Mike Flynn

Education & Professional History

University of Notre Dame, BA; University of Massachusetts, PhD

I was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1952. In 1974, I graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in English Literature. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1981. My thesis, directed by Professor Barbara Hall Partee, was about a reformulation of the system called “categorial grammar” first invented by the great Polish logicians who were so productive between the two world wars, and utilized around 1970 with great insight by the UCLA logician Richard Montague. The thesis was published by Garland Press under the title Structure Building Operations and Word Order, and is now out of print.

Around the time I was finishing my degree, I began a series of teaching and research positions. In the fall of 1979, I was a visiting assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. That spring, I taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. The following year I spent finishing my thesis and teaching at Hampshire College in Amherst. In the fall of 1981, I left the United States for a Fulbright Foundation fellowship to the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. It was during this year that I met my wife, Angelique Dietz, who is a Dutch citizen. The following year I spent a few months at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and hanging out in Amsterdam with Angelique.

We were married in Amsterdam in the summer of 1983, and a week later left for a year’s stay at Nankai University in Tianjin, The People’s Republic of China, where I taught linguistics and logic. The PRC had only recently reopened to the West after the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. It was a very exciting time to be there. In 1984, I returned to the States, to be a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The following year, I taught linguistics at the University of Arizona at Tucson. Finally, in the fall of 1986, I arrived at Carleton, where I have been on the faculty ever since.

Carleton offered me the chance of a lifetime, which was to build a linguistics program as I saw fit, in the context of a wonderful liberal arts college, students who are bright, energetic and kind-hearted, and a supportive administration. A mere quarter-century later in 2011, the Linguistics Program became the Linguistics Department with three full-time tenure track positions, and is today a thriving part of the Carleton curriculum, averaging about nine majors in each class.

I have two wonderful daughters, Marieke (b. 1988) and Nora (b.1992). Next to my family and the Linguistics Department, what I think about most is Japan. I have designed and led an off-campus seminar, hosted by Doshisha University in Kyoto, since 2012. The program will return to Kyoto in the spring term of 2021.

Linguistics 115: Introduction to the Theory of Syntax

Neither of the following two facts will surprise you, but their juxtaposition might.

1. Human languages are extremely complicated, so much so that there isn’t a single complete and accurate description of any human language, even though really smart people have been working on this for a very long time.

2. Little kids acquire these languages easily, without any apparent effort, without explicit instruction, at a time of their lives when they can do little else in the way of elaborate cognitive activity. Parents rightly see this as something of a miracle.

This is one way to construe the science of linguistics: it is the study of how it is possible for human beings to so easily acquire, by interacting with their local environments, spectacularly complex cognitive systems. It appears that in a real sense human brains are especially designed for this task.

One of the goals of this course is to display part of the complexity and systematicity of English. We could choose any of the 6,000 languages spoken on earth, but we choose English because members of the class have easy access to the data. They know, for example, that I have not eaten lunch is a perfect good sentence of English, which cannot be said for I not have ate lunch. (Though oddly, if you say this I would know exactly what you mean.)

But the class has other goals as well. One of these is for students to see what it is like being a builder of a sophisticated theory rather than just a consumer. To get you off the ground, I’ll give you some tools and I will guide you some as we try to construct a good theory of English syntax. But I don’t know what this theory will look like in the end, because it is the students who will build it.

Another goal is to help you develop a good style of scientific writing, so we’ll do a lot of that. In the end, you’ll have a paper proposing your original contribution to our understanding of the nature of English and maybe even human language more broadly. Along the way, you’ll also do a fair amount of speaking, as you try to convince your classmates, your fellow scientists, that you have found an explanation of some aspect of English that they should believe. And if we can figure out a good way to do this online, you’ll have the chance to speak to the assembled linguists about your carefully thought-out proposal, just as you would at an academic conference.

If this sounds to you like an interesting experience, then please join us, won’t you? (The won’t you part is called a “tag question”. If you explore this a little, you’ll see that it is fiercely complicated.)

What matters to me and why