After spending the last 4-5 years thinking about Articulatory Phonology and it’s relation to symbolic theories of phonology, I am now setting my sights on Element Theory which is clearly acoustically motivated (necessarily different than being auditorally motivated for them from what I’ve read).

A search function for the Library of Babel is so funny to me. I guess it’s to show each book has a “real” location. But showing a single result defeats the purpose. Anything you search should have infinite results! It should make me go insane having to wade through gibberish!

in some ways, the thing that is most annoying to me personally about this discourse is that a lot of people seem to be of the view that you can just play with LLMs *instead* of doing philosophy of mind. i'm pretty pessimistic about that approach

100/10

Going to see maybe my most anticipated movie of all time in about a half hour. When that Ben Folds track hits at the end credits you can catch me crying happy tears. youtu.be/y2K9ccMREOI?...

I had a roommate that pronounced “skeleton” as [skɛləʔn̩] and have heard it a few other times since (including Tim Heidecker at around 6:00 in this video). I’m happy to share that David Duchovny as Fox Mulder also pronounced it that way in episode 16 of Season 7 of the X-Files.

There's a Longmont Potion Castle call where he's pretending to be a man called Steadman Slick and talking to a man named Rick. At one point, Rick says, "Steadman, if you want to talk normal we'll do it now," and he responds as Steadman, "I'm ready to talk regular, Rick."

Teaching a stats class this semester and a student today asked, “what really are regular expressions,” with no idea what they were getting themselves into.

This year's Mayfest at Maryland was just announced where the topic will be "Representation in Language Production". Looks to be an incredible weekend and I'm quite grateful to have been asked to speak, especially after finding out who the rest of the speakers are: linguistics.umd.edu/mayfest2026

Threading the needle of the winter storm by flying between Chicago and NY today/tomorrow for the workshop on logical phonology. Two weeks of travel/conferences right before my semester started wasn’t chaotic enough so I had to include this trip to really feel something. wellformedness.com/wolp/

Was nice getting to see him give this talk and speak with him a little more about it! I’ve long felt a similar way. Simplicity arguments are so often missing hidden complex assumptions in addition to everything else. Looking forward to seeing where Rory’s work goes!

My flights to/from London have both played an instrumental Muzak version of “Clint Eastwood” by The Gorillaz that is extremely off putting.

Really having a nice time in Cambridge for OCP. Tomorrow ends probably the most insane string of presentations I will do in my career: 12/10 (talk + poster); 12/11 (talk); 12/12 (international travel day); 12/13 (talk); 12/14 (talk); 12/15 (poster). The material covered 5 different projects/papers!

Forcing every linguist ever to write on the blackboard like Bart Simpson, “I will not confuse the object language with the meta language.”

~One week ago I got to do my favorite thing (play music with friends). Today I get to do my other favorite thing (talk about phonological representations with my friends). Here's a pic of me deciding to wear a winter jacket doing the former during an hour long set of scream-singing (a stupid choice)

Red eye to London for OCP directly after LSA whooooooooo boy. 10 days of conferencing directly before the semester, is my body ready. 🙂

Presenting in the only room at the New Orleans Marriott that doesn’t have working AC

Wow! This looks great. Hoping I can find time to dig into it this semester.

Heading down to New Orleans tomorrow. If you're at LSA come say hey. We can talk about this stuff or whatever but I probably will end up talking your ear off about Nirvanna the Band the Show because I rewatched the webseries + tv show over break and now won't shut up about it.

🔥 well-thought, theoretically grounded models >>>>>>> trendy uninterpretable forest killers

i had to drop what i was doing to make this

Just in time for the holidays, my final post is live. This is a long-read, and likely of interest to anyone interested in the uses and limitations of computational modeling in cognitive science, with attention on less-noticed issues in the field. 🧵 vincentcarchidi.substack.com/p/do-languag...

I call this "The Lying Screen"

Paul McCartney’s ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ is actually a perfectly good Christmas pop song in a vein very much of its time, and it’s my firm belief that the disrespect it receives is unmerited and demonstrates a certain meanness of spirit that infects society at what should be a joyous time of year.

The EGG drama has hit lingbuzz.

I'm working on finishing up a paper with a student. I noticed they had a different style than what I'm accustomed to when it came to using em dashes. Primarily out of curiosity, I asked them if it was from a certain style guide. Their response? "That's how it's written in Lord of the Rings."

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

1, 4, and 5 indicate that I listen to the good type of 2.

I’m in Florida visiting my parents and we decided to go to Disney’s Hollywood Studios today. I just witnessed a kid run up to a Salacious B. Crumb toy, turn back to his parents, and yell, “It’s a Star Wars monkey!” I’m never gonna stop thinking about this.

I'm finishing up a chapter that partially reviews all the subregular/model-theoretic phonology work that has been done over the past decade. I'm combing through google scholar right now to make sure I didn't miss anything and I found this funny reference. Would like to meet this A Subregular person!

"writing code to solve a problem" used to have "understanding the problem" as a prerequisite. but vibecoding allows solution-shaped objects to be produced without any of the hard-won understanding. beware of solution-shaped objects.

“Optionality and the phonetics-phonology interface” by Scott Nelson (Nov. ’25) www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/42...

The guy calling the Purdue - Texas Tech basketball game on CBS right now is 27 years old but has a voice and style that sounds like he should be calling an NHL game for a local Canadian radio station in the pre-millennium.

Getting crispy at this point.

En route to Rutgers for a weekend full of subregular linguistics. 3 days!!! 19 student presentations!!! What a time to be working at the intersection of FLT + theoretical phonology!!! rucll.github.io/workshop2025/

"skin as part of brain?" This is that great intellect people talk about?

New OT markedness constraint just dropped 🐦🐦

Sometimes you just gotta start the week by queuing up “Wish Man”by Roswell Kid eight times in a row. rozwellkid.bandcamp.com/track/wish-man

I present, the lenition hypercube

During my last year at Stony Brook, our graduate bargaining unit did not come to an agreement with the state on a new contract and it was decided that we would work under no contract and be temporarily paid per the conditions of the previous one. Any raises won during negotiation would be back paid.

See you @ LSA? Talk (Sat): Phonological Knowledge, Weighted Logic, and the Competence/Performance Distinction Poster w/ my student Mikhael Hayes (Sat): Poetic Rhyme as a Tier-Based Strictly Local Constraint Talk w/ Eric Baković (Sun): A BMRS Analysis of Trojan Vowels in Hungarian Vowel Harmony

#Linguistics at the University of Georgia is hiring a tenure-track faculty member in #phonetics and #phonology. Spread the word and let me know if you have questions! linguistlist.org/issues/36/31...

The palpable relief of reading a syntactically awkward student paper nevertheless brimming with ideas they’re trying on after having to consume the stale cardboard generalities of a Chat GPT essay.

Morris Halle if he were a flintstones fan:

If someone from Tulsa or Buffalo told me they were from the Midwest I would likely utter the loudest and most confused “what” of all time.

Overleaf is cooked.

📢 My department is hiring! University of Chicago is hiring an Assistant Professor in Phonology! (EOE/Vet/Disability) See the link for more information. 📢 jobs.chronicle.com/job/37894671...

Fodor in 'Concepts': "When Pinker's analyses are clear enough to evaluate, they are often just wrong."

the concept of putting vowel inventories on ✨aesthetic🪐 backgrounds... phonologists take notes