At V.O.W.E.L.S., we believe that it is our solemn duty* to disabuse people of the incorrect notions they may have. Yet doing so in long, tightly argued rebuttals involves writing long, tightly argued rebuttals. In addition, there is a clearly demonstrated inverse correlation between the length of a statement and how convincing it is. A one-
Since our expertise is in a very small subset of human knowledge, we can enlighten the masses exclusively in the areas of linguistics and related fields. We therefore present the following statements, which all begin:
... not every paper with the word “social” in it requires six pages dedicated to the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
... a team of highly trained language ninjas did not steal all the irrefutable evidence that Tamil/
... your paper does not need “moar Chomsky”.
... the fact that all the speakers of a language have been dead for four thousand years will not prevent a reviewer from asking whether you obtained informed consent.
... your paper doesn’t need to be perfect to get published.
... your value as a human being does not correlate with your publication record.
... conversely, whether you are adding new lines to your CV is an important factor not just in whether you can get tenure, but also in whether you can get twentyure or even thirtyure.
... your cat is not a legitimate source of syntax data.
... similarly, the fact that you can import recordings of your cat into Praat does not mean you can write a feline phonology paper about them.
... Child Language Acquisition researchers did not do all that training just because they like babies. Linguistics also pays at least 0.1% better than most childcare jobs and involves fewer nappies.
... a background in computational linguistics does not actually guarantee expertise in both computer science and linguistics.
... machine learning models complex enough to be capable of generating plausibly human-
... Amazon cannot read your mind. It’s just that everyone who buys linguistics textbooks late at night also buys barrels of coffee, science fiction novels, and DVDs where the film is available in lots of languages.
... just because it works in English and Latin, that doesn’t mean that it’s a language universal.
... if two people are linguists, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have anything in common. Subfields of linguistics can be as different from each other as psychology and physiology, cosmology and cosmetology, or astronomy and astrology.
... just because the claims of Paper A are blatantly and absurdly false, does not mean that Paper B, which rejects them, is true.
... language doesn’t determine thoughts, except that it kinda does. You’re a lot more likely to worry about a tenure committee than an indigenous language speaker in the Amazon.
... and not just linguists worry about indigenous language speakers in the Amazon.
... a linguistics degree can be your ticket to a high-
... the amount of work you put into formatting your data to post it online is inversely proportional to the probability that anyone will ever look at it.
... people who “correct” octopi to octopodes aren’t cool. Real ledgebags use the word rhinocerotes.
... English does not have a future tense. That’s why Americans are so good at saving money.
... just because it’s expressed with auxiliaries and clitics, doesn’t mean it’s not a future tense.
... it is not the case that SpecGram is always clever and funny except for that one time it cruelly poked fun at your favorite theory/
* Not really. It’s just a lot of fun to tell people they’re wrong. That’s why people review for journals.
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Κόχλους Φύωμεν Συλλέγοντες Ἐγχωρίους |
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Academic Presentation Guides |
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SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 2 Contents |