Today I had a four-hour meeting with my thesis supervisors, and got their cautious approval for a radical plan: I’m changing the topic of my thesis entirely and starting pretty near from scratch, with one year of funding to go.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Michael Franke (yes, the Iterated Beer Response dude) and I have written a 40-page paper introducing Unawareness to the linguistics fraternity, and that will be the kernel of the thesis. There are obvious extensions and applications to write up, and there are slightly less obvious questions to investigate, that I think I can cover in the year I’ve got left.

It’s an Idea Whose Time Has Come, and I’ll be writing more about it here for sure. For now I’m just crowing that I’ve got the go-ahead to write a book about it.