by David J. Lobina

By now I feel like the linguist-in-residence at 3 Quarks Daily; and that would be quite right, as every outlet should have an in-house linguist (a generative linguist, of course), considering how often, and how badly!, language matters are discussed in the popular press. Perhaps I should start a series of posts calling out all the bad examples of the way language is discussed in the media, correcting the mistakes as a sort of avenging angel as I go (God knows I would spend most of my time talking about machine learning and large language models, and I have been there already); but nay, in this note I am more interested in bringing attention to one of the most important books in linguistics since its publication in 1965, and certainly the most influential: Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

But why? For ulterior motives, of course (it will come handy in future posts, that is); in this particular post, though, my aim is to highlight the importance of Chomsky’s monograph to other fields of the study of cognition. Having done this (today), the application of some of the ideas from Aspects, as most linguists call it, will be more than apparent from next month onwards.[i]

In particular, I would like to discuss how the distinction introduced in Aspects between competence and performance plays out in practice, and to that end I shall focus on a particular way to study cognitive matters: one that accounts for a given mental phenomenon at the different levels of analysis that the neuroscientist David Marr and colleagues identified some thirty years ago. If only modern research in AI would follow this framework! [ii]

What follows will include my own editions and additions on such a perspective and I hope the result isn’t too tendentious, but at least the discussion should give a comprehensive idea of the sort of interdisciplinary work Aspects spurred – in this specific case, in the psychology of language.[iii] Read more »

Sughra Raza. Shadow Self-portrait on a Young Douglas Fir, May 3, 2024.

Digital photograph.

by Richard Farr

Beautiful, enchanting Andalucía! — but I probably shouldn’t say that. It’s one of my favorite places in the world and we got to spend the whole of March traveling there. We even spent a week in a town with fabulous food, glorious beaches and lashings of history that the international tourist trade seems largely to have missed, ————— .

Like many people before me, I fell in love with Andalucía because of the bull who wouldn’t fight. My mother read the story over and over, slowing dramatically when she got to her favorite lines: 

“Once upon a time in Spain. There was a little bull. And his name. Was….”

“One day, five men came. In very. Funny. Hats.”

“And the Banderilleros were afraid of him. And the Picadores were afraid of him. And the Matador was. Scared stiff.”

I have heard Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand described as the only great work of literature composed in under an hour. That last part is surely an exaggeration; on the other hand ‘great literature’ seems to me not far off the mark, but perhaps I’m biased by knowing that these elegiac, funny, moving and geometrically perfect few dozen words about loving peace and refusing violence were written in 1936 and brought the Falangists out in a rash. (Franco banned the book. Hitler described it as degenerate. Why can you never find a Nobel Prize Committee when you need one?) On the other hand, the words would be far less memorable without the simplicity and wit of Robert Lawson’s drawings, with their magical evocation of heat and silence, their gimlet eye for comic detail. Has any book ever had text and drawings in more perfect symbiosis? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

In retrospect, the year 1994 seems a momentous one. That year: the genocidal war in Bosnia continued. NAFTA began and Mexico saw the Zapatista uprising emerge in rebellion against it. The Rwandan Genocide began and ended. The Republic of Ireland recognized Sinn Fein. Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were found murdered, kicking off the “case of the century” as OJ Simpson (a popular retired football player and actor and estranged husband of Nicole) was accused of the murder and later acquitted. President Clinton signed an assault weapons ban. And Kurt Cobain committed suicide on April 5th, with his body not being found for three days.

Perhaps we can see that year as indicating the direction the post-Cold War era was headed. As the Iron Curtain parted and the Berlin Wall fell, hope was palpable, at least in the US and in Europe. We in the west might have heeded the message of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in China.

By the year 1994, it was clear something other than just the emergence of a more peaceful, unified and democratic world was manifesting. Contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s celebratory missive in 1989, history had not ended but was marching merrily along. Neoliberalism was ushered in by western powers and authoritarianism was soon to follow. Strikingly, it was the Democratic party (US) and the Labour party (UK) who did much of that ushering once in power, under the auspices of President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Their third way ideology continued the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions of deregulation and government disinvestment, setting the stage for the current right wing challenge to liberalism around the world. While the shifts seem obvious in the political realm, can we see the neoliberal shift in the cultural production, too? I argue we can, and that the rise of Nirvana and subsequent death of Kurt Cobain offers us a vector to explore just that cultural shift. Read more »

Winter on the mountains, spring in the Mittewald valley of the South Tyrol, on this crisp day in late April, 2024.

by Mary Hrovat

When I was a child, my parents saw that I was shy and didn’t make friends easily. It didn’t help that we moved several times when I was very young; I went to four different schools for kindergarten through eighth grade. (I got my high school diploma by home study.) And back then, no one would have guessed that an odd, quiet, anxious little girl might be autistic.

