SpecGram Estates

A Retirement Community By Linguists, For Linguists¹

The second greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become tenured—the status, the glory, the freedom! The greatest day in the life of a linguist is when they become emeritus—the status, the glory, the freedom! Come and spend your golden years with us at SpecGram Estates; we understand you like no one else does, and we have the accommodation, the community, and the amenities that are just right for you!

We all know that different linguists have different expectations of the world. At SpecGram Estates we personalize your retirement experience, creating luxurious spaces that align with the values of your subdiscipline. Doctoral committees that press syntacticians and linguistic anthropologists into the same room can be a thing of the past when you settle into field-appropriate housing that indulges your whims and comforts, following the basic rules that govern the professional world in which you feel most at home.

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Syntacticians, come join us in our glorious Syntacticians’ Treehouse! Each binary-branching abode offers accommodations of several scopes, from the grand Root Mansion to the lofty Leaf Bungalows.² Discounts are available if you buy two units and one c-commands the other.³

For more modern tastes, we also have Recursive Condos available. Each room contains a smaller, identical room, allowing for infinitely nested living (subject to performance constraints).

Health-conscious syntacticians can get an all-access pass to the Parsing Gym, where you can work out your Core Grammar with our rigorous sentence-diagramming machines!

Syntactician’s Treehouse

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Morphologists, start your adventure at Paradigm Park with any of several base units. If your needs and budget grow, you can reduplicate the unit, or add a different base to form a new compound. For the entrepreneurial morphologist, you can add a warehouse unit to derive commercial space, a checkout line to derive retail space, or a factory unit to derive manufacturing space.

Note that certain bound units, like a home gym, sunroom, or chef’s kitchen, cannot be purchased separately. Local zoning restrictions may restrict the location of derived units.

Move-α services available to residents at a nominal (or verbal, adjectival, etc., as appropriate) cost. Caveat: SpecGram Estates is not able to accommodate German-style compound formation at this time.

Modular Morphologist Housing

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Phonologists, welcome to Autosegmental Acres! These minimalist retirement units have been stripped down to their most consistent underlying forms, eliding all that unnecessary detail. Subdivisions are arranged in tiers, and lower-ranked residents must yield to higher-ranked residents at all traffic intersections.

Popular amenities include the Sonority Lounge, where seating is arranged by loudness, and the Optimality Gym, where residents rank their fitness goals in a tableau and their optimal exercises are determined automatically! Strict HOA rules are enforced at all times.

Come for the Minimalism, Stay for the Monotony!

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Phoneticians, here in the Glottal Grotto we know that you know that all housing is underlyingly the same—a place to eat, a place to sleep, etc., etc.—but that the little details make all the difference in the world! Every expression of home is allowed—nay, encouraged—and zoning laws and HOAs are nowhere to be found. Go nuts! Amenities include... whatever you can articulate, we can build it!⁴

Underlyingly, All the Same—On the Surface, Each is Unique!

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Philologists, welcome to Manuscript Manor, where every floorboard is a primary source! Our units are painstakingly reconstructed from fragmentary blueprints, though we admit the plumbing is strictly conjectural. All modern amenities have been stripped away to reveal the ur-dwelling beneath. Residents are encouraged to spend their afternoons in the Scriptorium Lounge, where the lighting is kept at a dim, 12th-century glow to prevent the fading of your favorite marginalia.

The Scriptorium Lounge

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Sociolinguists, come join the fun at SpecGram Estates’ Fourth Floor—exciting urban living in high-rise apartments in a major North American city undergoing the Northern Cities Vowel Shift—so there’s plenty of ongoing changes to observe and study. The community center features the Labovian Lobby, where a hidden microphone records your casual post-dinner speech to ensure you’re maintaining the local identity markers.

We offer a range of stratified housing options, from the high-register Penthouses to the vernacular Garden Levels. Rents are based in part on your socioeconomic aspirations as revealed by your dialect choices. Apply soon, as quality units on the nostalgic actual fourth floor fill up quickly!

Come for the Community, Stay for the In-Group Solidarity!

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Etymologists, your unit in the Root Gardens comes with a detailed history of every previous tenant, dating back to the original forest clearing. You can spend your days tracing the plumbing back to its Old High German origins and wondering why the pantry no longer contains bread. The lobby of every Root Garden complex features one of our famous Doublet Staircases, showing the fascinating history of two cognates.

Note: Our landscaping team will not plant anything that wasn’t already growing in the area in the Neolithic era.

The Doublet Staircase for cow and beef.

