Thesis teaser

The reason I focus on vocabulary to the exclusion of morphology and syntax is two-fold. The first is that in a language textbook, particularly in classical language textbooks, the language accessible to students is constantly moving from simple to more native-like both in the student’s capacity to understand and in what language the book is presenting. So investigating the match of case usage, for example, in one book with case usage in Ancient Greek literature is a fool’s errand. Early in the book all of the cases have yet to be taught and therefore cannot accurately reflect the language in any meaningful way. The second half of my focus on vocabulary is that to some degree vocabulary can serve as a proxy for knowledge of morphology and syntax. For example, the particle an cannot be taught to students before the optative or subjunctive mood is taught. Likewise, the appearance of the verb lanthano is a pretty reliable stand-in for knowledge of accusative case and the present participle.

The Catullan corpus

The other day, I finished typing in the whole of the Catullan corpus as part of my Catullus project. Sure, I could have just cut and paste, which would have been a lot faster, but then I wouldn't have been able to get a sense of the whole thing. I'm glad I did it. To be sure, Catullus didn't leave volumes of poetry or mountains of prose. I wouldn't have wanted to do this with Cicero.

In the process I got to appreciate why people have enjoyed his work over the centuries. He's not just a love poet, but he does that very well too. To modern readers, his poems about his life come across as ordinary. What poet wouldn't write about his life? Heaney does. Except that in antiquity, to write about some aspect of your life wasn't the thing to do. You'd write about something epic. Like the Iliad. Or the Odyssey. Or the Aeneid. Or, well, you get the idea. Catullus, along with the neoteric poets broke the norms. Can you imagine poetry as familiar as Catullus's being avant garde? It's really hard to imagine. I also got to see the changing norms of how we present ancient texts, which I blogged about already.

So where to go from here? I don't know. This is kind of where I want to go, but I'm not sure about doing that for each poem. I'll probably want to do a few more movies where I recite the poems. That would be cool. I enjoy the challenge of writing vocabulary in Latin. But am I fired up enough about Catullus to do the whole mess?

When Latin's word order drives you batty

Latin's got a well deserved reputation among English speakers for having a complex word order. I can't argue that it isn't complex from an English point of view. But I'm going to throw out this bit of English song. (If you know the source, fine. But no Google if you don't!)

You can fix this fixer-upper
Up with a little bit of love!

What's going on with the verb fix up? It's been split up with the determiner phrase this fixer-upper, which in turn is derived from the verb it is splitting. 

To make the matter more tangled, there are patients in -er. For example: My wife is a keeper. But keep is hardly a phrasal verb. In deverbal agent in -er, like bricklayer, there's only one -er added to indicate that the word is a noun. But fixer-upper? Both morphemes in fix up get the -er.

English, what's wrong with you? How could you put linguistically complex stuff like this in a kids' movie like Frozen? 

Changing norms in Latin

And I'm not talking about antiquity. I'm talking about how we present texts. Right now I'm slowly grinding through a Catullus project. And in the course of transcribing the text, I've noticed several differences. In Catullus 62, line 60 is presented this way in a Latin/English edition from 1894.

Non aequomst pugnare, pater cui tradidit ipse,

Similar, yet quite different, is the Perseus presentation of the same line.

non aequum est pugnare, pater cui tradidit ipse

The differences are editorial. The words are the same, but the capitalization and prodelision are gone. The spelling is also changed to fit the standard better.

I suspect that the capitalization thing is a style choice that we have been moving away from in English over the last hundred years. I can't prove it (or rather I'm not going to crunch the data to be certain), but it's my hunch. I'm somewhat surprised at the archaic spelling in a book of this vintage, since that era has always felt like a time of standardization to me. But I could be wrong. Either way, there's an argument to be made. On the one side, it is useful to use standard spelling for less experienced students and simplicity of data management. On the flip side, (provided it's the textually attested form) it is what was written. There's a part of me that feels that we serve the text before it serves us. But this is all a digression.

Where did the prodelision go? It's all over this edition. It's taught in meter. I've heard people do it at conventiculums. It's easy to screw up if you're not smart to it, so a reminder of its existence won't hurt anyone. Besides, written Greek is full of elisions (though maybe not prodelisions). I'm probably just tilting at windmills, but here's how I handled the line from above.

non aequom'st pugnare, pater cui tradidit ipse

It strikes me as a balance and maybe an English speaker's solution. I'm sticking with the 1894 spelling and punctuation. Mostly. I hate semicolons.

