Suboptimist

Year of the Boomerang.

So, I’ve been way too busy to do anything to entertain you people, but I figured I could take a few minutes away from my very busy schedule to entertain you people and give you another small taste of my wisdom. There are only a few things worth mentioning right now.

First, I wanted to talk about the predicament I found myself in this past week as to what to do regarding next week’s Super-Tuesday primaries, in which both major parties in Utah participate. Despite not being one in reality, on paper I am still a Republican, a remnant of my desire to vote in Utah’s 2004 Republican gubernatorial primaries in this state. The conflict I found myself in this year was whether to maintain that superficial registration courtesy of the county and vote for John McCain, my preferred Republican candidate, and as it stands now, my preferred general candidate, or to go register as a Democrat and vote for my preferred Democratic candidate &emdash Hillary Clinton. Ultimately, I decided to remain a member of the party of the war machine, and vote for the man who I think could be a voice for moderates in the White House. On the flip side, who am I kidding? There is no chance in Hell that anybody but Romney will take this state.

Second, I have been reading a bit in optimality in syntax. Despite my being a user of Optimality Theory in phonology and language acquisition and certainly not being a minimalist, there is at least one major theoretical soft spot in Optimal Syntax: Obligatory Head being a violable constraint. Obligatory head, stated generally, requires that all syntactic phrases have a head, e.g. …wash the clothes, where ‘wash’ is the head of the verb-phrase. The problem is that in every analysis I have seen, it has never actually been violated in a winning candidate. If it was violated, I would imagine it would be a phrase completely unattested in human language.

Finally, the follow-up of my experiment is proceeding. I attended a meeting with the speech-acquisition lab yesterday, and actually feel like a real laboratory phonologist. It’s pretty awesome, indeed. We’ll see how things go.