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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Working with grad students, a lot of what I spend my time on is the parts of the paper "around" the analysis -- in particular the parts that explain to readers why they should care. The pitch! The pitch is the subject of this week's PL post: profling.beehiiv.com/p/your-paper...

profling.beehiiv.com

Your paper needs a claim and a pitch

tell us why we should care

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Thanks for reading and thanks for the correction! Fixed that :)

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"you should write something about AI" ok, I did, here it is 👇 a general goal of my blog is to be useful to linguists, so this is less my personal take on AI and more about how to take account of diversity of opinion in our community profling.beehiiv.com/p/linguists-...

profling.beehiiv.com

Linguists don't agree about AI

how to do linguistics in the meantime?

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

...along with the broader view of linguistics journal editors' practices from: D’Arcy, Alexandra & Salmons, Joseph. 2021. Peer review in linguistics journals: Best practices and emerging standards. Language 97(4). e383–e407. (which all linguists should read)

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

New blog post about what happens when you send your paper to a linguistics journal -- this is based on my experiences at Natural Language Semantics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and most recently Semantics of Natural Languages... profling.beehiiv.com/p/what-happe...

profling.beehiiv.com

What happens when you send your paper to a journal

with charts & graphs & strongly held opinions

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A fixation on being right is detrimental. So is an underappreciation of the value of social organizing among scientists. Famous theorists are famous because they organized their peers successfully (not because the theory is necessarily right)

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

big picture-y blog post this morning: three ways to contribute to science 1. be right 2. be wrong in a useful way 3. organize people profling.beehiiv.com/p/three-ways...

profling.beehiiv.com

Three ways to contribute to science

try to be right; expect to be wrong; remember the people

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

if you don't think humanistic learning has value in its own right, no amount of instrumentalization is going to save it that epochal decline coincided with the hegemony of the "employable skills" pitch, including earnings data and all the trimmings, ought to have taught us that

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The part of this I truly don't understand is that people who express this view in contexts of hiring are frequently, themselves, quite interdisciplinary in their work. The post is about how to approach this as a (future) job applicant.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

new blog post about the academic job market and its strange ability to cause linguists to believe that "everybody must be exactly one thing" -- meaning, no one can be both a syntactician & a semanticist, a theorist & a fieldworker, etc etc

profling.beehiiv.com

The paradox of strategic interdisciplinarity

the job market perils of "Everyone Must Be Exactly One Thing"

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

My basic advice is: show them a result and ask them a question The result can be something half baked when you walk in If the person you're meeting with can help you improve your idea, everyone is happy

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I have been both the student who is not quite sure what to say to the visiting speaker, and the visiting speaker not quite sure what the student is going for with the meeting. I wrote up some advice for the student about how to approach this situation.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A funny thing about academic meeting culture as I have experienced it: we think of the *junior* person as the one requesting the meeting and therefore the one who is supposed to set the agenda. On my blog this week I wrote about one specific kind of meeting where this dynamic is in play.

profling.beehiiv.com

How to talk to a visiting speaker

share a result and ask a question

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I would love it if people took this idea and tried it out in their own teaching. Tell me how it goes!

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

As an instructor I want to set up office hours in a way that clarifies that they are NOT an imposition on me and that attending them does NOT mean the student is dumb or behind in any way. Opt-out office hours have proven a good way to achieve this.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I think grad students often hesitate to attend office hours for two reasons, both of which can be grounded in politeness theory: 1. they don't want to look dumb 2. they don't want to impose

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

my blog Professing Linguistics is back with more linguistics professor-ing things specifically, I wrote about office hours and how they can be helpful at the graduate level

profling.beehiiv.com

Why I have opt-out office hours (in grad classes)

(in grad classes)

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Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcculloch.com · 17/08/2026

If you're wishing you could go back to school for linguistics, here's your annual reminder that Crash Course Linguistics @thecrashcourse.bsky.social exists! I worked on it with linguists @superlinguo.bsky.social and @jessgrieser.com, host Taylor Behnke, @complexly.org and @thoughtcafe.bsky.social!

youtube.com

What is Linguistics?: Crash Course Linguistics #1

YouTube video by CrashCourse

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

What is this even supposed to mean? “Don’t be motivated in this way in taking action?” Can that sentence even mean that?!