Fussell's Abroad

Ancient Roman ship by Valudia

So I'm reading Fussell's Abroad right now. Despite being a literary history sort of book, it's really readable. If you're familiar with and like his work, I'd go so far as to say it's on the must-read shelf.

Anyway, I mention it because it is a seminal work in the discourse analysis of travel documents. (I suspect mainly because it shows the way more than anything else.) And applying that sort of analysis to various works from antiquity would be interesting. I'm sure someone's already done the Odyssey, if for no reason other than it's the travel writing of antiquity familiar to non-classicists.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a few more:

• Xenophon's Anabasis
• Herodotus's Histories
• Pausanius
• Lucian's True Story
• Vergil's Aeneid
• Caesar's de Bello Gallico

I wonder why Greek sources come to mind more easily than Roman sources. It's not like I'm more familiar with Greek literature (because I'm not). Sure they were skilled sea-faring people, but it's not like the Romans weren't famous for building roads.

Anyway. More mental fodder.

Teaching morphology

So last night I was working with a student, and I realized that we teach inflectional morphology but not derivational morphology.

In fact, the bulk of Latin instruction is inflectional morphology. It's the guts of the grammar for Latin. Sure there's stuff like making sure that adjectives agree with their antecedents, but even that's just inflectional morphology. More to the point, inflectional morphology is regular and has grammatical effect.

Derivational morphology is another story. You'd have to be a dull student of Latin to not catch the similarity between these two:

cīvitās, cīvitātis – citizenship
auctōritās, auctōritātis – authority
pietās, pietātis – sense of duty

But there's something fishy here. The -tās ending is obvious. It forms an abstract noun. But look at the roots.

cīvis, is – citizen
auctor, ōris – a do-er (more literally, an increaser)
pius, a, um – dutiful 

Cīvis is a noun. Auctor is a noun. So far so good. Pius is an adjective. How are we supposed to teach that? What's worse is that it's not freely productive.

*imperātōritās – ain't no such thing

Even though someone who knows Latin can analyze that word. So you can't even predict that it will work at all times. About the only thing we can say about the -tās ending is that it is the abstract noun that deals with the attached root.

Anyway, the potential non-productivity of derivational morphemes is a frustrating feature of language.  

The odd morphology of remembering and forgetting

I realized that the verbs for forgetting and remembering have odd morphology.

oblīvīscor, ī, —, oblītus sum – to forget
—, —, meminī – to remember

That forgetting should be deponent doesn't surprise me given the origins of Latin's deponent. It is somewhat a folly that happens to you by you. Easily explainable with the stop at middle voice before heading off to deponent. But why on earth should the verb for remembering be odd? It's only perfect?

Yeah, I've seen the explanation in Gildersleeve's. I'm not sure I buy it 100%.

Anyway, just one of those I was in the shower realizations.

Utopia as a political attack

So this is the result of my discourse analysis class. It might be the best class I've ever taken. Don't get me wrong, the other classes in the program so far have been good and useful, but discourse analysis might be one step better than that. Better even than the Coastal Ecology of the Florida Keys class I took as an undergrad.

Of course it could just be that I had the chance to talk about Utopia.

More's Utopia as a political attack on Henry VIII of England by Peter Sipes

Discourse analysis

So I'm taking a DA class this semester.

I'll be honest: the formal linguistics stuff fascinates me. I'm only interested in the applied insofar as it relates to acquiring language. Particularly L2 and L3. But I've been taken by discourse analysis. The first thing is that it is hard. Not in the sense of hard science, but difficult hard. The reason is two-fold.

I'll get an example that is based off of what I'm doing. I'm fiddling with More's Utopia right now. The main angle I'm working on is that Utopia is a political attack on Henry VIII, which was not a safe thing to do. So the first trick is to show that it's a political work rather than religious. So I've done a frequency analysis of the vocabulary. I feel pretty confident that Utopia is political in nature. Why? I've compared vocabulary frequency of Cicero's de re publica against Utopia. A lot of the frequencies for critical words line up pretty nicely. Especially "publicus" and "magistratus". It's a nice sleight of hand trick. So now that I feel I've established Utopia as a political work, I want to show how More deals with Henry. Mostly I'm going to cast it as a politeness thing. By putting social distance between Utopia and the king, More increases his safety.

