ConceptualMetaphor

The Manning and Sch

I would definitely agree that for "everyday" use - word processing, web surfing, that sort of thing - the laptop plus external monitor/keyboard/mouse combination is great. You get portability and the comfort of the larger-sized monitor and keyboard. However, if you're more of a power user who does anything video or audio editing related, plays games, or does a lot of coding work, the processing power of a netbook simply isn't enough. Even with my regular laptop, I had to use the computer science lab often because code just took too long to compile on my own computer. (My thesis work was especially ridiculous - it took hours for the data processing, even on their desktops! I took a lot of nap breaks in the student lounge while waiting for it to finish...) So, that's why I'm planning on the desktop + netbook combo. I want the extreme portability of a netbook but the processing power of a desktop - and that's pretty impossible to find in a single computer.

This is my plan! My Apple Powerbook is on its last legs so I'm definitely going to get a new computer this summer. I realized that the reason why I like my laptop so much is just that I like being able to bring it with me to campus to take notes, check email between classes, etc. I also like being able to work on papers sitting downstairs on my couch instead of at my desk. But, I also found it frustrating having it as my primary computer - there are some things laptops just aren't as good as desktops for. I do a fair amount of coding and it's much easier programming when you have a bigger monitor (or two!). So I've decided to get two computers - one tiny cheap netbook (probably a Dell Mini) for commuting purposes and one desktop for serious working at home purposes (also watching tv online >_>). It'll actually cost about the same as getting a high-end laptop. Plus, being a huge dork I may set it up so that I can access my desktop at home remotely via my laptop, in case I need to access files I don't have on the laptop. I may also Hackintosh my laptop because I'm really fond of OS X. (Hence why I'm thinking of getting the Dell Mini - they Hackintosh well.) Don't forget to look into special academic discounts offered through your school!

The ling board's been quiet the past few days...anyway, thought I would mention I'm going to Berkeley! After 4 years of being in freezing cold, middle-of-nowhere NY it will be a welcome change.

Oh hey, yet another thread I should have posted in a while ago that I didn't even realize existed. Thanks for resurrecting it, anyli_t - I'll be in the linguistics dep't at Berkeley too! I'm pretty sure we met during prospie visit week, actually. (I'm the other cog sci-type.) I'm really curious to find out who else is in our cohort, but I guess we'll find out in August...

LOL! Ok, LingGrad, I think you win.

A lot of Berkeley-area Craigslist postings specifically mention they're queer-friendly and/or state their sexual identities, so if your friend is concerned about this he should have some good luck there. And hey, it *is* Berkeley...

...So you're an accountant, huh? Think you can help me do my taxes?

And yet you'll still have to endlessly explain, over and over, what "cognitive science" is...of course it would help if the discipline itself had a good answer for that first! I had fun explaining today to some parents of a potential anthropology major what "linguistic anthropology" is. I hope I didn't get too carried away. And I like the UArizona shirt idea, although I'd prefer "You're a psychologist? How many neuroses do you have?"

I agree, going to the LSA Institute this summer might be a great idea, especially since you don't have a ling dept at your university - it'll expose you to interesting subfields that you would otherwise miss out on. I can't say anything about McGill in particular, but linguistics depts really vary on what sort of background they expect you to have. Some do want you to come in with substantial ling training from your undergraduate degree, as you would get from a full linguistics major. Others have a list of "related majors" like anthropology, computer science, cognitive science, and foreign languages who they also encourage to apply, with the understanding that a lot of undergraduate institutions (like yours) don't offer a linguistics degree. So if McGill says that course prep is an issue for them, I would encourage you to make sure you also apply to other departments which suggest they welcome non-ling majors (sometimes more interdisciplinary programs are more "open-minded" in that regard). Personally, my undergrad doesn't offer a ling degree either, so I did much what you're doing - I made sure to take whatever linguistics-related courses I could find throughout the school and established proof of my academic viability in the (related) fields I did major in. In my SOP I made sure to illustrate that what I lacked in formal preparation I made up for in other ways, especially my persistence in creating a linguistics-related curriculum for myself and seeking out other non-class-based opportunities (e.g., research assistant jobs with professors in ling-related fields). Another really important thing is outside research experience - this can definitely improve the strength of your applications, so if you can continue to work in a lab with the professor (I assume) you wrote your hopefully-published paper with, I would highly suggest doing that. Of course, having a published paper is also a great achievement for an undergrad too. If you can establish your ability to do good independent research, even if it's in a barely-related field, a ling dept is more likely to accept you without an actual ling degree. (My research background is primarily in robotics. Go figure!) Quite honestly, unless you're *absolutely* dead-set on McGill, if I were you I wouldn't do the un-funded prep year. You can get into a fully funded ling PhD program without an undergrad ling degree!

