What a difference derivational morphology makes

In the introductory post, Semantic Compositions erroneously declared itself to be one of the first blogs on the web dealing with the subject of linguistics. In order to validate this claim, your host ran this search on Google: +linguist +blog. I figured anybody setting up such a site would identify themselves as a linguist. After searching the first 10 pages of results by hand, I figured I was practically alone, save for a student at Harvey Mudd College (a school near and dear to my heart, although I have no degree from them).

But then I ran another search on Google a day later, and considering the subject of my lone patent so far, my failure to consider this is embarrassing: +linguistics +blog.

There must be a cosmic law to the effect that the more grandiose the claim, the more humiliating the disproof. Hence, there exists a group blog not merely written by a few respectable professionals, but by an absolute All-Star team of top-notch talents across a variety of linguistic fields. Not only that, but they cover linguistics in much the way SC aspires to -- with lots of commentary relating linguistics to the outside world. There is somewhat less expository writing directed at the non-linguist, but there are nevertheless plenty of gems, and so they are immediately going up as recommended reading, and I expect to be linking to them in the future going forward. As an example of why Language Log is so much fun, SC commends this postto you, reader. The one right below it begins with the most icily perfect clause SC will read this year (and goes on to be a wonderful model of the sort of writing SC hopes to do).

There are also about 2-3 dozen active blogs written by other linguists which turned up as a result of search #2 above, but they vary widely in focus, and many of them are very much more concerned with Linguistics: The Profession than with general linguistics. There will be more discussion, and definitely links, as SC becomes better acquainted with them.

Semantic Compositions has come across the term "linguablog" in the course of this discussion. It seems to mean translation/ESL/language-teaching pedagogy, and other issues which, while highly meritorious in their own rights, are not really part of Semantic Compositions' expertise or background. SC will not be referring to itself as a linguablog.

Finally, readers with opinions about the division of labor between syntax and morphology may argue with Semantic Compositions' categorizing of posts referring to morphology as part of Linguistics -- Syntax. Your host is not actually implying endorsement of Distributed Morphology, Minimalism, or any other argument that morphology is just syntax writ small. But were he to introduce separate categories for every single subdivision of the linguistic theory, there would be a whole bunch of empty categories, and this field has certainly had enough controversy over those already ([Could you possibly make a more inside-baseball comment than that? -- ed.]).

Comments

[Ryan Gabbard]

Hello, and welcome to linguistics blogging!

I'm an undergrad planning on going into computational linguistics, I'm part of a group blog, The Audhumlan Conspiracy, that often deals with linguistics

[Ryan Gabbard]

Oops, links got deleted:
http://www.audhumla.org
http://www.audhumla.org/archives/%20categories/linguistics/index.html

[RDF]

Had I not stumbled on translator Gail Armstrong's blog (http://www.openbrackets.com) by chance a few years ago, it's unlikely that I would have found any of the other linguist blogs I frequently read. Overlooking them for a few days is, of course, forgivable. Welcome!

[Semantic Compositions]

Point taken. I'm still not sure this blog fits into the same ontological category (I spend a lot of time building ontologies, so I'll talk about them in the future), but that certainly did look like a very worthy blog. I'll try to be more open-minded about it.