Hello!
I'm Ollyver. Welcome to my ramblings on linguistics.
I am a graduate student of linguistics in the UK. This involves a lot of reading. Reading happens to be a favourite hobby of mine, but alas! papers and textbooks tend not to sweep you along in the same way as a good novel, and my undergraduate studies did not prepare me to read anything not written in algebra.
As I crawled through a (very interesting) introduction to the dialects of English, making notes to give myself a sense of accomplishment, it occured to me that other people might be interested in the short-notes version of many of these books and papers. Especially having spent my undergraduate years complaining about the appalling state of science reporting, which makes it impossible to find out what serious research is going on without a journal subscription and a degree in the relevant subject.
So here, I hope, is a layman's guide to current linguistic thought. I intend to write some posts to give you an overview of the whole field, but the bulk of it will probably focus on my current reading. Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately), linguistic theory is not yet so complex that it requires more than a brief overview to make research papers legible. Perhaps, unlike the physical sciences, it may stay that way. But that, I think, is a discussion for another time.