New Mission
Goal for immediate future is to research and compose an original writing sample for grad school applications since the last paper I wrote in theoretical phonology now strikes me as spirited and hearted in the right place but vulgarly naive in some of the specifics. Thus I’ve decided to review the literature surrounding the computational complexity of Optimality Theory (OT). OT is basically the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” constraint-satisfaction theory of phonology where for a given underlying form, infinitely/indefinitely candidate surface forms are generated and filtered out according to an ordered list of constraints. Put another way, all possible outputs are run through a series of gauntlets and the one that comes out in the best shape is the winner and selected as the output.
The literature consists of proofs that OT is NP-complete and responses to the effect of “ur doing OT wrong”. We’re doing NP-complete proofs in my theory of computation class, so I get to capitalize on and reinforce my knowledge in complexity theory. The formal mathematical reasoning and fine-grained scholarship serve my ultimate rhetorical goal of trying to get accepted, but the exercise will not be trivial as I can study the intricacies of a theory maligned across the board in my linguistics department. So that’s good and I feel good about it. My main issue for writing therefore is coming up with something original to bring to the table. Right now, I’m considering a direction along the lines of “computational intractability is not the end of world; mental representation is.”
Everything I did today, minus the prose.
Once I found out that it’s going to cost me just as much to take four classes as it would to take five, I enrolled in Introduction to African Linguistics. The class promises to be a snoozefest as a linguistics primer, but the fun part is that we have to adopt a language, study it and report on it over the course of the semester. I asked the instructor what language has a tone system with lots of word-level phonology—I want to see some crazy awesome phonology—and he suggested Akan, a family of languages spoken in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
The above data comes from the Twi language, and I would like to call attention to the (apparent) minimal pair /dʑa/ ‘leave behind’ and /dʑɥa/ ‘peel’. The initial consonant on both of these words is a voiced palatal affricate (compare to English “j” in judge), but the second is differentiated by the labiopalatal approximate (so imagine rounding your lips and bringing your tongue closer to your hard palate while making the “j” sound). As far as I can tell (I have yet to view a real grammar of the language), these are contrastive phonemes—which is really cool! Imagine if lip-rounding made a difference in English, imagine having two “ch” and two “j” sounds, all four as distinct as /p/, /b/, /t/ and /d/—that’d be neat!
(Also, props to the careful reader who notices the nasal assimilation and coalescence/gemination in the second column.)
Theoretical Computer Science Cheatsheet →
I’ve shared it here before, but this is the greatest math cheatsheet ever.
Class Schedule
Follow-up to my state of affairs post: Registered for classes one hour ago. Anxiety over having slim pickings subsided as I got to play the optimization game of course scheduling.
Constraints to satisfy:
- 3-mile bike/bus commute: avoid unnecessary early-morning awakenings and trips to campus.
- Fridays need to be open for trips to endocrinologist and in-network phlebotomists. Bonus: extended weekend visits to Chicago/Mary.
- Need courses to make me more marketable in work-place or grad school. Split the difference: two mathy and two linguisticky classes.
The schedule is thus:
- Communicative Disorders 240: Language Development in Children
- Linguistics 561: Intro to Experimental Phonetics
- Computer Science 520: Intro to Theory of Computing (woot!)
- Math 320: Linear Algebra & Differential Equations
All courses scheduled between 11am and 5pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, except for 50 minutes on Wednesday. That’s a four-day weekend, though I will give up Mondays/Wednesdays for employment. This is a very light course load for me, and I find math courses are very calming when I’m diligent. Mission One remains graduate school.
In other news: I bought a cheap, refurbed police-auctioned bike for my commute. I still need to pack, pack, pack, and move—I hate packing and moving more than anything else in world. I have to ask my mom for haircut.
State of Affairs
Even though I am all graduated, I have to go back to school for one semester. I originally enrolled at UW-Eau Claire, which is a teacher/nurse/engineer-mill commutable from my parents’ house. But they have a six-credit limit for “special” students, so I’m going back to Madison. I’ve arranged off-campus living with my generous older brother and his generous partner.
As a special student at Madison, I can take up 18 credits but my enrollment date is 48 hours before instruction begins, meaning that I need to gather up 12 credits from the slimmest pickings. My strategy is too land a bunch of computer science and math courses and maybe some communicative disorders, but at this point, the six-credit intro course in Japanese is looking mighty tempting. Experience in a tone (even pitch-accent) and SOV language is very relevant experience for a budding theoretical phonologist.