So as you can see, it requires a lot of clever work to make a good point. You can't screw around with sloppy thinking. Except that they do. By which I mean dragging in that old scheißkopf, Karl Marx. Marxism is a terrible political philosophy that put too many people on the wrong side of the dirt in the 20th century. If that weren't enough to discredit a philosopher, I don't know what would be. But yet I keep seeing his name dragged up as if he had something useful to say. And that just makes me angry. And this is the second class I've seen a book mention him, so it's not exactly accidental.

Anyway, I wish there were a less ugly philosophy to analyze some of this stuff from. Maybe we need a Misesian angle. I'd tell you how I'm the one to develop it, but I'm not.

Of articles and names

So in syntax class we've talked about how names in English don't (usually) get determiners and keep their usual sense.

*The Peter writes this blog.

We don't like that in English. Except for one person. Dwayne Johnson's persona: The Rock. How do I know? Wait.

Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?

I thought so. And since Peter means rock in Greek (ὁ Πέτρος), you can just call me the Rock when you see me. 

The nature of the lexicon

So last semester when I was as busy as you can get, I wrote a paper. I think it's kind of interesting. The idea here is that I'm looking to do my thesis on the nature of word frequency in people's heads. This paper is a bit of foundation for the differences between L1 and L2 speakers and their mental lexicons. This paper will probably be the back third of the literature review section.

Lexicon and automaticity by sipes23

Determiner in Latin

So we explored English determiners in syntax class last week. Dull dreary stuff, but completely necessary to the machinery of language. One of the rules in English is that you can't put two determiners onto one noun. That is

*this the cat

is no good. And it set me to thinking. Latin obviously has neither definite nor indefinite articles. But it does have demonstrative adjectives and other similar sorts of things. Which further set me to wondering whether Latin had a rule against two determiners on one noun. Some very cursory searches have led me to realize that

nullus ille

isn't an attested construction. But

ipse ille

is attested, though really uncommon. I'm wondering if I can fiddle with the results enough to see if the pronomial sorts of things aren't in complementary distribution.

Yet another thing to think about for future research.

Milestones in FLA: Modals

Yes, today Little Boy (2;11—22 days shy of his birthday) made a jump. Or at least the first time I heard him use it and made note of it. Today he made use of an English modal: could.

We were picking up Little Girl from school, and I asked him if he wanted to play at the playground. It was blustery and cold, so he said

I wish I could.

They grow up so fast. 

Summer's over

That's right. The fall semester started up this week. I'm taking two classes.

Sociolinguistics is the first one. It's going to be one of those mixed-feelings classes. On the one hand, it's going to be filled with cool stuff about how people use language in (sub)cultures. On the other, it's got a project which is geared toward those of us who are extroverts. I am not. (In case the blog title didn't give it away.)

The other is multiple language acquisition. Due to some academic acrimony from before my arrival at Northeastern, the linguistics department did not have a class in second language acquisition. Well, the prof figured a way around that problem. Second language is verboten? We make it multiple language. Problem solved. This class should tie in nicely with the vocabulary acquisition class I took over the summer.

Semantics don't apply to me

A dialog at home:

Little Girl (to Little Boy): You're a child.
Little Boy: I'm not a child, I'm a <his name>.

I've also heard this which kid substituted for child. There are two interesting things here. One, Little Boy seems to have figured out that kid and child refer to the same set of people—and that set does not include him. I'm not sure if ego-centrism plays into this situation or if it is some odd generalization problem with the word. The other thing I noticed is that he is "a <his name>". I wonder why he's using an indefinite article there.

eBook preview for Utopia

Since I knew you were dying to see it: here's a preview of the eBook for More's Utopia. Right now I'm charging $1.99 for the PDF, which strikes me as lame and necessary at the same time. Lame because paying for files sucks. Necessary so that I can get a handle on how much interest there is for this idea. All that said, I tried to set a pretty high preview percentage—30%, which is more than Scribd had it set at—so that you can get a pretty solid idea of what it is. And so that if you need it for research purposes or something, it's there for you. You can still get hardcopy at Amazon. But I'll tell you how to get a free copy below the preview.

Utopia by OpenSourceClassics

Ok, so if you're still reading, you want in on some sweet free book action. Here's the deal: first five people who live in a country served by Amazon (North America or Western Europe if memory serves), who e-mail me will get a copy to review. Here's the hitch: you've got to have a blog OR be willing to put your review on Amazon (and I'd really prefer that OR be and AND). You can get in touch with me via my profile which is somewhere on the right-hand side of the blog.

