marginaling

First in a (probably long) series of notes in which I tell myself to stop talking during class:

Also, apparently someone was talking bad about undergrads. Out of context and in retrospect, this seems unfair:

I am really bad at vowels and obsessed with the word “dispreferred.”

For the longest time (ok, three days) I had *no* idea what this meant, but I think it refers to the three criteria necessary for an adequate theory of grammar, one of them going under the heading of “simplicity.”

One more for now, just to get the ball rolling.

They are insidious! They are everywhere! Also, the VOT for vowels following [k] is much longer than the VOT for vowels following [p]! Aspiration!

I am going to post my silly notes, drawrings, and marginalia to this site. I am a grad student in linguistics, hence the name (get it? get it?) and the tendency for the notes to be about…linguistics.

Let’s start with something I apparently learned one day recently in syntax: ternary branching is not good. This is a very important lesson in X-bar theory.