Yes, it's been quite a very long while since Mihkel or I posted here in our Amsterdam blog, and I'm sure I speak for us both when I take this opportunity to apologize to our readers (all three of them). Instead of explaining what's been keeping me so busy since May and just making this a "sorry for not posting, but so it goes" post, I thought I might as well actually give some information to my reader(s) about what I'm doing at the moment.
As far as work goes (and yes, I get to call it work instead of school: I'm receiving a monthly scholarship for this, which means some people, though possibly crazy people, think it's worth paying me to do what I do; so there you have it), these have been particularly exciting months. At the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) I've been working with Prof. Jeroen Groenendijk on a rather revolutionary approach to the meaning of natural language questions. 'Revolutionary', of course, doesn't entail 'correct', but that's beside the point. Right now, he and I (and everyone we've talked to about it) are very excited, and think it's a truly promising line of research. As soon as things start being published, I'll stop being so vague and actually post something in concrete about it. Besides questions, I've been reading on and thinking about alternative semantics, the quite heterogeneous set of semantic theories that argue that natural language disjunction (the operator or in a sentence like "John or Mary have the tickets" and, more interesting, "Julia may be in Paris or in London") cannot be analyzed as the Boolean join operator, as classical semantics would have it and has indeed had it. Again, I may post something more on that subject in the near future, naturally in very light doses, so as to not cause indigestion. The tricky thing in talking about one's research is presenting it in simple enough terms that it becomes understandable, but not in such a trivial way that it comes out as something utterly uninteresting. Some other day, in any event.
Other than that (and overlooking, for today, my academic excursions to the realms of natural language syntax and, believe it or not, phonology), I'm working on my PhD applications. 'Tis a sinuous path, I know, but one very many fine people have taken before me, and are taking at the same time as I am, and will take in the years to come.
Since there's no such thing as a GRE Subject Exam for linguistics, PhD applications in this field consist essentially of a writing sample, which is what I'm working on. In actuality, I'm working on a number of writing samples, in different fields of linguistics, and then I suppose I'll choose one or two to send in. Maybe I'll just send them all, I don't know yet. As for which universities I'm applying to, it's probably wiser for me to only disclose that information after this academic year's PhD applications saison is over. I can however say that I'll be applying to some six linguistics programs in the US and to Amsterdam.
As a matter of fact, Mihkel is of course also applying to a number of schools this year, though on terms somewhat different from mine. But that's for him to write about (and I certainly hope he will).
Hopefully, this text will prove to be an efficacious icebreaker. If so, and counting on the pages of inspirational writing Mihkel still has to offer, I can already predict that, in a few weeks, Masters in Amsterdam will take its rightful place amongst the most influential blogs in the world.
In a breeze of fresh air, the Estonian Academy of Sciences is modernizing its membership policy. A proposed change in the law governing the academy's operation would allow a new member to be elected every time a present academic ("akadeemik") reached the age of 75. Currently, a new member can only be elected upon the passing of a previous academic - this has lead to a situation where 24 of 58 academics are above age 75, and the average age is 72.
