Telescoping Reduction

This blog post will be of interest to an extremely limited audience.

A long time ago (ten years at least!) I noticed this phonetic fact about ASL: when fluent signers sign things that include a repeated gesture, the gesture often becomes smaller with each repetition. I made up a name for it: Telescoping Reduction.

Eventually I wrote a paper about this fascinating topic. I was in the middle of revising it for Language when my life went upside down. I still think it's interesting, though, and things have stabilized enough that I started thinking about linguistics again. "I should go back and finish that paper" was one of my thoughts, and then "I don't care about my CV any more!" was another. It is very freeing, not to care about my CV and not to have any reviewers or editors. (The downside is that editors make your work better and so this paper has infelicitous clauses all over the damn place.)

Anyway, for the 3-4 people who will find this a fascinating topic to discuss, here it is, in all its glory. (That's a 33-page pdf about phonetics and phonology. There are no cranky rants or amusing anecdotes. You have been warned.)