(no subject)

[fox]

And a happy new year.

I have a beginning to Missa Discriminis Part Eleven on my hard drive, and a solid chunk of a Sentinel piece as well. One of these days I'll finish them. I will. Nose. Grindstone.

In the meantime, three out of four grad school applications have been sent, so it's all over but the waiting. Fingers crossed, everybody ...

Comments

ah, Chomsky ...

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

Sadly, no. For openers, Chomsky doesn't do what I want to do -- he's all about form, which is great and fascinating, but not really my bag of marbles. The logical segue from that, unfortunately, is that they don't really have anybody at MIT who *does* do what I want to do ... so no Chomsky for me, and no Pinker, alas.

An interesting thing: one of my recommenders had a very negative reaction when I mentioned something about Chomsky (the assertion that human languages are not so different from one another at all, but far more similar to one another than any human language and, say, the croaking of a frog) -- he was only familiar with Chomsky the political activist, and disagreed just about point for point with every political position the guy's ever taken. But I hastened to explain that, political nuttiness aside, Chomsky is widely considered to be the father of modern linguistic study -- people may disagree with him, and do, but he's always there. I believe I said trying to study linguistics today without Chomsky is like trying to study physics without Newton. Then I amended it to "trying to study geometry without Descartes". What Lobachevsky and that other guy did, with the non-planar geometry (and the fact that I still remember the non-planar geometry is frankly stunning), it was defined in terms of what it wasn't.

(Possible I'll get to grad school and they'll say "Pah, Chomsky's just another guy, and Universal Grammar is just another theory. A nice one, sure, but it ain't all that." We'll see. [g])