 Recorded myself writing my qualifying paper for my PhD program. I did that for a couple reasons ones because I have a YouTube channel Why not? I just put it up. I'm sure someone's gonna be interested in it But yeah, I figured I might as well do this. I'm the kind of person who? Like feels a lot more productive when they feel like someone's watching So I decided a I might just record this thing and you know put it up And that way I sort of feel it keeps me on task, you know So that I think that actually did help in a lot of ways so the video is I guess around seven and a half minutes long and It's sped up. I think 40 times. So I think if you do the math, that's somewhere around Five hours of actual work, which considering it's like a huge Milestone, I mean, it's a minor milestone in your PhD That's a not very much work. That's not very much time, you know I didn't actually write all of it on camera. Some I had written before from a couple weeks ago So that's actually a little more hours on that But I sort of copy pasted it in but yeah, you're seeing my workflow now You'll notice all I often have You know a window open for text a window open for the preview and one for the bibliography That's when I'm sort of writing a theoretical stuff and I need to remind myself. Oh, what's what's you know? Reference do I need here? I always forget I have a pretty good idea of like the kind of stuff I need a site But sometimes I forgot it. I forget exactly who the name is so I have to keep the references open And you also notice my wallpapers wallpapers change. That's just me leaving and coming back later And I'll usually change my wallpaper. So you'll notice the wallpapers will change a couple times during this video I actually probably a lot maybe around eight or nine times But yeah written over the course of the weekend so to orient you in where I am in the PhD I've been here for two years. I had a masters before but you know that none of that carries over None of the classes or anything so it doesn't actually count for anything But I'm about two years in the program. You have to write these two qualifying But well we call them prelims here. I don't know why they call them prelims I think it's because they used to be exams. They were preliminary exams But you have to write these two papers before you start Doing your dissertation and that's what I'm doing now As I'm also finishing up coursework and stuff So they should be you know relatively Decent publishable papers about something If you saw my last video, I sort of alluded to what this is about Of course, I work in linguistics and what the papers on is it's sort of like Basically when there's sort of been a problem in linguistics though So there are these things called syntactic parameters in the idea is Languages can vary in word order and things like this and when you're a child you have to learn all these language specific rules as to Where you put objects and where you put? Adjectives in you know reference to the things they modify stuff like that And basically what I'm alluding to in this paper and my analysis is on actual actual word order of sentences Is that these parameters don't really exist that really what's going on is that there are prosodic rules in each language? and each language will place its Constituents and will place its words in ways that get the kind of stress they need or get the kind of emphasis they need Stuff like that. So really the analysis is basically each language has different stress patterns or prosody patterns and you put Now or you put like subjects and objects where they get certain levels of stress That's basically it because if you look across languages There are actually universals with reference to this for example if you have Transitive sentence in any language the object is always going to have the most Sentential stress the subject will be stressed less than that and the verb will usually have no stress whatsoever So basically I'm saying languages have different rules for where the stresses are assigned And then they just put subjects object subjects objects and verbs where those stresses appear So the implementation like the theoretical Apparatus I'm using as I might have mentioned in the last video is what's called optimality theory Which is sort of edgy because That's usually only something used for phonology. It's supposed to be sort of a constraint-based neural net based Analysis of like different prosodic infant phonological constraints and how they Basically how different languages will choose words based on how they are loyal to different constraints like some things are just difficult to say some things are You know just bizarre in different languages and you want to avoid certain kinds of violations of these constraints I'm just taking this and using it on a realm which has been traditionally just syntax You know just sort of word order and you just sort of say oh, there are syntactic parameters Now generally my analysis is within the realm of I guess what's nowadays called minimalism Which is sort of the I guess the paradigm of choice and a lot of linguistics and the the Name is calling by Chomsky, but of course I'm doing things in ways. You know Chomsky does not endorse optimality theory I don't think he understands it to be honest but Minimalism is supposed the idea is when we used to have theories of grammar when we went through You know these sort of pre-cursor pre-cursor phase phases of government and binding There was a lot of theoretical apparatus that sort of accumulated over the years people were positing a bunch of bullshit constraints for things They were sort of making up all these rules that like no one really had You know basically you have to say that these rules exist in the brain Somehow or that they're learned by children, but that's sort of undesirable You know for theoretical reasons and also because language evolved at such a quick rate You don't want to have this extremely, you know complex language faculty so minimalism is a reaction to that which basically seeks to minimize the language faculty and You know basically the complexity of a language the idea behind minimalism is the complexity of language Isn't in language itself, but it's in external factors and my paper is sort of in a in agreement with this and that the differences in word order and you know all these different Changes or all these different factors that affect word order are actually just external constraints They're based on something like Phenology, which is not actually part of the language faculty per se. It's part of the externalization scheme So that's sort of the theoretical locus of this and I actually think I get a lot of I write about in the paper, but I actually get a whole bunch of other stuff in addition to this So if you have a conception of language where syntactic parameters don't exist and everything is actually just learning phonology It melds very well with the fact that children actually acquire Parosity and syntax at the same rate and it ends up prosody is actually part and parcel of how you process sentences So anyway, I've yapped on for quite long enough the videos about the end to end I didn't think I'd be able to talk for the whole time But that's generally what I'm working on and now you sort of see the work getting done. So