back at it

summer break is officially over. i've moved into my new home in Ithaca, NY and the department of linguistics at Cornell. as a first year grad student i'm treated to the "core courses" of syntax, semantics, and phonology. also on the schedule for the coming semester is Latin comparative grammar and a seminar on the morphosyntax of case. all fun stuff, and should be plenty food for thought (and blog posts).

my first class this morning was syntax, where we got a general overview of what the point of syntax is anyway. one of the points we covered was the difference between descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy. i volunteered to define the two, and did a real good job of botching the definition of explanatory adequacy. an omen, perhaps? or maybe just the underlying reason as to why this blog isn't called explanatorily adequate*.

*lies, it's because descriptively adequate sounds cooler.