Beginning English Grammar

Reference

Keyser, Samuel Jay

Foreign Language Study & Reference

HarperCollins, Publishers

A memoir of MIT life, from being Noam Chomsky's boss to negotiating with student protesters.
When Jay Keyser arrived at MIT in 1977 to head the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, he writes, he "felt like a fish that had been introduced to water for the first time." At MIT, a colleague grabbed him by the lapels to discuss dark matter; Noam Chomsky called him "boss" (double SOB spelled backward?); and engaging in conflict resolution made him feel like "a marriage counselor trying to reconcile a union between a Jehovah's witness and a vampire." In Mens et Mania, Keyser recounts his academic and administrative adventures during a career of more than thirty years.
Keyser describes the administrative side of his MIT life, not only as department head but also as Associate Provost and Special Assistant to the Chancellor. Keyser had to run a department ("budgets were like horoscopes") and negotiate student grievances―from the legality of showing Deep Throat in a dormitory to the uproar caused by the arrests of students for anti-apartheid demonstrations. Keyser also describes a visiting Japanese delegation horrified by the disrepair of the linguistics department offices (Chomsky tells them "Our motto is: Physically shabby. Intellectually first class."); convincing a student not to jump off the roof of the Green Building; and recent attempts to look at MIT through a corporate lens. And he explains the special faculty-student bond at MIT: the faculty sees the students as themselves thirty years earlier. 
Keyser observes that MIT is hard to get into and even harder to leave, for faculty as well as for students. Writing about retirement, Keyser quotes the song Groucho Marx sang in Animal Crackers as he was leaving a party―"Hello, I must be going." Students famously say "Tech is hell." Keyser says,"It's been a helluva party." 
This entertaining and thought-provoking memoir will make readers glad that Keyser hasn't quite left.

Mens Et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows (Mit Press)

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

MIT Press]

CV Phonology: A Generative Theory of the Syllable (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

This work introduces a new approach to syllable representation. It proposes an additional level of phonological representation, the CV-tier; which defines functional positions within the syllable. The first three chapters provide an explanation of and support far this new approach from a typologically varied selection of languages, including English, Turkish, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Danish. The last two chapters are devoted to an in-depth application of the theory of Klamath, showing that a radical simplification of the phonological rules of that language is made possible in terms of this new framework. The book constitutes the first full-scale phonological justification for the CV-tier.

Cv Phonology: A Generative Theory of the Syllable (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Clements, George N.

Mit Pr

An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of western Modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind Modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. 
Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats―Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Mit Press)

The MIT Press

Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

This work is the culmination of an eighteen-year collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that the behavior of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simple principles. In particular, a lexical item is assumed to project a syntactic configuration defined over just two relations, complement and specifier, where these configurations are constrained to preclude iteration and to permit only binary branching. The work examines this hypothesis by methodically looking at a variety of constructions in English and other languages.

Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs) (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series)

Hale, Kenneth L.

Literature & Fiction

Hale, Ken

History & Criticism

When he married for the second time, Jay Keyser thought he and his wife would settle down on a bucolic little farm in Massachusetts, a place where the cows meet the sea. That was before he found out the awful truth: he had married a travel junkie. While he was envisioning walks along quiet beaches, hand in hand at end of day, her sights were set on stakeouts beside the Grumeti River in Tanzania watching crocodiles take down a baboon. He didn’t want to come within six thousand miles of a crocodile, let alone six feet. But, somehow, he couldn’t let Nancy go it alone. And so, for the past fifteen years, Jay Keyser has followed his wife around this treacherous world. I Married a Travel Junkie is his chronicle. A natural born lemonade-maker, our reluctant traveler did his level best to understand not only the extraordinary people and places he visited, but his own internal conflict. As he studied his anxiety across the course of seven terrifying trips to Africa, from the Serengeti National Park to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, he gradually began to accept the profound differences between his wife and himself. Although terrified by them, he has learned from his experiences, most especially from an encounter with an angry female gorilla, who offered key insight into marriage and human nature. Jay Keyser learned to stop and smell the elephant dung. 

I Married a Travel Junkie

Travel

Travel Writing

GemmaMedia

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Rule Generalization and Optionality in Language Change(Studies in Generative Grammar, No. 23) (Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG], 23)

O'Neil

Keyser

O'Neill, Wayne

De Gruyter Mouton

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