If you follow me on Twitter (@rctatman) you probably already know that I defended my dissertation last week. That’s right: I’m now officially Dr. Tatman! [party horn emoji] I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on all the minutia of writing a dissertation lately, from formatting references to correcting a lot of typos (my committee … Continue reading
I’ll be the first to admit: for a long time, even after I’d begun my linguistics training, I didn’t really understand what sociolinguistics was. I had the idea that it mainly had to do with discourse analysis, which is certainly a fascinating area of study, but I wasn’t sure it was enough to serve as the basis … Continue reading
This week, I’m in Vancouver this week for the meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. (On the subject of conferences, don’t forget that my offer to help linguistics students from underrepresented minorities with the cost of conferences still stands!) The work I’m presenting is on a new research direction I’m pursuing and I wanted … Continue reading
From the title, you might think this is a US-centric post. To a certain extent, it is. But I’m also going to be talking about topics that are more broadly of interest: what are some specific benefits of humanities research? And who should fund basic research? A lot has been written about these topics generally, … Continue reading
So recently, the Associated Press Stylebook posted this on Twitter: AP Style tip: Use “icing” to describe sugar decorations applied to cookies; “frosting” for cupcakes and cakes. — AP Stylebook (@APStylebook) February 22, 2016 This struck me as 1) kind of a petty usage distinction and 2) completely at odds with my personal usage and what I … Continue reading
So tomorrow is my generals exam (the title’s a bit misleading: I’m actually going to be presenting research I’ve done so my committee can decide if I’m ready to start work on my dissertation–fingers crossed!). I thought it might be interesting to discuss some of the research I’m going to be presenting in a less formal … Continue reading
I’ve already covered what Sociolinguistics is in a earlier GIiL post. But what I didn’t really talk about are sociolinguistic variables, the specific things in that language that co-vary with some sociological factor. So that’s the dictionary definition, but what makes something a sociolinguistic variable? Let’s start off with some examples. Sociolinguistic variables exist at all levels … Continue reading
Today’s Great Idea in Linguistics comes to use from syntax. One interesting difference between syntax and other fields of linguistics is what is considered compelling evidence for a theory in syntax. The aim of transformational syntax is to produce a set of rules (originally phrase structure rules) that will let you produce all the grammatical … Continue reading
As I’ve been teaching this summer (And failing to blog on a semi-regular basis like a loser. Mea culpa.) I’ll occasionally find that my students aren’t familiar with something I’d assumed they’d covered at some point already. I’ve also found that there are relatively few resources for looking up linguistic ideas that don’t require a … Continue reading
