hakase

I can only speak for his linguistic works, but it's odd how much clearer and more straightforward his earlier works are than his later ones. Syntactic structures and Aspects of a Theory of Syntax are easy enough that I'd even recommend them to Introduction to Syntax students, but starting with Lectures on Government and Binding things get increasingly obtuse to the point that I'd always recommend reading "translations" of his later works rather than the works themselves.

Edit for full transparency, since this comment is getting upvoted while Chomsky is getting blasted in the comments here: Don't get me wrong, all of Chomsky's linguistic work is incredibly brilliant. He single-handedly brought about a complete paradigm shift in the field of linguistics. G&B with all of the bells and whistles added by other researchers in the 80s and 90s is still the closest we've come to an actual explanatory theory of syntax, and X-bar theory is probably the single most elegant, ingenious innovation in the history of linguistics.

And that's just syntax. I haven't even mentioned how he and Morris Halle revolutionized phonology a few years later with The Sound Pattern of English, or how he also revolutionized grammar theory with the idea of context-free and context-dependent grammars the year before publishing Syntactic Structures, and all of this somehow still understates the enormous import of Chomsky's linguistic work.

If anyone has any questions about Chomsky's linguistic work, feel free to ask, and I'll respond as best I can.

"Not in Employment, Education, or Training"

Perfect! I'd been looking for an easy way to get rid of both the baby and the bathwater.

So "'s" is what's called a "clitic". It's a tiny little piece of meaning that can't stand by itself and has to "lean" on a neighboring thing to be grammatical.

The interesting thing is that their distribution is syntactic, not morphological. So, instead of attaching to a word, like affixes do, "'s" instead attaches to entire noun phrases. This includes all adjectives, prepositional phrases, and even subordinate clauses, as long as they're part of the possessor noun phrase.

So, "the dude's car"? Perfectly fine, and it even looks like an affix here. "The dude over there's car"? Perfectly fine. "The dude I went to school with but who forgot that he ate a capybara yesterday's car"? Perfectly grammatical in English thanks to the power of clitics.

Bonus fun fact: "'s" used to actually be a suffix, but somehow became separated over time, and it's a big deal in diachronic syntactic theory, because things are only ever supposed to evolve toward being a suffix, but "'s" is one of the few things that seems like it evolved the other way, which throws a wrench into how we usually view the process (called "grammaticalization").

In short, Anon's sentence is a perfectly cromulent use of the English language.

Here is everything I can remember doing:

1. Downloaded the apk

2. Installed and opened the program

3. Allowed notifications

4. Input my four instances: lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.basedcount.com, and lemmy.ml

5. Hit "sync" and watched them sync. Three of these instances had almost the same number of communities (around 120), but one had none whatsoever. It took two or three minutes for that instance (basedcount) to sync all of the communities, and in the end, it wasn't able to subscribe to about 20 of them for some reason. (maybe because nobody had ever gone to/searched for those communities from that instance before - I've heard this can lead to access problems, but you'd probably know more about that than I would)

6. About five minutes later, I got couple of notifications saying that 6(-ish) communities had been synced and that 18(-ish) had been unsubscribed across my instances. This confused me, so I checked my instance list and saw that all three of my instances with around 120 communities now had around 95.

7. I disabled notifications because they were starting to feel spammy.

8. I looked at the notification again and realized what had actually happened. I immediately uninstalled the program and resubscribed to as many communities as I could on lemm.ee, my main account.

Sorry this is so long - I hope it helps!

Beware!

This unsubscribed me from twenty+ communities on all of my instances. It first tried to subscribe all of my accounts to all of the communities of my largest instance, which is what I wanted it to do. One instance failed to sub to 20+ communities, which was fine, as it was a smaller instance.

Ten minutes later, however, I got a notification that it had unsubscribed all of my other instances from those communities as well. It took me about an hour to figure out most of the ones that had been lost, and even now I think I'm missing a few.