proposed zoning changes and say “we should not allow apartments in this neighborhood because it will hurt my property values,” they are colluding to jack up rents by creating artificial housing scarcity.

remember, the blitzkrieg is intended to make you feel like there is nothing you can do about it; that’s the only reason to go forward in this haphazard and sloppy manner all in the first week

and the choice of that strategy tells you they are afraid you *will* do something about it

strange to read that my approach to [phenomenon x] cannot be correct because it strays from SYNTAX RECEIVED WISDOM in a paper that then goes on to reject SYNTAX RECEIVED WISDOM

Twelve months that crippled Jimmy Carter’s presidency A hostage crisis in Iran, unrelenting inflation and a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy ensured Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election.

Much I learned from this about why, exactly, Reagan was elected (gift link)

We all have our red lines somewhere…

I love this so much!

That would be amazing

“We asked three Trump voters in a diner…”

It’s brutal. Should be classified as horror not (just) sci fi

Preach

Ishii! Ishii!!

why do 10% of my undergrads not know the word "belch"

Ranked choice voting means it's not enough to vote for the pro-housing candidate, you also have to decide if you prefer "bully city employees until they quit and brag about it" or "rage-quit the city council"

the simple dream of learning, sometime this decade, who won to 2024 Berkeley mayorial election

Solidarity

Seriously tho what happened to that guy?

A Theory of Indexical Shift: Meaning, Grammar, and Crosslinguistic Variation A comprehensive overview of the semantics and syntax of indexical shift that develops a constrained typology of the phenomenon across languages.The phenome

I wrote a book about indexical shift—the phenomenon whereby words like “I” refer to the person whose speech or attitude is being reported, in languages such as Japanese, Farsi, Korean, Navajo, or Uyghur direct.mit.edu/books/monogr...

This pace of counting is absolutely insane

Orange cat on purple blanket

This is Gari

Reminded of the MLK quote: “You have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt.”