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Semanticists, Truth-Value Towers offer 100% propositionally stable living. Each condo is guaranteed to be “a place to live” in all possible worlds. We avoid the messiness of “furniture” by providing a set of logical operators that allow you to define your own seating, sleeping, and storage arrangements.

Older complexes feature hallways that branch according to the logical structure of Montague grammar—which some find endearing, while others can be a bit perplexed.

Be Advised: Lease agreements are encoded in formal logic. If you accidentally sign a contradiction, you may find your accommodations reduced to a null set.

Join our monthly “What is a chair, really?” debate club!

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Pragmaticists, in the Gricean Groves, we don’t just provide housing; we provide implicature. When we say a unit “has a roof”, we imply it also has walls, floors, and a front door—though we aren’t legally required to provide them.

Join us for tea at the Cooperative Lounge, where brevity is a virtue and no one says more than is strictly necessary. If you ask for the salt and someone hands you the pepper, just assume there’s a relevant conversational reason for it. (Note: all interlocutors in the Cooperative Lounge must follow Gricean Maxims at all times or face a temporary ban. Repeated infractions will result in eviction.)

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Psycholinguists, welcome to Priming Pastures, where every hallway is designed to keep your mind sharp and test your processing speed! Units are laid out like garden-path sentences—you’ll think you’re walking to the bathroom until the very last turn, at which point you’ll realize you’re in the coat closet and you have to re-parse your route.

Amenities include elevators that use eye-tracking technology to determine which floor you intend to visit, a café featuring our secret recipe Ambiguously Primed Stew, which tastes like whatever part of the menu you are reading at the time, and our (in)famous Stroop Effect–themed traffic signs (proper interpretation left as an exercise for the driver).

Stroop Effect–themed traffic signs.

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Lexicographers, the Alphabetical Abode offers alphabetical living at its finest! Each unit is adorned with a highly descriptive plaque outside, and each room is decorated with a word cloud of synonyms of the word for that room.

Notes: Moving furniture is prohibited. It has been prescriptively bolted to the floor to match the 1928 edition of the floor plan. Units are arranged alphabetically by the resident’s last name. Sorry you have to move frequently, but you chose this life.

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Historical Linguists, your joy will be complete once you move into your own SpecGram Estates UrHouse, where your house is its own historical reconstruction project! You will receive lifelong assistance from a Reconstruction team, who will fabricate earlier historical forms of your living quarters based on your own analysis. You tell us which Change rules to apply and we’ll do the rest, enabling you to live in unattested earlier versions of your property—provided, of course, that your proposed changes are consistent with those of your immediate neighbors.

Due to problems created by some former tenants, we feel compelled to stress that the borrowing of tools, food, and other items from your neighbors is strictly prohibited in UrHouse.

Historical Reconstruction Begets New Construction!

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Typologists, you’ve devoted a lifetime to sampling the world’s languages to discover commensurability and explain what variation really means. Now it’s time to sit back and relax in the Cross-Linguistic Commons, the only neighborhood at SpecGram Estates designed to accommodate every possible configuration of condo living!

Whether you prefer your kitchen before your living room (KVO), your living room before your kitchen (VKO), or a rare “free-word-order” studio where the bed can be found in the shower, we have a sample size that is statistically representative of the world’s architectural diversity.

Amenities also include our Greenbergian Pools, where the depth follows strict universal implications: if the pool has a diving board, it is guaranteed to also have water.

Our condo association meetings are unique in that we don’t seek a majority; we simply map every resident’s complaints onto a multi-dimensional scaling map—which, for example, allowed residents to find the most “central” temperature for the building thermostat.

Every combination is out there if you look hard enough!

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Computational Linguists, come join us at Calculating Comforts, a retirement community for number nerds who love stats and algorithms, and who can tolerate language in small doses as long as it’s been heavily preprocessed.

New dimensions of retirement living are available in our Vector Space Studios, where units are positioned based on our patented lifestyle questionnaire. You’re guaranteed to be great friends with your k-nearest neighbors, because you all share a high cosine similarity! Or maybe our Tokenized Tiny-Homes are a more correlated fit, offering minimalist living for those who believe everything can be reduced to a sub-word unit.

Community amenities include our GPU Sauna, kept nice and toasty by the residual heat from our 24/7 training clusters. Meet up with old friends at the crown jewel in our nightlife scene, the Algorithm & Blues Club. And for singles looking for a late-life love connection, our Latent Love Connection match-making service will help you find that special someone to share your “big-O notation” with in no time!

Hallucination Policy: If you see a cat in the hallway that isn’t there, please report it to the Data Cleaning department immediately.

