27.2223, Featured Linguist: Adam Przepiórkowski

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Mon May 16 18:59:36 UTC 2016


LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2223. Mon May 16 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2223, Featured Linguist: Adam Przepiórkowski

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Date: Mon, 16 May 2016 14:59:01
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Adam Przepiórkowski

 
Dear LINGUIST List Readers,

We are pleased to present you our next featured linguist, Adam Przepiórkowski,
for Fund Drive 2016.

Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with a donation:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

----------------------------------------------

Grammar sucks: it is complex and it makes no sense. That's what I learned at
school. One day you are told that each Polish noun has a grammatical gender,
and the next day – that it actually has a different gender in the singular and
in the plural. One day you are told that transitive verbs always combine with
accusative objects, and the next day you see the direct object in the
genitive, just because some negation is floating around. One day you are told
that complements are obligatory participants and adjuncts are optional
circumstances expressing manner, location, etc., and the next day you notice
verbs like BEHAVE or RESIDE, with obligatory circumstantials. So you can't be
blamed for deciding that mathematics and programming make much more sense.
Having said farewell to grammar, I went to an experimental university level
maths high school, and got far enough in the national maths olympics to be
accepted as an MSc student to the Mathematics and Computer Science department
of the University of Warsaw.

These were late 1980s and early 1990s, the communism fell down – first in
Poland, then in Berlin, Czechoslovakia and other places – and suddenly
exchange programs became available, of which I immediately took advantage,
spending a year in Edinburgh twice: first at Heriot-Watt, and then at the
Centre for Cognitive Science of the University of Edinburgh. There, with
teachers like Elisabet Engdahl and Robin Cooper, grammar not only started
making sense, but became great fun – like a bottomless box of toys and
puzzles. One game was called “Principles and Parameters”: how to set
parameters (and how to tweak supposedly universal principles) to get Polish? I
must have set a couple of parameters right, as I got an A+ for the final
syntactic assignment and an offer to publish it, PUBLISH IT (gasp), as a
research report of the Centre for Cognitive Science (EUCCS/RP-62). Another
game was: how to make a computer produce all and only grammatical sentences of
Polish? Computational linguistics courses were fun also for reasons not really
intended by the lecturers. I remember a particularly enjoyable class at 2
Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, about the implementation of some kind of focus
calculus in some form of dynamic semantics, when – as the teacher was trying
to explain the intricate workings of perhaps a little unwisely named
parameters FOC-IN and FOC-OUT – the colour of his face was becoming
increasingly purple… Edinburgh was certainly a forming experience for me, and
the solid broad exposure to syntax (Chomskyan and HPSG), formal semantics,
logic and computational linguistics set me on the path of becoming a formal /
computational / corpus linguist.

(...)

Read more:

http://blog.linguistlist.org/fund-drive/featured-linguist-adam-przepiorkowski






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