Noncompositional

I’m waiting for my flight at Albuquerque back to the Bay Area, so I thought I’d take a moment to write up some impressions of the 2006 LSA meeting.

First, the desert is dry and brown. This did not do anything good for my northern California aesthetic nor my skin. Second, there’s not much to do in town. I came here with Lindsay, and we went to several museums and restaurants, which was nice, but I don’t think that staying an extra day would have let us do anything we regretted skipping. Finally, it’s flat. I like hills.

As for the conference itself, there were several interesting talks that I attended, including a couple of symposia/workshops on topics like connectionism and ellipsis. In a couple of conversations with several of my peers, as well as fellow language bloggers, I found that maybe there was some confusion about one of the plenary addresses, Sandra Thompson’s talk on a discourse-pragmatic approach to defining the clause (even that short explanation may not be what some people thought the talk was about). So in a future post I’ll detail my thoughts on that.

And, as mentioned, there was the second annual linguistic blog dinner, this time with rather fewer people - a summary forthcoming.

Finally, a thanks to Albuquerque airport for free wireless internet - and a boo to the Hyatt and T-Mobile for their pay-to-play connection.