Scott Nelson

@esseeohteetee

Assistant Professor @ University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | computational phonology, phonetics-phonology interface, representations, logic/model theory, philosophy of science. Fan of sound in general (synthesizers, field recordings, natural reverb,…)

187 Following229 Followers259 Posts

YouTube Bluesky

Is this your profile?Claim it and esseeohteetee.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Apr 23

Kodner et al. (2023) citing Da Vinci (1519) is my favorite citation in a linguistics paper.

A screen shot of a paper by Jordan Kodner, Sarah Payne, and Jeff Heinz that reads, "we are reminded of Leonardo Da Vinci’s comment (Da Vinci, 1519/1906, 64) on perpetual motion machine enthusiasts: “O speculators
about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest? Go and take your place with the seekers after gold.”

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jan 23

View from my seat when I look up is the Empire State Building.

View of the Empire State Building through a set of windows arranged in a grid.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jan 13

40 people at the ocp pre-conference workshop in this tiny sitting room makes me yearn for the LSA Marriott.

Picture of a fancy room at Cambridge with a chandelier and ornate bookshelves and furniture. Picture shows linguists standing around drinking coffee and tea before a workshop.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jan 13

~One week ago I got to do my favorite thing (play music with friends). Today I get to do my other favorite thing (talk about phonological representations with my friends). Here's a pic of me deciding to wear a winter jacket doing the former during an hour long set of scream-singing (a stupid choice)

Picture of me on stage playing a surf green Fender jaguar guitar while wearing a brown, khaki, and black winter jacket.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Dec 3

1, 4, and 5 indicate that I listen to the good type of 2.

Spotify top genres list: 1. Drone; 2. Midwest Emo; 3. Indie Rock; 4. Neoclassical; 5. Post-Rock

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Nov 26

Another bangerS

Screenshot of an academic article written by an author named "Adam Jardine" titled "The pedagogic value of science fiction: teaching about personhood and nonhuman rights with planet of the apes". <note: a different Adam Jardine is a prominent research in the subregular/model-theoretic phonology subfield referenced in the original post>

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Nov 26

I'm finishing up a chapter that partially reviews all the subregular/model-theoretic phonology work that has been done over the past decade. I'm combing through google scholar right now to make sure I didn't miss anything and I found this funny reference. Would like to meet this A Subregular person!

A screenshot from google scholar linking to a pdf titled "A Subregular Analysis of Phonological Transformations" on Jane Chandlee's haverford.edu website. The first author is listed as 'A Subregular' which appears to be an error when scraping the information as the linked pdf shows that Jane Chandlee is the only other.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Nov 16

Weekend lived up to the hype.

A picture of attendees of the Rutgers subregular morphophonolgy workshop. Around 30 people on a set of stairs in an academic building with high ceilings.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Aug 18

Even /vr/ is a valid English onset at the vegan diner

Photo with two words “entrees” and “vrunchwrap”

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Aug 12

Screen shot of a facebook post from The Onion. The article being linked is titled "Interdisciplinary Linguist Brings Up Marr (1982) On First Date". Also includes a pull quote "So Marr defines the distinction between three levels of analysis of any cognitive information-processing system. At the computational level...". Corresponding picture shows a man and a woman having drinks together.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Aug 1

The term "corn sweat" seems to be on the rise as I had never really heard it being used before this year. Went to Google Ngram Viewer to look at the trend. It does appear to be on the upswing, but also is less frequent than "sweat corn" which I assume is just a misspelling of "sweet corn".

Screen shot of Google Ngram Viewer showing the frequency of "corn sweat" and "sweat corn". They are both on the rise, but "sweat corn" has somewhat consistently been more frequent.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jul 28

Goodbye Eugene. It was nice to walk five miles a day and remain relatively comfortable, but I must now return to the corn sweat of the Midwest. Had a great time at both SCiL and DYMOS as well. Life is good

A picture of a slide from an academic presentation with a picture of three turtles stacked on top of one another and a tile that says insert [infinite regress cliche] here

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jul 22

Karthik Durvasula pointed me to Imre Lakatos’ “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs”. It really helped me pull together my thoughts on the philosophical underpinning of my dissertation. Found a hard copy at a used bookstore in Eugene, OR today. The world is kind.