My mother tried to engage me in activities of the type that might draw a shy child out of her shell. For example, she signed me up for Brownies when I was in second grade. Unfortunately, this well-meaning attempt felt almost like a punishment to me. I’d been learning how to get by in the classroom without attracting much attention (luckily, school work came easily to me), but I didn’t know how to behave in what was essentially a social club. I was miserable.

I knew well before second grade that I was different from other people. Because I was so young when I learned this, and I was the only one like me that I knew, I thought there was something wrong with me. I disliked things that children were supposed to love: the circus (too crowded, too loud and confusing), cartoons (they moved too fast and were too silly). I preferred familiar settings and warmed up to new people or places very slowly. I didn’t roll with the punches; I became anxious when I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next or what was expected of me. I liked to be quiet and observe the world rather than participating. I would have loved to share my observations with someone—little things I noticed about the snails in the back yard or the patterns of clouds in the sky. But no one else, not even other children, seemed all that interested. I could sense, in many contexts, that I was expected to adapt, or at least appear to adapt, to the things that made me uncomfortable. I was often lonely and confused. Read more »

Found Poem

“No footballer
no football manager
no football club
no football reporter
no football pundit
no Ian Wright
no Gary Lineker
no football authority of any kind
not FIFA
not UEFA
not the FA
not one of them has even mentioned
the murder on screen
of the captain
of the Palestine football team
recording his own death
at the hands of the Air Force
of a country that still fully participated
in every one of your football
tournaments and competitions.”

Words by George Galloway, M.P.
Found by Rafiq Kathwari

Click on Read More for translations into Irish, German, French, Scot, and Slovenian by eminent literary figures at the invitation of Gabriel Rosenstock, the noted Irish poet. Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation.

His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then, however, Harrison has charted an increasingly idiosyncratic course as a thinker, a writer, and an educator––in the broadest sense of the word.

Harrison joined the faculty of Stanford in 1986 and became chair of the Department of French and Italian in 2002. He turned 70 this year and announced his retirement. (Andrea Capra’s tribute, part of at a day-long celebration of Harrison’s career at Stanford held on 19^th April, was recently republished by 3 Quarks Daily.)

Harrison has written books at a steady clip, each beautifully written and finely wrought, combining intensely felt thought and erudition with quietly challenging daring. His subjects–the forest, the garden, the dead, our obsession with youth–might appear dauntingly bottomless. Yet Harrison’s style, a graceful inter-flowing of literary, philosophical and (increasingly in his recent work) scientific reference-points, gives the impression that one is both ascending and descending, reaching strange giddy heights while delving deep to the essential mysteries at the core of the matter in hand.

It’s the same style that marks the conversations and monologues of his radio show-cum-podcast, Entitled Opinions. I stumbled across an episode of Entitled Opinions sometime in 2020 on the iTunes Podcast app while looking for something about W.H. Auden. But the show has been broadcasting for almost 20 years, “down in the catacombs of KZSU” (Stanford’s local radio station) where, in Harrison’s phrase, “we practice the persecuted religion of thinking.” Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Suppose a cop pulls you over for speeding. What do you think should happen? My guess is you think he should give you a warning and let you off without a ticket. Why? Well, because you will, no doubt, be polite, respectful and contrite (or at least you will attempt to appear to be) and because you are a generally law-abiding citizen, you aren’t drunk, and you are not obviously transporting guns, drugs or kidnapped children.

That’s fine, but now let’s take your personal interest out of it. Suppose a driver gets stopped for speeding. The reason for the stop is that speeding is unsafe. A speeder presents a danger. That danger has nothing to do with whether the driver is polite. Politeness and rudeness are completely beside the point. So how would you want the cop to decide whether or not to write a ticket? What criteria would you want him to use?

How about tribal membership? When I was a kid my world was divided into two tribes. There were long-haired, hippie pot smokers like me on one side and short-haired, beer-drinking cops on the other. It was a simpler time. We made life miserable for each other whenever we got a chance. I suspect none of us today believes that tickets should be issued or not issued based on tribal membership, however delineated. Too much room for mischief. But we also don’t think everyone who gets pulled over should get a ticket. So, if it isn’t politeness, and it isn’t tribal membership, what should the determining factor(s) be? Read more »

Compost

wonderstuff of summer declination
that’ll grow my beets and beans and other rations

browner than the mere idea “earth”, archetypical
as sacrifice, more wonderful than virgin birth

more promising than the phantom wealth of nations
more essential than human beings of highest stations

shoveling this wonderstuff into my wagon
sifting it through hardware cloth,

screening stems & stones until it’s light and soft
to turn into my garden till my ass is dragging

to reap its harvest then until my light turns off,
then lift my harvest to the sun which causes
without ever bragging

