/ling/ - Linguistics General



Reading lists:



Starter Pack (based on Yale undergrad curriculum, all titles PDF downloadable on libgen):

> 1. Mike Davenport, S. J. Hannahs - Introducing Phonetics and Phonology

> 2. Geoffrey Poole - Syntactic Theory

> 3. Andrew Spencer, Arnold Zwicky -  The Handbook of Morphology [Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics] (2001) (https://englishzoneone.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/5/1/25513129/andrew_spencer_arnold_m._zwicky_the_handbook_of_morphology_blackwell_handbooks_in_linguistics__2001.pdf)

> 4. Lyle Campbell - Historical Linguistics: an Introduction

> 5. Mitkov Ruslan - The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics

> 6. Ferdinand de Saussure, Wade Baskin - Course in General Linguistics



Language/Linguistics Ubercollection, +64 GB

> magnet:?xt=urn:btih:1ad01a626310a2692f74c3e401fd15ba4d5ab30c&dn=Language%20and%20Linguistics%20Collection%20(Updated!)&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce&so=0-340



https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/wiki/readinglist)



Anon-Suggested Books:

> Surviving Linguistics by Monica Macaulay

> Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy (New Accents) (2002)

> https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1kXCh496U0



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5lzt42Tb20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0CIRCjoICA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5ZMGBz8qgI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQmF7kbOrmE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eliANcZdkw



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3TwTb-T044



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4KRbENmFDk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TwQi9Wp66A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dAEE7FYQfc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvvn-ZVdeqQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIlKjZYipA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCvJiqKZbz4



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQwNYajSk08



https://soundcloud.com/andrew-lynch-622652011/before-speech



https://youtu.be/m3vIEKWrP9Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AN2tbfSGm4



https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKpLVHMEJFZsL6Fb0HocbvQ



—



> How selective are these programs for admission?

penn, a top 10 program in the united states, admits ~10% of applications every year: https://live-sas-www-ling.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/graduate/application/graduate-program-application



other depts don't have published figures i'm aware of but that's an incredibly high admissions rate for phds



> What are career prospects for linguistics phds? My advisor says to look at the LSA info, but it seems like a meme to me



depends. if you do computational, you'll make fat stacks as a tech worker. if you do something quantitative but not full on computational, you could pivot into a data science role or something and make ok money. if you don't do either of those things, you might as well have done a phd in philosophy, and should consider your PhD a 5 year passion project that won't be developing your career



> Are there rewarding research work and internships while you're in university?



i assume you're talking about phd programs, yes?



for the summer: again, it kind of depends on what you're doing--if you're doing pure theory, either you're at a top school where they'll summer fund you, or you'll need to find something else. if you're doing computational obviously you'll find tech internships or something in between like an internship at a military research lab or ETS. in my program (top 20 in the US overall I'd say), I think most theoretical students pick up some kind of summer job since we don't have summer funding. (The rich students, of course, don't have to.)



for during the year: you're going to be doing research, of course, year round, and if you're admitted to a phd program then that means profs want to and will work with you--at least your advisor.



> How often do linguists do field research?

it really depends. sociolinguists do the most of it overall i'd say. Some theorists do zero fieldwork, but it has been on the rise over the past 20 years as they've gotten their heads out of their fucking asses



—



> Which grammatical theories interest you?

i'm not a theorist, so take what i say with a grain of salt. i have conflicting feelings about mainline generative theory: the solutions that are dreamt up when challenging data arises stinks heavily of adding epicycles, and i wonder whether the formal apparatus available to generative linguists ought to be overhauled. philosophically, however, i think mainline generative theory is sound: clearly our mind must have something innate that helps us process language to account for the startling facts about language competence (e.g. everyone is basically the same level of competent in a language even independent of IQ (!)). if we have this thing, then it's probably most reasonable to assume in the absence of evidence otherwise that its structure is the same for all human beings, and if that's the case, then human languages are products of different parametric states of this language apparatus. one task of linguistic theory, then, is to discover in detail what this apparatus consists of and all of its parameters.



as much as i want to be sympathetic to chomsky's violent critics, when it comes to purely intellectual matters, honestly i find them all ridiculously unsophisticated and dumb compared to chomsky. it's clear if you read what they're writing they don't even understand what chomsky is saying. it also just seems like wild speculation without justification to say "human language is explainable in terms of general cognitive principles". they do have a point, however, when they note that chomsky has been unprofessional and maybe even unscientific in how he has wielded his influence in the field.



now to your question after that extended roundabout--I'm interested in CCG and HPSG and have been also been curious about the multitude of semantic formalisms that have been cropping up (UCCA, AMR, …)



—



> What are some major unsolved areas of linguistic theory?

all of semantics, for one thing



> Are the grants enough, and how stupid are the politics necessary to get those grants?

what grants lol



ok seriously now: any phd program worth attending will fund you for x years, but after that it's very unlikely you'll need/get a grant unless you're doing experimental stuff (phonetics, cogsci) or fieldwork.



> How much has SJW bullshit infected the field in academia? I know postmodern theories place a large emphasis on deconstructing language

hard to say since i'm a computational linguist. linguists are on the whole very liberal and sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists in particular are even more so. i don't think about this much though--if you go to some conferences you might like, idk, get asked to state your pronouns or something. it's not a big deal imo



—