A picture of the book “Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jul 2

I like this quote from Vinny Czarnecki's paper from SCiL this year because it makes explicit what I think I only made implicit in my dissertation. openpublishing.library.umass.edu/scil/article...

Screenshot of a paragraph from the linked paper which reads: "How can we use knowledge of these modules independently to understand their interaction? Namely, if model-theoretic representations allow us to understand the formal properties of semantics, syntax, phonology, morphology, phonetics in isolation, and we know that it is extremely well-suited for understanding the relationships between different structures, then it should also serve as an invaluable tool for understanding the formal properties of their interfaces."

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Mar 11

This paper from CogSci last year has my favorite figure for explaining transparent rule ordering in phonology: escholarship.org/uc/item/1kg1...

An image explaining feeding and bleeding via potato preperation. On the left are whole potatoes. An arrow goes up and to the left labeled as chopping to a smaller image of chopped potatoes. From the chopped potatoes and arrow goes down and to the right labeled as frying to a smaller image of fried potatoes. A green arrow underneath is labeled as feeding. From the same whole potatoes an arrow goes down and to the right labeled as pureeing and shows pureed potatoes. From the pureed potatoes a crossed out arrow goes up and to the right to the fried potatoes. A red arrow above is labeled as bleeding.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Feb 6

I have returned to exclusively working while listening to Stars of the Lid and I can't express how perfect 'The Tired Sounds of...' remains. A timeless album.

Picture of a man pointing at the sky as part of the meme "If nobody got me I know X got me". In this case X has been replaced with The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid and a picture of the album floats in the sky

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jan 27

Vintage advertisement for Roland Juno 60 synthesizer.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jan 21

Teaching in the basement of my building this semester and there’s a spray painted “No Smoking” message on the board.

A picture of a blackboard with the message “no smoking” spray painted in the top corner

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Aug 27

This but with markedness constraints. I have the capacity for *NT >> IDENT(voice) and yet I’m stuck saying camp instead of camb.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jul 13

Lol to using a Charles Reiss quote out of context here. And then following it up with a citation for the GAN models that Beguš has proposed as if the majority of phonologists have adopted them? No shade to Beguš, I just haven't really seen them widely used. An extremely cherry-picked paragraph.

Screenshot from article: "In phonology, for example, the once- mainstream idea of a universal set of phonological features (analogous to the categories assumed in the domain of verb argument structure) is “very much a minority position today, even among phonologists trained in the generative tradition” (Reiss 2023: 9). What has taken the place of phonological features? State of the art computational models that operate on audio input and generate “internal representation that corresponds to phonetic and phonological features” (Beguˇs 2023: 138)."

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jul 13

Look, if you're going to write a provocative article about how LLM's are better at theoretical linguistics than theoretical linguists can you at least try to understand the distinction between individuals and the aggregate? Also, time is a flat circle read McCloskey (2002): shorturl.at/KrCgW

Screenshot of text that says: "Indeed,theremaysooncomeapointatwhichthe“acceptabilityjudgments”ofLLMsaretakenas the gold standard, with human ratings subject to “error”, or at least uncontrolled individual dif- ferences. In fact, quite possibly, we are at that point already: It is not clear why the grammatical intuitions of 48 University of Liverpool students (Ambridge et al. 2020) should take precedence over the distilled wisdom of millions of English speakers worldwide (davinci002)."

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jul 6

Still trying to track down this citation by my namesake.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jun 29

What did I learn at SCiL? Well, I found out that UC Irvine has a Taco Bell Endowed Professor. Truly living más.

screenshot of text "Taco Bell Endowed Professor of Information Systems and Computer Science; and Director, Center of Digital Transformation (CDT)"

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee· Jun 14

Hello! I am teaching an Intro to Mathematical Linguistics seminar with Vinny Czarnecki from Rutgers at the upcoming virtual New York Institute. There are many other interesting seminars in linguistics (and cultural studies)! Apply to NYI (by June 17!) here: forms.gle/axv3GCvnnnty...