Utopia: shameless self-promotion

I really hate self-promotion in general, which is why I try to avoid it. On the flip side, if I can't self-promote here, where can I?

So why today? Well, I'm working on a cool project that has to do with language, so it sort of pertains to the blog. This particular book has Latin in it, so it double applies.

Anyway. If you head over to Amazon, you can help pay for lights and heat at my place. If you don't you'll have to wait a few days for the free ebook (which I'll link to from here).

What is so awesome about this book? Thomas More's Utopia (though Amazon thinks it's Vtopia—silly them) in Latin and English. Oh, yeah. And it's priced to sell. Even better, I've got some concordance type information at this site. And that's free.

If you're curious about the insides, it looks somewhat like a Loeb, but as a trade paperback. Or a knockoff I Tatti. Your pick. The big reason for doing this is that other Latin-English editions are really expensive (like $60). I'll probably do Erasmus's Praise of Folly next. Got any suggestions for what else?

But whatever you do, buy fifty million copies of it over at Amazon. I want to go to Istanbul.

New words for me

So I had to learn 100 new English words for the lexical acquisition class I took. Here they are, warts and all.

English

1. polysemous – adj – about word that has several meanings (e.g. bank₁, bank₂)
2. tumbleblog – n – a multimedia blog that isn't as text heavy as a more prototypical blog, a blog in the style of tumblr.
3. fameball – n – "a derogatory term for someone who has an unquenchable desire for fame" from nytimes.com
4. magnetar – n – neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field, the decay of which powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays
5. social steganography – n – the practice of users of social media, often teens, to cloak messages with double meaning. (A status update of "Always look on the bright side of life" seems innocuous, unless you know the context of the song and that the author of the comment is making allusion to it. It allows for outsiders to see one reading and insiders to see another. Example from this paper.)
6. bibelot – n – tschochke, geegaw, but with the overtones that explicitly French borrowings bring to English
7. postern – n – a door or gate that isn't the primary door or gate
8. proddie – n – a protestant, use is derogatory and Irish
9. saccade – n – the jerking motion of the eye across the field of vision
10. swag – n (possibly adj too) – style, Urban Dictionary has a lot of interesting info on this word, which in some communities may have positive connotations and negative connotations in others. An are-you-joking origin: an acronym for "Secretly We Are Gay", but UD suggests a much more plausible origin in Scots English. More likely origin: an abbreviation of swagger.
11. incel – adj (also n) – involuntarily celibate
12. teknonym – n – a name taken from a child (e.g. Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the PLO, is also known as Abu Mazen, which refers to his first son Mazen)
13. Einzelgänger – n – the opposite of a doppelgänger, unique
14. ambilingual – adj – a fully fluent and balanced bilingual, the Platonic ideal of bilingualism
15. arseward(s) – adj – perverse (obsolete), screwed up; I had assumed that back asswards was some sort of play on ass backwards, but no.
16. intersubjective – adj – occurring between two minds (e.g. When two people use a word, it is intersubjective because they both know the word and agree on its meaning.)
17. moil – v – to work hard; often collocated with toil – toil and m.
18. progymnasmata – n – a curriculum of rhetorical development in antiquity
19. phatic – adj – words that pertain to social relationships rather than their strict meaning
20. decolletage – n – a low cut neckline in women's fashion
21. poorism – n – tourism in poverty stricken areas (rhymes with tourism); probably a journalism word as I heard it on the radio (NPR, Worldview, 4 June 2013)
22. binge watch – v – watching a whole season or series of movies in a very short time, possibly even one sitting: synonym for marathon, though I'm not sure what the exact difference might be
23. crepitus – n – medical term for cracking knuckles (or any other joint really)
24. survivorship – n – the state of being a survivor (thanks Wiktionary, I'd have never guessed that)
25. stanchion – n – an upright bar or post that provides support to something else; the vertical bar in a a leadlight
26. leadlight – n – a decorative window made with small panes of glass separated by metal bars (though I'm not sure how this is different from stained glass except maybe there's no color in the glass of a leadlight?)
27. raceway – n – an electrical conduit that is a decorative element rather than hidden behind a structure
28. spiv – n – a criminal (specifically a con man or black marketeer) who dresses in a flashy manner; probably obsolete
29. paresthesia – n – pins and needles feeling in a numbed or "asleep" body part
30. doodlesack – n – bagpipes; possibly obsolete
31. ergodic – adj – applies to dynamic systems whose average behavior is the same over time when compared to average phase states; applies to Markov chains and thermodynamics
32. comedo – n – a blackhead
33. be spoiled – v – to have spoilers told to you
34. bogie – n – the wheel unit of a train, typically with two axles
35. journal – n – the part of the axle that lies on bearings
36. dinkum – n – hard work (regional to Derbyshire)
37. dinkum – adj – good, excellent, honest (regionalish to Australia)
38. ology – n – a science; a backformation, its use probably indicates low social status on the speaker's part
39. pinion – n – gear type either within another gear with cogs on the inside or the gear that meshes with the rack
