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Luke Smith
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About

I'm Luke Smith.

You're looking at a document that doubles as a .pdf CV and a html webpage. However you're viewing this, welcome! A lot of relevant information about me is here.

You can download this in printable form at https://lukesmith.xyz/lukesmith.pdf or see it in HTML form at https://lukesmith.xyz.

My main work

  • I manage the Arch Linux meta-distribution and install scripts LARBS.
  • I'm a doctoral candidate in linguistics at the University of Arizona.
  • I run a YouTube channel that focuses mainly on technology, targeted mostly towards "power-users".

Contact

Institutions

  • Ph.D., Linguistics. University of Arizona. 2015--
  • M.A., Linguistics. University of Georgia. 2013--2015
  • Exchange Program, Zhèngzhōu University. 2012.
  • B.A., International Economics and Modern Languages. Georgia State University. 2009--2012.
  • Valdosta State University (2008--2009)

Classes

On the HTML version, scroll over a class for teaching evaluations, if available.

University of Arizona

In person

Online

  • LING 150 "Language".
  • ESOC 210 "The History of Hacking and Open Source Culture".

University of Georgia

Lectures

Conference Presentations

  • The Evoution of the Ibero-Romance Irregular Imperfect: A Constraint-based Analysis. 2018. 28th Annual Symposium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature, Language and Culture. Video. Slides (sent).
  • Scope without Syntax: Towards a Game Theoretic Approach. 2017. UofA Synsalon. Slides.
  • Language as Synesthesia. 2017. Tom Bever's Seminar on language and consciousness. Video. Slides.
  • Towards Biolinguistic Clarity in Generative Syntax. 2015. The Interdisciplinary Linguististics Conference at UGA.
  • Syntax is for Real! Parameterization of Head Movement in Korean and its Effects on Scope and Alternations. 2015. LSUGA Tiny Talks.
  • External Possession and the Undisentanglability of Syntax and Semantics. 2015. University of Georgia Linguistics Program Spring Colloquium.
  • The acquisition of tú and usted by English Speakers: A study of non-native knowledge and usage of forms of address. 2013. Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference.
  • Theories of contraction: A survey of macroeconomic theories of depression. 2012. Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference.

Guest Lectures

This list in non-exhaustive. I've made available some of the slides from the talks, but in many cases I use slides only as a visual aid, so it might be unclear what I'm saying looking at the slides alone.

  • Linguistics Isn't 60 Years Old!: Pāṇinian Approaches to the Syntax and Semantics of Natural Language. 2018. For Simin Karimi's Major Works in Syntax class. Video.
  • Quantifier Scope is Just All Fun and Games! Linguistics Department Graduate Student Showcase. 2018. Video.
  • The Origins and Mechanics of the Greek Alphabet. 2017. For Shannon Grippando's The Psychology of Writing Systems class. Handout.
  • The Phonetics of Language. 2016. For Amy Fountain's Language class.
  • Constituent Structure---What is it and where does it come from?. 2016. For Simin Karimi's Introduction to Syntax class. Some slides.
  • An Introduction to Minimalism. 2016. For Doug Merchant's Generative Syntax class. Slides.
  • Optimizing Structure. 2016. For Doug Merchant's Generative Syntax class. Slides.
  • Syntactic Theory and Psycholinguistics. 2015. For Doug Mercant's Psychology of Language class. Slides.

Languages

Human

Spanish, Mandarin, Latin, some Persian and French, reading knowledge of Classical/Koiné Greek and most Romance languages, grammatical knowledge of many Indo-European languages, Korean, and others.

Machine

Python, Perl, R, PHP, Matlab/GNU Octave, bash/shell, some superficial knowledge of C, common LISP and Haskel; markup languages including LaTeX, XeLaTeX , R Markdown, HTML and CSS.

Computing

Code

  • mutt and offlineIMAP wizard. Github. : A tool for setting up a fully featured personal mail system and offlineIMAP server, with GPG secured passwords, server detection and support for notmuch mail indexing and autosyncing with notification.
  • shortcut-sync. Github.
  • Corpus Latinum Lucae. Github. : (Still in progress.) A planned Latin corpus to be searchable by regexes. Right now, I've developed a part of speech tagger based on Whitacker's WORDS and some systems for converting Latin HTML files into tagged text documents.
  • voidrice. Github. : My most popular item on Github, dotfiles for an i3-gaps based Linux system. This is my personal config which is employed by LARBS.
  • LARBS (Luke's Auto-Ricing Bootstrapping Scripts). Github. Website. : A series of scripts that automatically configures a full-featured vim and i3-gaps-based GNU/Linux system on Arch Linux or derived distributions.