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John Ewing @avimentor.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Me, hopefully in the near future, when I forget a bottle opener while visiting my favorite Berkeley shops on Hopkins.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Bartlett is my CM, why is he like this

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Thank you for your service 🚲❤️

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

And apparently Bartlett is an excused absence 🤔

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Cool, I'll check out the repo. I will post in the fall about what this does or doesn't hint about the future. Personally I do not think that the good times are likely to be seen again anytime soon. Of course you are right that that goes beyond what the actual data show :)

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

People should know! I feel strongly about this. Students should know what they’re getting into, advisors what their students are facing

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Lingthusiasm @lingthusiasm.com · 02/07/2026

please remember to adopt a medium posture today in the middle of the day and go uhhh for World Schwa Day from our episode about real and silly linguistics holidays www.patreon.com/posts/142860...

Lauren: I think we could also have a go at making World Schwa Day happen.
Gretchen: What day would you propose for that?
Lauren: It would have to be the very middle of the year (which I now realise I’m not sure if that’s the 1st of July of the 30th of June), and it would have to change on a leap year.
Gretchen: According to Wikipedia it is July 2nd.
Lauren: Right, July 2nd. So, July 2nd at midday, peak schwa day.
Gretchen: July 2nd at midday everyone just stand outside and go /ə:/. That can be schwa day.
Lauren: Schwa Day – it’s extremely mid. You can’t make it too much of a big deal because it’s schwa. It’s unstressed. It’s not a big deal.
Gretchen: It’s just sort of chill. I think that’s particularly good in the North American context because a lot of border cities between Canada and the US will celebrate both July 1st, which is Canada Day, and July 4th, which is American Independence Day, and they’ll have fireworks on both of those days. It’s nice to have a lull day in the middle.
Lauren: Oh, I was gonna say we’ve got a new holiday for them where they could just do both at once.
Gretchen: But they have to put off incredibly quiet fireworks if it’s Schwa Day.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(6/6) 3. Reading takes students away from more important tasks of moving, settling in, dealing with bureaucracy Response: respectfully disagree. Reading can be fitted around a lot of other constraints in one's schedule. It's not an either/or.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(5/6) Reading is not a competition, either with the text or with some imagined alternative reader who would understand it better. Reading technical literature is a skill you practice. It is normal to not understand everything you read. (hmm I guess I should write a blog post about this)

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(4/6) 2. Reading makes students feel inadequate Response: If this is so, we need to help students tell themselves a different story about reading.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(3/6) The ones who will take this advice don't need it; the ones who need it won't take it. People who are anxious and want to take an action should be directed toward a *productive* action. Reading widely, and developing their ability to do so in the future, is a good action for them to take.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(2/6) 1. The relevant student population is already too anxious. We should just tell them to relax Response: It rarely works to just tell anxious people to chill out.

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(1/6) Via a different social media site, I've learned that some linguists disagree with my recommendation that incoming PhD students should read (widely and relatively undirectedly). Three arguments have been advanced. Here are my responses:

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Thanks! Most job boards don’t give access to non active listings, so we can’t get historical data. This looks to be the case here alas

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Semantics of Natural Languages @semnatlangs.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

We're thrilled to announce the launch of Semantics of Natural Languages, a new diamond open access journal - the scholar-owned and -led successor to Natural Language Semantics, published with OLH under the auspices of LingOA. snl-journal.org The Editors Amy Rose Deal, Clemens Mayr, Florian Schwarz

openlibhums.org

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I would be curious to know how your collaborators see the word "generative". Do they understand their work to fall under that? I ask because I have encountered various people defining it in a way that would not include current work in LFG, as I understand them

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

I just say "contemporary generative syntax"

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

This is from early December :(

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Musgrave nails it as always

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AR Deal @ardeal.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Linguistics prof here, Singer is legit!

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