40. rack – n – a bar with cogs, as if it were a gear built flat instead of round
41. threequel – n – a second sequel, probably in distinction to part three of a trilogy 
42. bargainous – adj – an outstanding deal, opposite of spendy
43. dee – n – police Detectives
44. slashdot – v – to overwhelm with messages
45. half handle – n – one of the two pieces of a knife handle that are not the metal part of the knife
46. tang – n – the metal part of the knife between the two half handles
47. bolster – n – the thickened metal part of a knife just past the handle
48. heel – n – the portion of a knife's blade that extends below the handle
49. guard – n – the taper on the metal between the blade and bolster
50. back – n – the edge opposite the cutting edge of the knife
51. skimmer – n – a kitchen utensil with a handle and a round, perforated dish on the end that is used to take food out of liquid or skim things off the top of soups
52. slot – n – the space between the tines of a fork
53. demitasse – n – a small cup for coffee, usually used for espresso
54. ramekin – n – an oven to table dish that is used for individual portions
55. cork ball – n – the inner cork portion of a baseball
56. yarn ball – n – the outer wound portion of a baseball
57. cover – n – the leather outside of a baseball
58. shrift – n – the act of confession, related to shrive
59. emulous – adj – ambitious, though possibly without the negative connotations (hard to say what connotations ambitious had when RL Stevenson was writing)
60. coquetry – n – effort to attract attention, often directed from a woman to a man
61. risk – v – to take a risk (heard in a live interview on the radio, is this a nonce form caused by the ease of zero derivation in English?)
62. chuff – v – to make a noisy puffing sound like a steam engine (heard every day thanks to Thomas and Friends, defined thanks to class) Source: oh, the horror, http://ttte.wikia.com/wiki/Roll_Along
63. chuff – v – to deliberately and obviously fail a standardized test
64. chuffed – adj – pleased
65. shunt – v – to move a train from one track to another or move cars from one train to another (again courtesy of Thomas and Friends)
66. head – n – the flared load-bearing part of a railway rail
67. web – n – the thin(ner) part of a rail between the base and head
68. fishplate – n – the piece that joins two railway rails together
69. safety line – n – the textured and colored strip at the edge of a train station platform
70. trough – n – long, narrow area of low pressure, named because of its shape
71. cornice – n – portion of roof that overhangs the main structure for rain protection
72. pilaster – n – rectangular column that sticks out of a wall but is structurally insignificant
73. fore edge – n – the edge of a book opposite the binding
74. square – n – part of book board that overhangs the block; a book cornice
75. action – n – the part of a piano that transfers motion between the key and hammer; possibly generalized to (musical) keyboard function
76. nacelle – n – /ˈnæsl̩/ at M-W, /nəˈsɛl/ at Wiktionary – the boxy part of a windmill between the hub and the mast (and just what is the difference between a mast and stanchion?)
77. swart – adj – dark; related to swarthy
78. percy – adj – personal (of a drug stash), which has led to a meaning of unreal or legit
79. bpw;dr – initialism – behind pay wall; didn't read
80. avidity – n – greed, intensity of desire
81. catholicity – n – universality; appears to relate to catholic and Catholic
82. cheval-glass – n – a full length mirror on a stand that allows the mirror to pivot
83. arras – n – tapestry, since Arras (a city in France) was a major source of them
84. tippet – n – a shoulder covering garment, an animal skin draped on the shoulders is a typical example, a scarf worn loose around the neck is another example
85. bartizan – n – (also bartisan) a wall with projecting battlements like the Spanish fortifications in Cádiz or San Juan (though the word is Scottish in origin)
86. retronym – n – a term modified to make the original sense explicit as in acoustic guitar, natural turf or white milk; apparently coined by Frank Mankiewicz
87. annuitant – n – someone who gets an annuity
88. absquatulate – v – to run off; a joke coinage from the 19th century
89. hangry – adj – anger caused by hunger; a joke portmanteau of the 21st century (not the only portmanteau of hungry I've seen, just that this one was new)
90. nyctophilia – n – a love of the night
91. cat vacuum – v – to be doing something other than the writing you ought to be doing (like collecting words rather than preparing a book I ought to be)
92. adiabatic – adj – involving no heat transfer into or out of the working fluid of thermodynamic processes; highly associated with process
93. hegemony – adj – a notion of a power structure involving domination of one group over another; more narrowly a power structure that is not questioned—how Things Are The Way They Are and why they stay that way
94. memristor – n – passive electrical element (resistor, capacitor and inductor are the other three) caused by imperfect metal-metal contact; portmanteau of memory resistor
95. coherer – n – radio detector that predates crystal detector; some are memristors
96. articulated bus – n – one of the really long busses with two halves
97. slug – v – to carpool informally but not as informal as hitchhiking;, usually to take advantage of HOV lanes (similar to the expresses on the Kennedy, but for cars with multiple passengers) or lower tolls
98. slug – n – the person who gets a slugged ride; not the driver
99. tender – n – another name for coal car
100. tank engine – n – a steam engine that does not have a tender, but carries all fuel and water on-board

