Dinali

Facetious? Me? I resemble that comment! In any case, I'm going back to tone curves and that'll be that. All the best to all of you.

I hate the economy because I'm on waitlists at three different places that have made a point to say they'd have admitted me in a better year. Also, I really love learning things. I think everyone who considers a graduate program does. But I hit my limit, and have made a mental note to NEVER find out any more about the words "menstrual cup." That's one big gap in my knowledge I hope to carry til I die. Also: This is my 150th post. I want to see if I get a new title Edit: Yay! Latte!

Haha!! See, I would have thought you'd put cog on the formal side of the fence! Them lines are blurry. This clears it up for me. I think the problem is the use of the word "possible." When I said possible sentence, I meant "actually possible, as in, someone might say it tomorrow but no one's around with a notebook or DAT recorder to add it to the corpus;" not theoretically possible, but realistically possible. You have to admit that there's no such thing as a complete corpus, which means that there are things people have said that are not attested to in data. Hypothetically, here's a corpus: 1. I see a ship. 2. I saw a ship. 3. I see a dog 4. I saw a dog. 5. I see a cat. Is "I saw a cat" an allowed sentence? It's not attested to in the corpus. A formalist is going to take the existing data, construct a paradigm, and hypothesize that "I saw a cat" is possible. If there are native speakers alive and available, one can make an experiment. The experiment is as simple as asking "Hey, can you say 'I saw a cat?'" The native speaker renders his or her, yes, intution on the grammaticality of the phrase. And really, what is a corpus but a large collection of sentences that native speakers have intuitively judged grammatical (by saying them aloud)?

Dude, a decision like this had better be decided for a place you're wildly, not mildly, excited about. Can you swing UCSD for a year and get funding after that? Eventually, California will have money again (it's remarkably good - through practice - at bouncing back from recessions) and the UC system always has first dibs at education dollars.

With that you're objecting to the underlying premise of formalism, not its methods. The premise is that there is an underlying universal grammar that, once it's fully understood, will predict all possible utterances in all possible languages. Give the title of this topic, you probably think that's a foolish premise. But engage in an intellectual game for a moment -- support the other side. Given some corpus for language X, how would you develop an idea of what's NOT possible in that language, and what IS possible, but NOT REPRESENTED in the corpus?

Please give an example or description that shows how your methods differ from the ones described by Chomsky. And please don't go on the defensive; I'm not trying to attack your point, just understand it. I just read the "Cheating" thread and I'm not going to join something like that.

I've always thought of functional vs. formal being merely different frameworks or models under which to study, and the minutia of each, such as data gathering and research methodology, remain the same. To use an analogy, one would be the geocentric model of the solar system, and one the heliocentric (I'm making no claim as to which is which! ). How the data fit into the model varies by which one (and which version of each) you labor under, but the basic methods, ie looking up at the sky, don't change. That's why I was so astronished to see you (or rather your source) attack the field methods of formalism, because I had never known they had a special set of techniques different from everyone else. (Point #10, especially, just blew me away. Blew my head clean off!)

I'm sorry but . . . what? Anyone who behaves as you've just described is not a linguist of any kind, because linguistics is a science, and that's not science at all. Where are you getting this?

That looks almost like a mail merge error, especially if a lot of people got the same message. It seems like if that were the real reason, you'd have been weeded out far earlier in the process.

Wealthy is not in the cards for me. I've accepted that I do, however, someday want to be on the top side of my debt, which doesn't seem possible given the limited hard cash earning potential of a linguistics PhD. The costs of these programs without funding is too high for me to consider.

Not me. No funding=no go. The earning potential of a ling grad is too low to risk a debt load that will haunt your heirs.

Poor Rutgers. It's the UC Davis of the East Coast.

Something like this? http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker?currentPage=all

Why flinch? This is a frustrating, stressful process, and people have to vent somewhere. Railing harmlessly on an anonymous bulletin board is as good a way to do that as any. I've complained plenty about people that I hold no actual enmity towards, even against people that I thoroughly respect. It's just blowing off steam.

What a coincidence, I was about to start a Rutgers thread. What is going on with their notification? The DB shows three acceptances, and TlingIt posts a waitlist, but no reported rejections so far. No one listed rejections last year either. Do they just not notify if they don't want you? Or do they keep options open until the last minute, essentially putting everyone on a de facto waitlist until they fill slots? I know their deadline was months after everyone else, so for them it's probably too soon to go bothering the department, but they're the only school I haven't heard something from so far. I'd like to wrap this up, one way or another.