Dustin A. Chacón

Sorry to everyone that I panic-texted and my landlady whose storage space I had to camp out in in the dark for 3 hours.

Had a pretty good day, especially since it was last day of classes of the quarter. Got home around 11 PM to find my door wide open and my cats missing. Anyway, it's 2:40 AM now and the cats are indoors after hours of me sitting outside with cat treats and a blanket trying to coax them out of hiding

Pronouns Are a Public Health Issue | AJPH | Vol. 112 Issue 3 American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA)

discussing today in seminar: Ross, L. E., Kinitz, D. J., & Kia, H. (2022). Pronouns are a public health issue. American Journal of Public Health, 112(3), 360-362. ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.... #linguistics

Arwi - Wikipedia

Just learned that Arabic for Tamil uses complex vowel ligatures, like the Indian abugidas, which include the harakaat

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arwi

What if there was a whole league of legends

Really big announcement! See @wtimkey.bsky.social's thread for the details on an exciting new preprint from the NYU-UMass Syntactic Ambiguity Processing group. It is the culmination of the team's research efforts over these last couple of years, and we're really happy with it.

this is what it feels like to be a professor

Agreed. I find black-and-white, us-vs-them mentality of this field really exhausting and counterproductive, and I feel like linguists overall have good-of-center values. I'd be really troubled if a big functionalist was implicated, because it's bad for the field and, y'know, in general...

i actually feel pretty fucking negative about the like. glee some of my acquaintances and colleagues are expressing about famous dudes in our field having ties to serial rapists. i think its actually not funny or exciting to find this out

I need there to be a Yorgos Lanthimos adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray ASAP

Very far outside of my field expertise, but there's an observation that Irish uses two different complementizers. One form is sensitive to whether there's a wh-element that crossed it and whether there's a resumptive, and the other isn't

Oh yes, but not in Arabic (not yet, anyway)! The curious part about resumption in English vs. Arabic is where the pronoun pops up in and when/whether it's perceived as 'good'. Actually, there's interesting work on the interaction between resumption and complementizer choice in Irish by Jim McCloskey

Also I know that that-trace is hot again and people have newer ideas than what I ever learned, so I'm sure the form of the problem is more interesting than it was back in 2015!

There are dubious claims about dialectal variation of that-trace effects! In my dissertation I showed that the arguments for these are not compelling, and that the real variation probably is not "dialectal" (i.e. kids in place X vs. place Y need to learn different grammars wrt that-trace)

(This was me *MISHEARING* someone; but I'm still counting it as a datapoint, just fyi)

'how drunk can I send you something?'

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

Jaw is on the floor watching election results. There's actually some hope

The 15-second loop of it playing the first time you encounter Praline à La Mode has been stuck in my head since the original came out 10 years ago, it needed to be honored

Love that the Bravely Default HD Remaster has a whole-ass rhythm minigame for Love In the Crossfire

There's a guy standing near the student union on UCSC campus with a giant banner that says 'POLYAMORY' and he's handing out flyers

It's a semilattice structure! Some theories of count/mass distinction make use of a mereology that assumes something like this; count nouns pick out the 'atomic' level (the bottom rung) and plurals pick out the higher rungs, and mass nouns might lack the 'atomic' level

none of my students in my morning undergrad class found this funny but just fyi it is very funny

#linguistics

A selfie of me in a crappy vampire outfit from Spirit wearing a piece of paper with a diagram of a mereology structure as used in semantics papers on count vs mass nouns

Happy Halloween from Count Noun! 🧛

Screenshot of an error message from Elsevier. It says 'Sorry. Something isn't working. If there's still a problem, please contact your administrator or helpdesk.'

Why does this sound like Elsevier is breaking up with me

Noooo!!!!! I thought I was clever and original!!! Curse you Yoda

#linguistics this is an important scientific observation

If English were head final the childrens’ joke would be “why is 5 afraid of 6?”

#linguistics