Questions
to Ask After
Any Linguistics Talk
Juan Point and
Justin I. Dear
Academic conferences. You know you love them—catching up with your grad school cronies; checking proudly on the progress of your own former students; commiserating with that former colleague who (ouch!) didn’t get tenure and has moved on; checking publishers’ booths for books to have the library order; delivering your paper to a packed room (more or less). Endless mealtime discussions about the good old days and the hopelessly directionless state of the field; late nights at the hotel bar; late mornings at the buffet breakfast. It’s all good.
And then there are the actual sessions. You can only skip so many of them, having coffee with an old friend, before you start to feel just a mite guilty about using up funding for a potential TAship in your department and not actually attending any talks. So, with a sense of dreadful duty, you consult the program and find one that seems less than usually odious, and off you go!
In such circumstances, nobody expects you to really pay attention. We don’t. You’ve got friends to text, arranging where to meet during the next coffee break. You’ve got to correspond with your spouse about a plumbing problem back home. And those last two diagrams for your talk tomorrow are still just not quite right. Plus, the title of the talk you settled on was probably misleading and it has turned out to be either irrelevant or bad. Or both.
Nine times out of ten, the end of the talk comes and you find that you never really focused in. Maybe you tried and maybe you didn’t, but now the discussion period is upon you, and you may discover that you’re the most senior linguist in the venue. The impressionable are waiting—how will you inspire and impress them with your brilliant questions?
This article provides just what you need: Questions that will serve at the end of any talk—no matter how little of the content you digested—to stimulate discussion and rescue your reputation in the eyes of your audience mates. Just cue up these questions on your phone before the conference and you’re set!
To suit your various needs, we’ve grouped the questions into various categories. If you have one from each list memorized, you’re good to go!
All purpose questions
- Could you say more about how you define [RANDOM TERM FROM HANDOUT]?
- Could you clarify [RANDOM POINT ON SLIDE 5 OF 19]? (NB: Best followed-up with a scowl and copious note-taking.)
- Are you sure {THESE RESULTS/THIS METHOD/THE ALGORITHM} will generalize?
- What is the next question you are planning to investigate?
Up to the minute (but not faddish) questions
- How does this relate to [ONGOING CONTROVERSY]?
- Have you considered applying [CURRENTLY POPULAR TECHNOLOGY]?
- Have you considered taking a {POSTMODERNIST/POST-POSTMODERNIST/POST-POST-POSTMODERNIST} view of this problem?
- Is [RANDOM TERM YOU PICKED UP BETWEEN NAPS] similar to [VAGUELY SIMILAR TERM FROM UNRELATED FIELD]?
Name dropping
- How do you think [ANY FRAMEWORK] would handle this data?
- How ecologically valid do you think your study is? (NB: Use only with talks by experimentalists.)
- How does this relate to [FAMOUS LINGUIST]’s analysis of [UNRELATED LANGUAGE]?
- Wasn’t your conclusion already (dis)proven by [AUTHORS OF AN OBSCURE OLD PAPER WRITTEN IN CLASSICAL MONGOLIAN]?
- Have you considered using a Hidden Markov Model? (NB: Especially good after papers presenting field data.)
- Have you taken on board the work of [PAPER THAT CAME OUT YESTERDAY]?
Don’t forget to promote your own work!
- I don’t see [CITE YOUR OWN PAPER HERE] in your bibliography. How do you explain this oversight?
- Wouldn’t one consequence of this be [YOUR OWN PET THEORY]?
- Have you read the work of [YOUR COLLEGE ROOMMATE]?
- This is more of an observation... [LONG, RAMBLING, IRRELEVANT SELF-PROMOTION].
Veiled insult
- How would you respond to the charge that most of your results are due to transcription errors?
- How sure are you that [RANDOMLY SELECT ONE TECHNICAL TERM FROM HANDOUT] is the best term for what you’re describing here?
- Are you now or have you ever been a lexicalist?
Misdirection
- Have you considered [ITEM THAT WAS IN ONE OF THE SLIDES THAT YOU SLEPT THROUGH]?
- Wouldn’t one consequence of this be [BLATANTLY ABSURD STRAWMAN]?
- Did you control for [OBVIOUS VARIABLE THAT WOULD INTRODUCE A SPURIOUS CORRELATION]?
