The motto, `O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!', is deliberately modelled after the traditional motto of the international Communist movement, `Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!' The gist of my own professional motto is, `Phrases of human languages, be liberated! You have nothing to lose but your barriers!' This is a reference to one of my principal research interests, the subject of my dissertation, the syntax and typology of constituent-order freedom. Having decided that i wanted to say this, however, i decided i wanted not only to say it but to demonstrate it, which meant saying it in some language that (unlike English) actually allowed for the degree of constituent-order freedom that was the focus of my interest. Of those known to me, the one that seemed most appropriate (given among other things the fact that it could be easily represented in ASCII) was Latin. The word-for-word translation of my motto is:

O phrases of languages.............human

......................be liberated!

.............................................You can be

..............deprived of

Nothing...................except

........your......................barriers!

There are some subtle allusions here, of moderately humorous intent. `Liberated' constitutes an allusion to Geoff Pullum's `Liberation' hypothesis, a proposal for dealing with `gratuitous discontinuity' in a non-transformational framework of syntactic theory, a hypothesis which i developed towards the end of Chapter 5 of my dissertation and in an ESCOL paper. `Barriers' is intended as a allusion to the `barriers' notion in REST. Of course, i needed to find a Latin word to represent this last, since the Classical grammarians, so far as i know, had no equivalent notion. I settled on `obex' (dat/abl. pl. obicibus), a rather obscure word referring, if i remember correctly, to a type of fence.

A second motto i have is in Hebrew and transliterates roughly as follows:

Dibarta vlibbi wathomar, `baqqshu phanay!'
Eth-paneykha, YHWH, avaqqeah;
Al-taster paneykha mimmenni

It's an adaptation of Psalm 27, vv. 11-12a, which in the 1979 (ECUSA) Book of Common Prayer version reads:

You speak in my heart and say, `Seek My Face'; Your Face, O Lord will i seek; Hide not Your Face from me.' A few years ago at the funeral of a deceased faculty member, i was very struck by how appropriate this passage seemed for a scientist: If one adopts a quasi-Tillichian view of God as the `Fundamental Reality', then the `Face of God', in a sense, represents conscious awareness of that Reality, and to seek God's Face is, in the manner of a scientist, to seek conscious knowledge of that Reality, of the principles that undergird our experience of the universe. The statement (assuming, as the context requires, that the addressee is God) `You speak in my heart and say, "Seek My Face"' could then mean that the speaker has the internal motivating drive of the scientist to pursue such knowledge, which drive has presumably been implanted by God. And the whole passage then becomes an acknowledgment of that drive, a self-dedication to that pursuit, and a prayer that the pursuit will prove fruitful.

A third motto i have treasured comes from a couple of college friends who in the course of a typical late-night undergraduate discussion concluded: `Where fools and angels fear to tread, there stands Steve Schaufele'. (I want to assert here that i was not present at this discussion; i was told about it the following day.) At present, i would like to think this statement alludes, among other things, to my willingness to entertain hypotheses that may on the surface appear wacky and to seek to seriously evaluate their merits.