I probably err more on the side of letting myself run wild than on that of being overly theoretical. Affix Hopping happened magically, and word boundaries were cleverly inserted where they would do the most good, and I was thrilled. There was a slug in the jello, though. And of course, as a grad student, there were (and no doubt still are) practical sides, too. In sum, pursuing problems of the type of 3) and 4) represents in my opinion much more structured and updated ways to address the concerns which intrigued me and drew me to MIT in the 1980s. “We're trying to discover what those properties of the human mind are. So the current status of question (2) is “unanswered”; there are still no preliminary explicit formulations of Grammatical Lexicons $latex G_i$. I was then conceiving of linguistics as separable from other areas, including psycholinguistics, whose data are not restricted to intuitions. But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities. 2. What was the broad question that you most wanted to get an answer to during your time in the program? phonotactic patterns by phonology alone, then the maximal syllable can It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. But I was doing this mostly on my own, and the idea that I could present something algorithmic, so that I could turn a crank and out would pop sentences with nice indices of grammaticality, all like clockwork, seemed infinitely far off. An unremitting search for higher forms of ignorance. And I was then assuming that other sciences emphatically do not take human intuitions as data. Terms of Use. Or a word that perfectly captures the idea of doing something for no reason? Since the space of inferences we make is bounded in seemingly non-arbitrary ways, a theory of such inferential capacities requires a theory of these bounds, that is, a theory that tells you when to stop thinking. For that, the nature of graduate education needs to change. And most importantly, we do not teach our students how to challenge their teachers and show that the teachers are wrong. So, you had to be looking for new generalizations and new ideas all the time. I am very clear that not everyone feels that such mystery squibs have any right to be published. At Penn, I hadn’t even tried to think along those lines. The current state of the art suggests that the language faculty itself provides the required frame. I no longer remember this, but George tells me that it was me who came up with the name squib. As I remember my January 1964 mind, which I had when I left Penn, (my Penn MA thesis, which I was supposed to have written before leaving, a long thing on superlatives, which I finally did finish at MIT in May or June of 1964), was filled with wonder at how beautifully everything grammatical worked! still common, including their reincarnation in Optimality Theory as But my (uninformed) opinion is that a tiny fraction of the problems which those squibs of mine thrust in your faces has been looked at in any depth. MIT achieved a perfect score for the ‘alumni outcomes’ indicator (one of the five used to calculate the ranking), having been associated with 91 Nobel Prize winners, while more than a third of the US’s manned spaceflights have featured MIT-educated astronauts. So, the broad question had two parts: what was UG, perhaps the hardest part, and what were the (formalized, explicit) Particular Grammars, a supposedly easier question. A contentful answer would be at least preliminary formally explicit Gi of some language(s), e.g. If it’s a meaningful question as yet unanswered, please tell us what you think the path to an answer might be, or what obstacles make it a hard question. Research programs revolving around such questions seem now feasible and promising. This time, it was decked out as Captain America’s shield in honor of the release of Avengers : Endgame . The current lively debate on the parametric approach and Minimalism, and, more generally, on how to best express a theory of syntactic variation (e.g., the Barcelona workshop last year, etc.). But then I started poking it, and a misty understanding of what was eventually going to become my dissertation started emerging from the ooze . No – not quite. Linguistics alumni (in reversed chronological order of year of graduation) Hello, Alumni! It’s a matter of discovering new generalizations and coming up with new good ideas. The glimpses of understanding of syntactic “change” achieved so far permit us, in my view, to empirically evaluate P&P with respect to their “historical adequacy”, i.e. Or can one envisage a unification? What came out in LI were short notes – great notes, notes with deep consequences, I am happy to have helped in any way to get them out – but something was missing. I was pleased and flattered, probably Dave was too, off we went. In particular, empiricist views, undermined by poverty-of-stimulus considerations, but also previous nativist theories relying on evaluation measures, seem to represent no such alternative. Are these the best forms of evidence for what we wish to understand? . Has it been answered? In any event, whenever this stage is reached, the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas. And Noam too – his famous Thursday afternoon class. 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