But it doesn’t really matter what I take because (a) I will do fine and (b) the real goal of the semester is for me to apply and get into one of the better midwestern linguistics programs, if not one of the big-name coastal schools. Thus, I must brush up on and return to being totally conversant in theoretical phonology and articulatory phonetics. I also need to do the stinking GRE and kick its ass, as well as develop my writing samples and reconnect with potential letter of recommendation writers. That’s the real work for the fall.
The upside of the new location is that Mary will be in Chicago this fall instead of Columbus, which is the difference between catching an early-morning bus and budgeting/planning flights two months in advance. That is to say, things will be much more awesome.
![This is characteristic of most of my old phonology homework. I used to take two copies of an exercise: one for messily figuring out the problem (dead-ends and all), and one for presenting my elegant solution (seemingly divined from the language heavens).
I can see that I struggled with how to gracefully unite the following facts:
Voicing: /t/ becomes [d] before [b] but not [r,a,k,s]
Devoicing: /z/ becomes [s] before [s,k] but not [r,a,b]
Which is why the work is full of rule descriptions like /X/→[Y] / __[+a,-b]. I am trying to condense four descriptions into one single rule: Obstruents regressively match voicing across the morpheme boundary.
It probably looks really messy and foreign, but it’s like a logic or an insight puzzle, and in this respect, I find phonology problems very calming. I also find value in knowing that I describe a fact about Russian prepositions.](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kolk833pSz1qznraho1_500.jpg "This is characteristic of most of my old phonology homework. I used to take two copies of an exercise: one for messily figuring out the problem (dead-ends and all), and one for presenting my elegant solution (seemingly divined from the language heavens).
I can see that I struggled with how to gracefully unite the following facts:
Voicing: /t/ becomes [d] before [b] but not [r,a,k,s]
Devoicing: /z/ becomes [s] before [s,k] but not [r,a,b]
Which is why the work is full of rule descriptions like /X/→[Y] / __[+a,-b]. I am trying to condense four descriptions into one single rule: Obstruents regressively match voicing across the morpheme boundary.
It probably looks really messy and foreign, but it’s like a logic or an insight puzzle, and in this respect, I find phonology problems very calming. I also find value in knowing that I describe a fact about Russian prepositions.")
This is characteristic of most of my old phonology homework. I used to take two copies of an exercise: one for messily figuring out the problem (dead-ends and all), and one for presenting my elegant solution (seemingly divined from the language heavens).
I can see that I struggled with how to gracefully unite the following facts:
- Voicing: /t/ becomes [d] before [b] but not [r,a,k,s]
- Devoicing: /z/ becomes [s] before [s,k] but not [r,a,b]
Which is why the work is full of rule descriptions like /X/→[Y] / __[+a,-b]. I am trying to condense four descriptions into one single rule: Obstruents regressively match voicing across the morpheme boundary.
It probably looks really messy and foreign, but it’s like a logic or an insight puzzle, and in this respect, I find phonology problems very calming. I also find value in knowing that I describe a fact about Russian prepositions.
Developing Graves Disease really screwed me up this year, and as a result, I couldn’t graduate this year. Thus, yesterday at Mary’s graduation ceremony, it was sad seeing most my friends graduate, and it was annoying knowing that I wouldn’t be able to hang out with them next year. It wasn’t all bad, as it was a relief knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing many of my enemies and frenemies for a long time.
Favorite Things I Had To Read For School
Post your list.
- Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
- Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
- Milton - Paradise Lost
- Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
- Joyce - “Araby” and “The Dead”
- Shelley - Frankenstein
- Pope - The Rape of the Lock
- Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- Crane - “The Monster”
- Shakespeare - King Lear
My Linguist Stance of Official Language Legislation
Excerpt from my triple book review:
So pervasive is English worldwide, Crystal argues, that the only place where an English backlash could have significant effects on global English is the United States, and with 95% of the population speaking English, one would think that the U.S. wouldn’t have to worry about the viability of English. But amazingly, Crystal notes, that there has been considerable political interest in making English the official language of the U.S. namely through two bills, each of which ostensibly aim to promote immigrant acclimation by conducting government business in English. Again, we see the tension between the language of one’s home and identity and the language of the state, as immigrant groups claim that any English-only bill surpresses the groups’ cultural identity. Now, as linguists, we immediately recognize the myriad reasons why English-only bills are problematic: there is no assimilation problem; this bill is unnecessary, introduces unneeded legal complexities, attempts to regulate self-expression, will not make the nation any more stable (a point in Crystal’s book Language Death is that all the main monolingual nations have had civil wars), and so on.