Tools I Use

I have lots of tutorials on many of these programs and tools on my my YouTube channel.

Usual Workflow

I use a vim-based setup in a tiling window manager (i3-gaps). I compile documents using R Markdown or LaTeX, and biber for references. I prefer multimedia manipulation in the terminal with tools like imagemagick and ffmpeg for extensibilitiy's sake. I've run Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux systems (both Debian and Arch-based varieties, as well as Void Linux).

Programs I'm familiar with.

tmux, ssh, RStudio, Blender (mostly for video-editing), Praat, Audacity, E-Prime, GIMP, pandoc, Jupyter. I've managed websites manually via ssh and vim using HTML/CSS/PHP and with tools such as Github Pages (Jekyll) WordPress via either cpanel or wp-cli. Some experience with myBB.

Writings

On the HTML version, scroll over for a summary.

  • A Critique of "Reason". PDF. : A critique of the "Heuristics and Biases" approach to cognition usually associated withe Kahnemann and Tversky. I argue for a variety of ecological rationality, stating that tendencies which seem irrational in experimental conditions are not in the real world, but also that heuristics and biases are all constuable as mental models which differ only in scale, where there are often negative returns to scale, making simple heuristics preferable to so-called "optimization".

  • Scope Without Syntax: A Game Theoretic Approach. PDF. : Second qualifying paper. 2017. : A Game Theoretic analysis of quantifier scope, arguing that possible scope interpretations fall out from pragmatic assumptions about speaker/hearer intention. One empirical claim is that syntactic rigidity should universally correlate with scope ambiguity, while flexible languages/constructions tend to be scopally non-ambiguous.

  • Syntax Without Syntax. PDF. : First qualifying paper. 2017. : Language differences in syntactic word order can be modeled as falling out from otherwise independent prosodic constraints (modeled Optimality Theoretically). Each language has a prosodic pattern and sentential constituents are placed optimally in that template. This avoid grammar overgeneralization that occurs in Halle and Vergnaud.

  • External Possession and the Undisentanglability of Syntax and Semantics. PDF. : Master's Thesis. 2015. : Many languages have external possession constructions which may be possessive datives, incorporated possessa or other types, but all with an affected possessor abide by subtlely similar syntactic constraints, always disallowing EP from agentive clauses. This is argued to be due to an inherent thematic/semantic hierarchy in the "syntax".

  • Indo-European Particles and Head-Movement-driven Word Order Change. PDF. : An informal squib arguing that word order differences in Indo-European languages were historically telegraphed by particle placement, and verbs moved to unify with particles. I.e. languages with initial particles gradually shifted to be VSO, languages with second position particles moved to being V2 and later SVO.

  • Scope Markings and Series Phrase Parsing. PDF. : A crazy idea about scope marking, arguing that if we take a serial approach to prosodification, the vexxing construction of scope marking may in fact be a repair strategy to meet a general desire of the language faculty to group together a question word with where it takes scope, based on an intuition similar to N. Richards' Contiguity Theory.

  • Syntax is Just a Phonological Construct! PDF. : A precursor write-up to the "Syntax without syntax" paper above.

  • Some countercyclic problems at the nexus of phonology and syntax. PDF. : A brief write-up ennumerating some aspects of syntax which are tied into prosody/phonology/semantics and how generally they produce counter-cyclicity problems for Generative Grammar and any "Y-modeled" grammar.

  • Accomodating phonological structure: Extraposition, the EPP and trace effects. PDF. : Probably the first "syntax is just phonology" paper I wrote, a term paper. I detail the mismatch between semantic and prosodic structure as the origin of syntactic movement, etc.

Service

University of Arizona

  • Coyote Papers Editor for the 2018 Arizona Lingusitics Circle.
  • Creator and manager of Tom Bever's Language and Cognition Lab site: coglanglab.com.
  • Arizona Linguistics Circle Peer-Reviewer 2017.
  • Indo-European Reading Group Director. 2015--2016.

University of Georgia

  • LSUGA Website Manager. 2014--2016.
  • LSUGA Interdisciplinary Conference in Linguistics Committee Member. 2014--2015.
  • Graduate Student Mentor. 2014--2015.
  • Socio-Paths Sociolingusitics Reading Group Co-Director. 2014.
  • Typology Reading Group Director. 2014.