by Jim Culleny
6/1/13

by Derek Neal

There is a meme on the internet that you probably know, the one that goes, “Men will do x instead of going to therapy.” Here are some examples I’ve just found on Twitter: “Men will memorize every spot on earth instead of going to therapy,” “men would rather work 100 hours a week instead of going to therapy,” and “men would literally go to Mars instead of going to therapy.” The meme can also be used ironically to call into question the effectiveness of therapy (“Men will literally solve their problems instead of going to therapy”), but its main use is to mock men for their hobbies, which are seen as coping mechanisms taking the place of therapy (“men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy”). The implicit assumption in this formula is that the best way for men to solve whatever existential problems they may have is to go to therapy. I don’t particularly like this meme, and I don’t think therapy is necessarily the best way for a man to solve his problems (although it may be in some cases), but what do I know? I’m setting myself up for this response: “men will write a 2,500-word essay about why you shouldn’t go to therapy instead of going to therapy.” Fair enough. I should specify that I don’t have an issue with therapy itself; instead, I have an issue with a phenomenon I find pervasive in contemporary American culture, which is the assumption that therapy is a sort of magic cure for any ills one may have. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

The short stories in Kindergeschichten (Children’s Stories, 1969) by Swiss author Peter Bichsel are not actually for children. True, they are short, easy to read, and feel a bit like spare, minimalist fairy tales. But the moment you think you’ve grasped what they’re all about, they slip away. In the introduction to my German language edition, the stories are said to “seduce us, playfully, into thinking,”* and this was exactly my experience reading them. It’s not that they’re inappropriate for children, but more that children will likely only find them silly, whereas an adult will very likely see layers of meaning and existential crisis.

Some of the stories are about a person who takes an absurdly skeptical stance about something that is widely known. For example, in the story “Die Erde ist rund” (“The Earth is Round”), the protagonist knows intellectually that the Earth is round, but he doesn’t truly believe it, so he undertakes an absurd journey to prove it to himself. 

The stories also feature characters who ridiculously imagine that they can live outside the confines of society and pursue radical autonomy. For instance, the protagonist of “Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch” (“A Table is a Table”), having grown bored with his humdrum life and grown frustrated with how things always stay the same, decides to give different names to everyday objects, with the result that no one can understand him when he speaks. He ends up forgetting the original names for things and eventually falls silent, able to talk only to himself.  Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait After Dark, Butaro, Rwanda, November 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Thomas R. Wells

Taiwan is an independent prosperous liberal democracy of 24 million free people that the Chinese Communist Party solemnly promises to annex to its empire by whatever means are necessary. Although Taiwan’s flourishing capitalist economy once allowed it to outgun and hence straightforwardly deter China from a military invasion, this military advantage has switched to China over the last 20 years. If Taiwan is to be kept free it must find another means to deter the CCP.

In fact it makes sense for Taiwan to develop a new deterrence that rests on multiple pillars and is thus robust to the failure of any one of them. Hence Taiwan appears very sensibly to be pursuing closer and more militarised alliances with America and other democracies of S.E. Asia threatened by China’s imperial expansionism (especially Japan and S. Korea). At the same time, Taiwan is moving to adopt a ‘porcupine’ strategic posture, investing in large numbers of cheap access denial weapons such as sea mines, torpedo boats, and anti-ship missiles that would exact catastrophic losses on any amphibious invasion fleet.

An additional possibility is for Taiwan to develop an independent nuclear deterrent of its own, which would be well within its technological capabilities (and something the KMT dictatorship actively pursued in the 1960s to 1980s before America persuaded them to drop it). On the one hand a nuclear deterrent would free Taiwan from dependence on US promises to risk a direct large-scale war with a nuclear armed super-power to stop a Chinese invasion (and the presidential elections that determine the worth of those promises). On the other hand, the ability to escalate a Chinese invasion to a nuclear conflict would also allow Taiwan to coerce its allies into upholding their promises of conventional military aid in case of an invasion, thus increasing the deterrence value of those promises in the eyes of the CCP. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Clouds above Berlin this past Thursday.

by Barbara Fischkin

It was the summer of 1961. I was six years old. My mother and I had arrived in Omaha the night before, flying out of what was still “Idlewild,” not JFK International Airport, as it is now named. We would visit relatives with roots in the same Eastern European shtetl as my mother. Unlike most of the family, this branch had left the New York area for the cornfields of the American Midwest.

The relatives—Max and his wife, Sarah, their grown children Geraldine and Stanley and a bachelor brother, Sam—were the only Jewish people on their street. My mother told me this before we left—to prepare me. She knew that coming from the Midwood section of Brooklyn, I would find this odd. No other Jews? My mind, though, was fixated on adventure, being so far from New York for the first time, meeting new cousins and taking my first airplane ride.

Cousin Sarah, her hair already white, told me she had never been on an airplane. I remember the envious tone in her voice. I noticed her tone carried a signal that I was too young, thus undeserving, to have been granted this privilege.

I blew that off, as kids do at an age when guilt does not, or should not, get in the way of a good time. My mother suggested that I go across the street to play with a little girl who lived in a big house. I probably guessed she wasn’t Jewish but my mind was still fixated on this new adventure. Read more »