I'm going to go ahead and bump this thread again with the same question...when's the best time to start looking for housing? I'm moving to Berkeley the first week in July and subletting a place for 7 weeks, and planning to move somewhere more permanent right before school starts. Are there school-year based leases to be found for grad students? The listings I've seen so far on Craigslist for late August move-ins seem geared toward undergrads, but I'm guessing more listings will be popping up later in the spring/summer...I hope.

I don't know anything about UW, but since you've already decided to go elsewhere you could withdraw your application from consideration, both to help out other people on the waitlist and to get a bit of a snub in there (you're too good for them! ha!) since you feel they've been rude. That said, they probably can't get back to the waitlist applicants until after April 15th anyways, since they're waiting on responses from the first round. It's strange that they haven't said anything at all to some applicants, though. That's rather unfair. Btw, your forum screen name is quite amusing.

Ok, I've been diligently avoiding posting in this thread - I have a thesis to write, after all! - but I'm afraid you guys have managed to suck me in. I know that I posted earlier saying that I considered myself a functional linguist, but I'm honestly of the opinion that at this point in the field, labels like these are unnecessarily divisive and too hard to define to even be really all that useful. Considering that a lot of research is moving in an interdisciplinary direction, and given that linguistics is already so fractious and open-ended, maybe we should stop trying divide everyone into one of two massive groups? And meanwhile, I'm going into cognitive linguistics, so proverbial gun to my head I'd put it on the functional side as well. But that has a lot to do with the fact that I'm approaching it from a cog sci perspective, which trends toward the function camp, and because I'm grounded in discourse analysis (I'm actually a linguistic anthropology major for my undergrad). And here's what dragged me into this - sorry, Dinali - I suspect you're being somewhat facetious here, because I'm not sure anyone (well, just about anyone...) honestly thinks that "exact phrase not in corpus" = "can't exist in the language, period!" A better characterization, using the same toy example you suggested, might be: 1. I[NP] [see[V] [a[DET] ship[N][NP]][VP]. 2. I saw a ship. 3. I see a dog 4. I saw a dog. 5. I see a cat. (With similar POS tags for all the other sentences in the corpus. And sorry if my brackets are off, I hate doing this by hand...) So is "I saw a cat" an allowed sentence? Well, we can see from the corpus that I is a NP, saw is a past participle, a is a determiner, and cat is a noun. And we see the attested forms "I saw a dog" and "I saw a ship", which both have the parsing: S -> NP VP VP -> PP NP NP-> DET N Therefore we can ascertain that "I saw a cat" would be a felicitous sentence in this language as well, because it can be accepted by that attested grammar. I think the great thing about corpus linguistics is that we can do this for far, far more utterances than can be intuited, or individually analyzed, or elicited from subjects. Automatic POS taggers are a wonderful thing! I don't see why corpora should be an issue for formalists, given that they can be such a useful tool: you can think of a structure you want to investigate, intuit that you find it felicitous, ask some subjects "hey, can you say this?" and then look in a corpus to see if it occurs in everyday speech and what tends to elicit it. And then it's easy to look through the corpus for similar occurrences. And it works well in reverse, too - you might think "oh, nobody ever says that" and your subjects might, in a formal research environment, say "oh, I wouldn't say that!" but corpora sometimes show that constructs are far more common than one might first suspect. Anyways, that's my two cents. In general I'm going to stay out of this, if only because I don't consider myself nearly informed enough to really even justify having an opinion on the matter. And I have other things to occupy myself with...like that thesis...

Well, to be fair, I'd say a number of those criticisms used to be more true of formal linguistics than they are now. For example, a lot of arguments for the poverty of the stimulus were based on intuited claims (i.e., that such-and-such construction is far too rare for children to acquire it and therefore it must be inherent, to grossly oversimplify). Then corpus linguistics came along and demonstrated that some of these constructs are far more common than previously claimed, and other empirical work showed that claims which held for English and Romance languages (i.e., the privileged languages Nel cites) failed when considering a more typologically diverse field. So that created a challenge for formal approaches: they need to be theoretically sound, but also rigorously tested. Of course, now we can all squabble over methodologies and the validity of experimental elicitation and corpus biases and so forth.

I'd consider myself a functionalist linguist. I'm primarily interested in the cognition/language interface and cognitive linguistics (particularly spatial and embodied work). That's what you get for taking mostly cog sci classes in undergrad, I guess! I also have a heavily computational background, so I'm a big proponent of empirical research, especially corpus linguistics. I think I'm not so much anti-UG (although I am admittedly skeptical of it) as falling on the interactionist side of the modularity debate.