From the Archives: Acton’s Call to Action

In honor of today’s colloquium speaker, alum Eric Acton (Ph.D. ’14), we bring you an abridged version of one of the one-of-a-kind social announcements he sent as a first year graduate student.  This one was sent on October 29, 2009:

Fellow radical tree-lovers:

…  As there may still be some skepticism among you that we’re facing a real, insidious threat, I am compelled to share the most recent and haunting episode of tree violence, which will surely erase any doubt. Last night I was working on my syntax homework in 110 and did some sentence-parsing diagrams on the chalkboard. When I came back this morning to check my work, the syntactic trees had been erased.

Friends, we are, indeed, in the midst of a full-fledged War on Trees.

… We are holding a rally today at 4pm in the department lounge to grow support for our cause. Our rally will feature tree-friendly music and food to fuel us for the fight. We are especially looking for volunteers who will be divided into teams that will in turn be chained to chalk- and dry-erase boards across campus to guard our linguistic foliage. But, of course, any support helps!

This is not the time for ideological squabbles over transformational, lexical, or other approaches. In the end, we must unite in our belief that, first and foremost, trees are precious--regardless of their theoretical origin. Nor can we afford to be complacent based on notions of recursion and the infinite capacity for the generation of new trees. After all, trees don't grow on trees.

Dear friends, the moment is too critical. We must show the world now that our bite is just as potent as our bark. The felling of trees will not stand!