The GPU Sauna

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Philosophers of Language, at the Reference Ridge we spend our mornings and evenings debating whether the “Morning Room” and the “Evening Room” are actually the same room, just with different names. If that sounds like fun, you’ll love it here.

Even though every unit looks pretty much the same to a casual observer, you know that deep down inside they are all fundamentally unique. That describes the residents, too!

Please Note: Lecturing the wait staff in the communal dining areas about Twin Earth or the chemical composition of XYZ is generally frowned upon. Just ask for your glass of water, okay?

A table at the Private Language Club, a popular night-time hotspot!

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Orthoepists, in the Proper Pronunciation Pavilion, we ensure every resident speaks with the utmost clarity. Our HOA is strictly dedicated to the elimination of “mumbled vowels” and “sloppy glottal stops.”

The dinner bell in the communal dining area is tuned to a perfect schwa. Anyone caught using a non-standard diphthong will be asked to repeat their order until the waiter is satisfied. A strict dress code is enforced.

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Linguistic Anthropologists, our Ethnography Esplanade is less of a retirement home and more of a participant-observation site. We don’t have “rules,” we have “cultural norms”. Residents are encouraged to perform their identities through elaborate porch-sitting rituals and the exchange of rare kinship terms collected over the course of their presumably illustrious careers.

Note to Residents: Please do not feed the linguistic anthropology undergrads from the local community college; they are trying to remain “invisible” while documenting your bridge game.

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Corpus Linguists, in the Data Dell, we don’t care about individual units of housing—we care about the frequency of those units! Ours are built based on the most common architectural collocations found in a 100-million-word database of condo real estate brochures.

You’ll also love our Keyword Café, where the menu is sorted by “Most Frequently Ordered” rather than by food group. It’s statistically significant living!

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Cognitive Linguists, the Prototype Place is the most house-like house you’ll ever inhabit! We’ve stripped away the peripheral features to give you the quintessential “Home” schema. Everything is organized by conceptual metaphor: like “up is good” (the bedrooms are upstairs) and “down is bad” (the basement has a locker for your syntax books). Furniture is arranged by prototypicality—so the most chair-like chair is the centerpiece of the living room, the most dish-like dish is stored in the central cabinet, and so on. Remember, space is mental, and so is our floor plan: if you have trouble finding the kitchen, just try to map it onto your experience of hunger.

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Documentary Linguists, at The Archive, we are dedicated to preserving your retirement before it disappears! Every resident is assigned a junior researcher who will follow you around with a digital recorder, capturing your “dying” anecdotes for future generations.

We also subsidize “endangered” lifestyles. If you still use a rotary phone or a VCR, you may qualify for a significant discount!

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Semioticists, the Signifier Suites are more than just buildings—they are statements. Every window is a symbol, every door is an index, and the smell of the lobby is a complex cultural code signifying expensive.

We don’t actually provide beds; we provide the concept of a bed. If you can’t sleep on a concept, you’re clearly misinterpreting the décor.

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Discourse Analysts, join the Cohesion Commons, where we analyze every interaction at the mailbox for underlying power dynamics! Every hallway conversation is recorded for turn-taking analysis! Our community meetings are legendary—we don’t discuss the budget, we discuss the structure of the discussion about the budget, and our fire alarm system doubles as a conversational peak-marking flasher, making every debate all the more vivid.

Note: Please wait for a clear transition-relevant place before entering the laundry room.

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Second Language Acquisitionists—specialists, researchers, and teachers—Acquisition Arbors offers you, finally, a place of your own! You will exult in our cozy 2LA Cottages, far removed from the supercilious syntacticians and theorists from other so-called “related” disciplines with whom clueless university administrators have forced you to share departments and compete for resources.

Here, theory serves practice, rather than the other way around! You’ll never learn your way around the complex neighborhood by looking at a map—so set out on the Pimsleur Path, a walking trail that repeatedly loops back to every major landmark at increasingly longer intervals to ensure you never forget where they are on your way to navigational fluency! Eventually, as a long-term resident, you’ll enjoy helping newbies distinguish cottages that appear nearly identical but that actually differ in hard-to-perceive ways.

For the real “health nuts”, the Pienemann Fitness Trail offers a series of achievable low-impact fitness challenges (though you are barred from moving on to the next one until you master the current one), and the Zone of Proximal Development Pool features a deep end that is always exactly two inches deeper than you are currently comfortable swimming.

Other amenities include The Comprehensible Input Cafeteria which offers menus consisting entirely of pictures, gestures, and cognates to ensure 100% nutritional uptake. Or relax and enjoy the Interlanguage Garden, featuring hybrid plants that are neither fully weeds nor fully flowers, but beautiful transitional species in their own right. (Shhhh! We won’t tell if you don’t—Code-Switching Quiet Zones with advanced noise-cancelling technology allow you to temporarily stop pretending you don’t use your L1 when you’re frustrated.)

