Stuff I've Written

Every so often, for one reason or another, I write something. Since stuff I write tends to appear all over the place (or nowhere at all), I thought I'd collect all the links and files here. Feel free to browse around.

• "On the Necessity of a Tri-Branching Corpse": This is the first article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. It features Zhyler, and a version of Chomsky's transformational grammar taken to nightmarish extremes.


• "Systematic Suppletion: An Investigation of Ksotre Case Marking": This is the second article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. It's my attempt at creating a regular suppletive system.


• "The Lexicalist Agenda: Exposing the Myths": This is the third article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. It's a parody of the pamphlets written to "expose" the "evils" of homosexuality. This time, though, the whipping boy is lexicalism.


• "The Symptoms and Warning Signs of Framework Psychosis": This is the fourth article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. If you want to know what I think of frameworks, this is it.


• "No Escape From the Bremley Bump: Don't Try Linguistic Analysis in the Privacy of Your Own Treehouse": This is the fifth article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. If you're a linguist, you can probably guess whose article I was parodying.


• "Where No Researcher Should Tread": This is the sixth article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. This is a continuation of the Anti-Lexicalism arc.


• "A Reanalysis of English Cat": This is the seventh(?) article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. I decided to poke fun at the nonsense that is morpheme-based morphology (yet again).


• "An Official Confession": This is the nth article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. This is another continuation of the Anti-Lexicalism arc that I thought was pretty clever, but which some people didn't get it (hasn't everyone read Darkness at Noon?).


• "Lexicalist Sampson Found, Rescued": This is the nth+1 article I wrote for Speculative Grammarian. The Head Honcho at SpecGram told me that Sartoris (from the previous article) needed to be saved. I balked, but then he came up with an utterly brilliant solution involving a hidden clue in the text (I had planted clues, but not that one!). I then wrote up the rest, and I think the result is fantastic.


• My LiveJournal: I'm keeping a blog now. A real one. So be it.


• MySpace Blog: I've officially retired this blog, but it has some good stuff in there you might want to check out (especially if you like baseball).


• [PDF] My COMPs Paper (a.k.a., Master's Thesis): This is the COMPs paper I wrote to get my MA from UCSD. I'm not particularly proud of the paper itself, but I did seem to hit on some sort of interesting phenomenon (the fact that the "a" in "ban" and the "a" in "bad" are actually quite different in Southern Californian English). The data's good, and something might be made of it. If you're interested in working with my data, send me an e-mail (see the contact section), and I'll send it your way.


• [PDF] Déjà Vu: In twelfth grade, for AP English, we had to write some sort of something (it could be whatever we wanted) that combined two or more of the novels/pieces we'd read up to that point. I wrote this. It's a performance piece combining Frankenstein, The Iliad, and Hamlet. I latched onto the fate of three characters in particular: Justine, Astyanax, and Ophelia. Is it good? No. Is it pretentious and unbelievably silly? My, oh, my, yes. If that appeals to you, you can give this a read. The "Explanation" at the end is especially priceless. (I should note that the novel I wrote ended up just being called Epic. I guess I should put that up here, too.)


• [PDF] Morphology Problems: When I was a TA for LIGN 120 down at UCSD in 2004 (Morphology), I came up with a set of practice morphology problems for the midterm. As they might be useful to others, I've included them here. For solutions, click here (it's a webpage, not a .pdf). Please note that the problems feature four of the languages I created (Zhyler, Gweydr, Njaama, and Kamakawi), so if you wanted a data set with natural languages, don't use these.


• Review of Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare: I began reviewing books for LauraHird.com in 2007. This was my first review. (For the review that can be found on my site, click here.)