Since we recently a had a post about Engelfriet’s work on transductions and logic, I figured I’d add a short tutorial that combines the two and talks a bit about logical transductions. I won’t touch on concrete linguistic issues in this post, but I will briefly dive into some implications for how MGs push PF and LF directly into “syntax” (deliberate scare quotes). I also have an upcoming post on representations and features that is directly informed by the logical transduction framework. So if you don’t read anything here unless it engages directly with linguistics, you might still want to make an exception this time, even if today’s post is mostly logic and formulas.

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It’s nice to have loyal readers. One of them wrote me an email a few days ago that starts as follows:

Hi, hope all is well with you. I notice Outdex has been silent for longer than usual but I prefer to assume that that is because you are doing something more fun.

Guilty as charged. In anticipation of my 1-year sabbatical (*gloat*), I have used this summer for an extended vacation from everything linguistics and academia. Well, not quite, there was something fun I did that is sort of related to linguistics, but more on that in an upcoming post. Anyway, this loyal reader knows how to reel me back in: a LaTeX question! More precisely, the best way to typeset a vowel chart in tikz, which is the standard solution for graphics in LaTeX nowadays. Challenge accepted.

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Somehow I wound up with five students writing their theses this Spring semester, and you know what this means: lots and lots of reading. And when reading, I can’t help but get riled up every time I see one of my LaTeX pet peeves. I also like to read the source files in parallel with the PDF, and over the years I’ve come across some nightmare-fuel coding in those files.

So, in a (futile?) attempt to save my future self’s sanity, here’s a list of all my LaTeX pet peeves. Many of them are covered in your average LaTeX tutorial, but people rarely read those cover to cover and instead just go to specific parts that they need to solve whatever problem they’re wrestling with. Compiling it all into a single list might make for a more useful reference. Future students of mine, read this and adhere to it. You have been warned!

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Even though I’m slowly growing into my role as tenured professor, I still haven’t developed a taste for saying the same thing over and over again — at least not when I’m aware it’s the same thing over and over again. One thing that comes up a lot is questions by new students about their presentations, be it in class or at a conference. So I figured I might actually be able to save everybody some time by just posting my standard remarks on the Outdex, preserved for eternity. Who knows, it might even be hilarious 30 years from now to read about how we did things in the academic stone age. Just like it’s hard to talk about mimeographs nowadays without a smirk on your face.

Okay, then let’s tackle the very first issue, one that is still so contentious in some parts of the field that it might rip asunder the fabric of space and time: slides or handouts?

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Oh boy, this month is killing me. I know I promised you one more detailed discussion of subregular complexity before we finally get back to the topic that started it all, Omer Preminger’s post on listedness. But in the interest of time I’ll merge those two posts into one. That means some points will be a bit more hazy than I’d like, but I think it will work just fine nevertheless (and for those of you sick of this series of posts, we’ll get to something new sooner). Alright, with that out of the way, here’s the basic question: why aren’t PF and LF more alike?

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The previous post in this series discussed the lay of the (is)land from the perspective of TSL (I’m so disappointed in myself for not making this pun last time; better late than never). I mentioned that the TSL view cannot handle all island constraints. Sometimes, we need an alternative approach. But this alternative approach doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is also what we need for all kinds of licensing constraints, and it also handles restrictions on movement that are not island constraints.

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In the previous post we saw Merge is SL-2 over dependency trees, and Move is TSL-2. For every movement feature f we project a separate tier that contains only lexical items that have a licensor feature f⁺ or a licensee feature f^-. A tier is well-formed iff every lexical item with a licensee feature has a mother with a licensor feature, and every lexical item with a licensor feature has exactly one lexical item among its daughters that carries a licensee feature. It’s a pretty simple system. Despite that simplicity, it predicts a fundamental aspect of movement: island effects!

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Alright, syntax. Things are gonna get a bit more… convoluted? Nah, interesting! In principle we’ll see a lot of the same things as in phonology, and that’s kind of the point: phonology and syntax are actually very similar. But syntax isn’t quite as exhibitionist as phonology, it doesn’t show off its subregular complexity in the open for the world to see. So the first thing we’ll need is a suitable representation. Once we have that, it’s pretty much phonology all over again, but now with trees.

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After a brief interlude, let’s get back to locality. This post will largely act as a recap of what has come before and provide a segue from phonology to syntax. That’s also a good time to look at the bigger picture, which goes beyond putting various phenomena in various locality boxes just because we can.

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We’re continuing our stroll through the subregular locality zoo, still in the service of ultimately being able to say something about syntax and its interface with PF and LF. We started out with SL as the most restrictive kind of locality. The step to the TSL region corresponds to a relativized notion of locality where it’s not absolute locality that matters, but your position relative to other elements of a specific type. TSL is actually a cluster of different classes, with standard TSL at the very bottom. Depending on what context information the TSL tier projection may take into account, TSL expands to ITSL, OTSL, or IOTSL. While IOTSL has a very liberal notion of locality that can even accommodate insane patterns like nati, it still involves some level of locality. That’s in stark contrast to the strictly piecewise (SP) dependencies of Rogers, Heinz, Bailey, Edlefsen, Vischer, Wellcome, and Wibel (2010), which throw locality out the window.

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