Seeing as though deep structure is by definition unobservable in its direct form, it would be kind of strange to tackle that before building up a lexicon. A more interesting question, IMO, is whether they even have a deep structure.
Without a more cross-cultural study this falls more into the domain of cultural bias (still interesting) than what the title suggests. I'd love to see what the results look like incorporating data from cultures whose musical traditions are rhythmically complex and better documented. Godfried Toussaint's work on Euclidean Rhythms (http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf) makes for a pretty convincing survey of "evenly spaced" beat distribution, albeit sometimes over uneven lengths. This doesn't even get into things like the polyrhythm and syncopation in much African music or the complex rhythmic cycles found in Indian percussion.
I have mild Tourette's, which has thankfully gotten milder in adulthood. It was the most pronounced in grade school. Minor facial tics, the occasional head jerk, and some subvocalized echolalia that took me years to be able to notice myself doing. I'm kind of shocked it's still so misunderstood by society at large.
I do think, as one of the commenters on the original thread suggests, that some of the blame lies with the often latent relationship audio software companies have with Apple's release cycle. Ideally QA begins while the OS update is still in beta. This varies quite a bit from company to company, but it's not something to sweep under the rug. The news of audio drop out issues (poison to live performers) persisting through multiple major versions is horrifying though.
> Ideally QA begins while the OS update is still in beta.
Would help a lot if (a) Apple had longer lead times to actually get things right internally before they went to beta and (b) beta cycles were a bit longer and (c) companies didn't have to do this every damn year.
On the other side... what are the benefits of having yearly regimented releases again?
> what are the benefits of having yearly regimented releases again?
It's what consumers expect. If Apple ditched the yearly upgrade model there'd probably be a shitstorm of bad PR and people complaining about how it's not just their hardware offerings that are getting out of date, now the OS is too.
Objective-C also uses ARC by default, and that's been the case for several years now. In any event, avoiding retain cycles is relatively straightforward and most iOS devs I know would agree that the low memory overhead and lack of GC pauses are worth the occasional extra effort of weak references.
I studied theoretical linguistics through the graduate level and it wasn't until rather late in my schooling that I even began to hear of competing frameworks such as HPSG or LFG, and much of it in passing. There was no mention of them in the coursework, and the tendency of faculty to sell modern linguistics as a hard science gave the impression that we were learning a standard approach that had a provable empirical edge and broad scientific consensus. Otherwise, why would it be called "Extended Standard Theory"?
While I know that part of the pedagogy was giving students a grounding in dominant strains of formalism (in North American circles anyway), at times I felt a bit cheated out of a broader perspective.
Of course in practice many of the competing frameworks are weakly equivalent in terms of their descriptive power and the differences come down more to things like biological plausibility, computational complexity, how strongly you interpret the claims of UG, whether you have any interest in building tractable computational implementations, and so on. Or how you feel about the proliferation of empty functional categories, which was what bothered me the most from an empirical point of view.
As the foundational figure in modern Linguistics Chomsky has had an outsized role in shaping the field, some of it good and some bad. IMHO the usefulness of mainstream generative grammar has waned since the 70s or so in terms of its applicability to engineering and empirical rigor. But it remains dominant, in part due to his influence and the logical conclusions one draws from a strong interpretation of Universal Grammar. Since much of that foundation is ultimately philosophical, there are bound to be challenges from the field now and again, and acolytes of the Chomskyan school are likely to attack them ferociously. It will probably be a few decades before there's a major shift.
