Shota Momma

As far as I can see, what “theory neutral” actually means is that the hidden theoretical commitments are so weakly constraining that they don’t make predictions that diverge from existing theories

I use prolific mostly for sentence production experiments, so I think ai responses would be obvious. I don’t see any noticeable changes in the % of accounts returning the study or in the % of submissions that need to be rejected. I suppose it depends on filtering settings.

We need name for this kind of non-argument: Argument from Unspecified Alternative (AUA)

Dear reviewers, please specify what “simpler analysis” is. You can penalize whatever you don’t like if you are allowed to use that unspecified alternative account as a basis for low scores.

New preprint: psyarxiv.com/dwh8v! We know surface/phonological overlap can matter for reading & memory. But does it bleed into dependency resolution? In English, “pseudo-plurals” like /s/ in *cruise* don’t induce agreement errors—but Russian ones (SG.GEN ~ NOM.PL) have been argued to. (1/3)

Speech errors are constrained by UG

Evidence for the existence of the null temporal operator: the age [Op_i that everybody dies t_i]

Review starts 12/1 (rolling basis): Open-rank (tenure-track/tenured) positions, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, Psych. + Brain Sci., Johns Hopkins University pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/

Reposting because the link has expired:

PDF: drive.google.com/file/d/1t2EF... (if this doesn't work, lmk)

Publisher link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ah, yes, thanks for letting me know! Here's the PDF:

drive.google.com/file/d/1t2EF...

Publisher link:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Competence vs. performance

Caveats:

(1) “-mo” can also be interpreted as NP coordination.

(2) AdjP coordination may be “-kute” rather than “-te”, though my intuition “kute” feels like a morphological complex.

(3) Both “-te” and “-kute” have non-coordination meaning so not clear if they should be labeled as coordinator.

Clausal coordination is also “te”

Japanese has “to” (と) for coordinating NPs and “te” (て) for adjP and VPs/Vs. Neither can be used for adverb phrases.

At this rate he will ask me why movement has to be successive cyclic by the age of 12.

opened box containing dark green books called Mereological Syntax, one of which is diagonally placed on top of the others

pile of 10 dark green books stacked on a wooned tabletop

Look what just arrived early! It’s chunkier than I thought. Open access version on publication day which I think is the 18th on the @mitpress.bsky.social website. I must admit, I’m very fond of the colour!!! 🐦🐦 #syntax #newbook

Why should you study linguistics? My six year old just asked me how “we make voice out of air.”

6 y.o., out of context: Is Santa super rich?

Tamar is a great mentor/scholar and she is one of the major reasons I am still in academia. Great opportunity

Well we will write one soon!

The relationship between tense and complementizer is really puzzling…

It’s okay to admit that you are jealous of case markers and scrambling.

You get thicker white matter track between left temporal lobe and frontal lobe if you speak Japanese though

The following article is now in press at Psychological Review. Interested to hear what people think! "The successes and failures of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) highlight the importance of innate linguistic priors for human language acquisition".

osf.io/preprints/ps... via

"With admirable consistency he goes on to conclude... English is appropriate for the sciences, whereas Japanese "sont plus avantageuses pour les lettres"

"...French is unique... in the degree to which the order of words corresponds to the natural order of thoughts (Diderot, 1751)" (Chomsky 1965)

Matchin concludes that English is superior in the degree to which the order of words corresponds to how we scan a visual scene (Matchin, 2025, p.c.).

7 positions on language? Sounds like your school accounts for 90% of the jobs in language

If I were to design a language, I wouldn't use very subtle noise (-s) to have a large consequence for interpretation.

For parsing, yes. But language is not designed for communication.