Monday, July 10, 2006

Disclaimer: this is only funny if you're a linguist

The conference has ended (sigh), but now the linguistics "summer school" begins. One week of intensive courses on such funky topics as language and genetics, or paradigmatic morphology! (Okay, maybe I'm the only one who's excited about that last one).

Today in Andrew Spencer's morphology course (Andrew Spencer!)*, he came out with the great line:

"A morphologist who believes in morphemes is basically someone who doesn't know the difference between inflection and compounding. Otherwise known as a Minimalist syntactician."

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* It's very exciting (in a geeky sort of way) taking a course taught by someone I only ever came across before on the covers of textbooks. I think I always had a sneaking suspicion that he didn't really exist as an actual! live! talking! person!