Please Note: The nearby Universal Grammar Gameroom is strictly off-limits to residents of Acquisition Arbors, as we believe skills are learned through exposure, not innate hardware.

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Forensic Linguists, the Evidence Enclave is the most secure community in SpecGram Estates. We don’t need keys; we identify residents by their unique idiolects and the specific way they type their Wi-Fi passwords.

Note: Be careful what—and more importantly, how—you write in the “Suggestions Box”; other residents have been known to undertake stylometric analysis to determine exactly who complained about Marge’s tuna salad!

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Speech Language Pathologists, the Fluency Flats are designed for maximum communicative ease! Our units feature Tactile-Kinesthetic décor—if you can’t say it, you can point to it, sign it, or tap it out on the kitchen table, and every bathroom mirror is equipped with specialized lighting optimized for articulation practice.

Our most popular pub, the Low-Stakes Social, features thickened liquids at the bar, and our structured mixer events ensure that everyone gets as much time as they need to finish every sentence.

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Translators and Interpreters, we know—and we know you know—that you aren’t really linguists, but we like hanging out with you anyway, even though we can’t really tell you apart.

That’s why we’ve built Equivalent Estates, where the units are almost exactly like the ones you remember, just a little different in style and structure. And for those who know the difference, we have both Source Units and Target Units; and if you move from one to the other, we guarantee the gist of your furniture will remain the same.

Amenities include an Untranslatable Lounge in every building, providing a quiet space for when you get those overwhelming feelings of schadenfreude, saudade, or hygge.

Like you, we value human-in-the-loop interaction, so we have a “No Machine Translation” policy—the use of any automated translation technology in the common areas is strictly prohibited.

Note that dinner is served at precisely 6:00 PM. Late arrivals will be charged a rush fee. Residents are advised to always remain aware of the language(s) being used in the dining areas. (Disclaimer: There hasn’t been a Gift-related incident in the German dining area since 1998.)

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Dialectologists, won’t you/y’all/youse come join us at Isogloss Manors? While we celebrate linguistic diversity in all its forms, we recognize that some chasms are just too wide to cross. So, we’ve divided our community into three main sectors—Coke, Pop, and Soda.⁵

Now that we have that ugly messiness out of the way—welcome to Isogloss Manors! Whether you conflate your pins and pens or your cots and caughts, drop your yods, raise your /æ/s, front your ⟨th⟩s, or smooth your triphthongs, you’ve found the place to spend your golden years.

Every neighborhood features a fully stocked Little Free Research Lab for when the grandkids come to visit. Give them surveys and clipboards and sidewalk chalk and let them draw real-life isogloss lines to their little hearts’ content!

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Special Accommo­dations are also available at a small premium for those who need something special, but for some reason can’t sneak into the Glottal Grotto with those easygoing phoneticians.

For example, our small enclave of Pikean Linguists have all requested monastic cells grouped in blocks of four.

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And finally, for Editors, Staff, and Interns¹² of Speculative Grammarian, we invite you to join us at SpecGram Estates, the premier scholarly retirement community featuring peace and tranquility for the neglected champions of satirical linguistics.

Here, we understand that a lifetime of rigorous satirical inquiry requires a specific kind of respite, a sanctuary from the vulgarities of modern linguistics that provides a quiet space to reflect on the glory days of Psammeticus Quarterly without the burden of deadlines or fact-checking.

Residents can enjoy a variety of amenities designed for the linguistically discerning. Spend your afternoons in the Metalleus Memorial Library, participating in spirited debates on the phonemic inventory of silence, or relax in the Hockett Social Lounge. We provide 24-hour on-site assistance for those struggling with the transition from the Active to the Passive voice, and our Mundane Living Program helps residents reïntegrate into a society that does not communicate primarily through footnotes or obscure Latin puns.

Our accommodations range from cozy, manuscript-filled studios to expansive suites featuring soundproof walls—perfect for those who still feel the urge to shout into the void and/or at particularly egregious acts of prescriptivism.

At SpecGram Estates, we don’t just care for your physical needs; we nurture your intellectual eccentricities. Join us as you enter the final cycle of your own personal publication history, ensuring that your golden years are spent in a community that truly appreciates the irony of it all.

Artist’s conception of SpecGram Estates—for retired Speculative Grammarian Editors, Staff, and Interns—which has not yet been and probably never will be built, because none of those mean old bustards have ever gotten out alive!

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	SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 3 Contents