I am migrating this site back from commercial blog hosting at wordpress.com to a self-hosted solution, reversing my goodbye to DIY. I am however not running a CMS like Wordpress on the server anymore, because that has opened me up to spam attacks in the past, which is why I moved away from self-hosting last year. So, now, I’m writing my posts on my computer, “baking” the site through Jekyll/Octopress, and then uploading a static website to the server.

I like the fact that all my posts are right here (in plain text, markdown format) and do not reside in some server database. I’m having fun geeking out around this move, learning a bit more Ruby along the way. This is certainly not something I would recommend unless you’re really into this kind of thing. Hosting your blog at wordpress.com is a very good option if you don’t want to worry about what happens on the back end.

One thing that I didn’t like and that got me to move away from there is this: the annual renewal of the “No-Ads” option (for $30 or so) came up, but then I noticed (using the Ghostery chrome extension) that wordpress.com tracks all readers with two commercial systems: the ScoreCard Research Beacon and Quantcast, in addition to their own stats system. One might have hoped that by purchasing the no-ads option, one’s readers would enjoy not just an ad-free blog but also one that doesn’t track their behavior.

Anyway, the site now is definitely a bit no frills, which I kind of like. There’s no comment system, for example (some Jekyll/Octopress sites use the Disqus system, but turns out they also do a massive amount of user tracking). If you have feedback on anything, email me or tweet about it or write on your own blog. If it makes sense, I will update my post accordingly. In the sidebar are just a few things: links to other sites I’m involve with, my latest tweets (in addition to a page that has all my tweets ever, fwiw), and my latest pinboard bookmarks. The RSS feeds should work as before once things are settled down after the move.

I have restored most of the old posts all the way back to 2003 when I started this blog. There are all kinds of formatting errors and of course lots of linkrot, but maybe I’ll get around to fixing all that over time.

I have a new draft paper:

The best we can (expect to) get? Challenges to the classic semantics for deontic modals.
2012. Paper to be presented in a session on Deontic Modals at the Central APA, February 17, 2012.

A somewhat programmatic response to recent challenges to the classic semantics for deontic modals (as brought into linguistics by Kratzer), addressing work by Cariani, Cariani & Kaufmann & Kaufmann, Charlow, Kolodny & MacFarlane, Lassiter, Silk.

As always, comments would be very welcome. You know how to reach me.

Iatridou & Zeijlstra: “Negation, polarity and deontic modals”.

[cross-posted from S&P: Editors’ Blog]

Time for a year-end statistical rundown on how S&P is faring.

In 2011, we published 5 main articles and 3 short articles for a total of 331 pages.

The submission rate has almost doubled since 2010. We are very lucky to now have 6 associated editors working hard alongside David and Kai. We received 43 new submissions in 2011, of which we published 5 (three of the articles published in 2011 were originally submitted in 2010) and accepted 6 more (those are in various stages of revision or typesetting). We declined 24 submissions (6 of those were declined without external review, usually within a day or so). For the 29 submissions that were sent out for review and have already been decided on, the average time to the decision was 48 days (our goal is 60 days, which we missed in only a few cases). 8 submissions are still under review.

Our acceptance rate for this year’s submissions was 11/35 = 31% (to be updated when the rest of the submissions have been decided on).

Our articles are each downloaded well over 1000 times per year. Our most downloaded article is Matthewson 2010, which has been downloaded more than 12,000 times so far. By now, some of our articles are building up a good citation rate on Google Scholar. As of 2011, S&P is also indexed in the influential MLA International Bibliography. We will continue to work on having S&P be indexed and ranked by all relevant providers.

All years

2007: 4 submissions, all declined, avg decision: 37 days, acceptance rate: 0%

2008: 16 submissions, 5 published, avg decision: 59 days, acceptance rate: 31%

2009: 21 submissions, 6 published, avg decision: 59 days, acceptance rate: 29%

2010: 25 submissions, 3 published, 1 accepted, avg decision: 58 days, acceptance rate: 16%

2011: 43 submissions, 5 published, 6 accepted, 8 under review, avg decision: 48 days, acceptance rate: 31%

[NB: these stats do not include commentaries or other articles that were not subject to standard external peer review but were solicited by the editors and received expedited editorial review. S&P has published 6 invited commentaries and is about to publish its first “underground classic”. Also NB: one submission from 2010 is still in revision cycle; 2011 stats not final until all decisions made]

Downloads (not including invited commentaries)

as of 12/28/2011:

Matthewson 2010: 12,233 downloads of the pdf of the article
Schlenker 2009: 5,342
Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009: 5,119
Chemla 2009: 4,723
Beck 2010: 4,688
Barker & Shan 2008: 4,318
Nouwen 2010: 3,960
De Swart & Farkas 2010: 3,923
Gillies 2010: 2,513
McCready 2010: 2,604
Barker 2010: 1,827
Franke 2011: 1,779
Rothschild 2011: 1,253
Rothschild & Klinedinst 2011: 698
Abrusán 2011: 681
Khoo 2011: 539
Magri 2011: 287
McClure 2011: 87
Bary & Haug 2011: 63

Google Scholar citation counts

as of 12/29/2011 (links go to Scholar citations):

Schlenker 2009: 42
Barker & Shan 2008: 30
Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009: 28
Chemla 2009: 22
Nouwen 2010: 16
Gillies 2010: 15
Beck 2010: 10
Farkas & DeSwart 2010: 7

A subset of the MIT syntax/semantics politburo, some of us even smiling:

(Taken during Rick Nouwen’s colloquium when Irene Heim was introducing the speaker, which is why she’s not in the row with us.) (Thanks to Danny Fox for the pointer at the picture and thanks to mitcho for taking the picture!) (Can you put three parentheticals in brackets in a row?) (Sure, you can.)

I’ve already shared this picture via the requisite social networks, but here it is for the blog:

A picture taken after Noam Chomsky’s keynote talk at Ling50@MIT, the scientific reunion to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the MIT Linguistics phd program. Morris and Noam are holding a 1988 picture of them holding a 1953 picture of them … Or, as Bob Frank put it: “The linguists the colleagues the department invited applauded posed for a picture.”

Sabine took this while I was chairing the semantics session at Ling50@MIT, where Danny and Philippe were the speakers:

John Frampton has posted a new version of ExPex, his example package to end all example packages for TeX and LaTeX: http://www.math.neu.edu/ling/tex/expex/. He intends to upload the package to CTAN in the near future. I might finally switch away from linguex.

The slides from Lisa Matthewson’s talk at NELS 42, “How (not) to uncover cross-linguistic variation” are online. I can’t wait to read the paper. This is an important reply to overblown claims about linguistic variation.

During my sabbatical year, I have just as many races projected as I have speaking gigs. Perhaps, I should make that a principle.

I plan to run the following races:

• October 9, 2011: BAA Half Marathon
• April 1, 2012: Cohasset Road Race by the Sea 10K
• April 15, 2012: BAA 5K
• June 3, 2012: The Old Sandwich Road Race Half-Marathon
• June 24, 2012: BAA 10K
• October 7, 2012: BAA Half-Marathon

Here’s a list of my speaking engagements:

• October 7, 2011: Colloquium talk at the University of Connecticut
• February 7, 2012: Invited talk at Yale (Current Work in Cognitive Science)
• February 16-20, 2012: Invited talk in a session on “Deontic Modals” at the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago
• April 19-21, 2012: Invited speaker at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society
• Spring 2012, some time: Invited talk to the Philosophy Faculty at Oxford University’s Jowett Society