LSA ‘07

Well, I survived my first LSA conference! In fact, I’d go as far as to say I did more than survive - I even had a good time and learned a few things!

The Tensor organized a little linguablogger meetup, and even though I don’t fall into that category, housing JonW has certain benefits and I was allowed to attend. I was quite star-struck, getting to hang out with Mark Liberman (of Language Log), Anggarrgooon, Heideas, and their ilk. Aside from being generally hip froods, they helped confirm that I’m going into the right field (which is good, considering how much money I just spent on grad school apps).

I really enjoyed Mark Liberman’s talk entitled The Future of Linguistics, complete with a quote from Linus Torvalds (”World domination… Fast…”). At the end of the talk, an ad hoc group of advocates of opportunities for undergrad linguists sprung up in response to a comment, putting me in contact with Nassira to hopefully help out in that regard. Also, Alison, pretty much the only other undergrad there, made a provocative comment, leading Mark Aranoff and Geoff Pullum to go and talk to her - except she didn’t realize who they were! The look on her face when I told her later was pretty priceless.

I also had brief conversations with William Lewis (UW) and Jason Riggle (UChicago) about computational linguistics and UChicago, respectively.

Funny moments:

  • At one talk (actually, a pretty nifty one about Ish, the linguist who the speaker had been bashing turned out to have been sitting in the audience the whole time. When he stood up and introduced himself even *I* almost wet myself.
  • Lance Nathan (newly of UPenn) talked to JonW and I about his 1999 (humorous) paper (since updated) on why OT tables are called tableaux. The answer? It’s an interplay between *French (avoid using French), Snooty (be as pretentious as possible), and Cmprhnsbl.
  • “Long before you get to 9, you shift to Spanish” - Bernard Comrie
  • Squishy Seven Mesh (Skwxwú7mesh)

    • Further funny moments have been immortalized on JonW’s quotes page.

    A few things I’ve learned/realized/had reaffirmed:

  • I love linguistics
  • Informal discussions are great (discussing the finer points of OT with JonW in the car on the way home from Anaheim at 2am, for example)
  • I really do love phonology, more than anything else. Also, sociophonetics are cool. (Not that I don’t still love acquisition)
  • Language modeling is really pretty awesome
  • I really want to submit an abstract to the Harvard undergrad linguistics conference. Maybe a bit from my thesis, maybe a paper on the side (putting my Catalan nasals paper into OT, with Prof. Hung’s aid?)

    • Did I have a great time? Yes. Am I glad that this is what I do? Most certainly. Will I go next year? Let’s just say “expletive redacted”.

    Posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 5:20 am. Categories: Linguistics, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    2 Responses to “LSA ‘07”

    JonW Says:
    January 10th, 2007 at 12:38 pm

    - You need the underscore with the /x/ in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh.
    - My url doesn’t have a dot after the http:// ;)
    - Didn’t Comrie say “switch”? Ah well, I forget.
    - Don’t you mean ‘“’ instead of the first occurrence of ‘”’?


    Aaron Says:
    January 10th, 2007 at 12:57 pm

    - Fixinated
    - Hehe on the URL. I had “www” in there originally, and then removed it, but apparently left in the dot.
    - I’m pretty sure I got Comrie’s every word, but you could be right.
    - Whatchu talkin’ bout, Willis? Those look the same to me…


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