L2 tactics on L1 vocabulary learning

Since one of the projects in the vocabulary acquisition class is to learn 100 new English words, I figured I could take a page out of L2 teaching. There are some ways of teaching that include pre-reading vocabulary instruction. Why not do the same for L1? Sure, I've got an adult-sized vocabulary, but why make this harder than necessary?

But where to find the words I don't know? Enter the Simple Concordance Program teamed up with Jekyll and Hyde. One of the SCP's tricks is that it can generate a word list by frequency of the word's use. And Jekyll and Hyde is in the public domain, so its text is already txt. So team them up to make a list showing from least frequent (one use for a whole bunch) to most frequent (1,600 uses for the). Scan the words that occur once for likely targets, and you've now got a list of words to learn. 

Just. Like. That.

(I should add that this doesn't add to vocabulary depth or catch all of the likely targets, but it speeds things up quite a bit.)

Themes in learning new words

So we’re most of the way through the vocabulary acquisition class now. It’s over next week in fact. In my reading for the class, some common themes cropped up. The following are some take away points for people looking either to improve their vocabulary in their native language or learn vocabulary in a non-native language. Learning new words:

• is a social process
• follows your interests
• depends on your level of engagement.

Let’s take a look at what I mean by this.

It’s a social process. You are somehow going to get these words and their meanings from other people. Period. (I suppose there might be an exception, but most people don’t coin new words the way Shakespeare did. So, period.) To be sure, some of those people will be face to face with you, but written langauge has a broader use of words. Slight data on this point: Of the words in my vocabulary project, only a handful were in any sort of spoken context. The vast majority were from written sources. (I’ll supply some numbers once I finish that project.) I suspect, though haven’t seen anything saying so in peer-reviewed research that

face-to-face > movies/tv > radio > reading

in terms of what format is likely to stick best.

It follows your interests. The words that I have the most trouble recalling are the words that other people gave me on a request. Ergodic is cool, but I’m not that interested in mathematics or thermodynamics. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure to remember bogey—I love riding on the train. My wife likes Scrabble sorts of games, so ai is likely to stay in her vocabulary while I’ll probably forget it because I don’t play those sorts of games.

It depends on your level of engagement. This is somewhat trickier. You are certainly more likely to be engaged when talking about things you are interested in. But you are also more likely to be engaged when you are talking face to face with a person and ask for an explanation of a new word. Likewise, explicit vocabulary instruction in a non-native language—whether from a teacher, fellow student or other speaker—will increase your level of engagement with the new vocabulary. Another anecdote, though involving grammar. On a trip to Spain, I wanted to know how to say “I’m ready to X”. So indicating to the man running the tapas bar, I told him that I wanted to pay and that I was ready. I then asked but how do I say those at the same time. I now know that you ESTAR list@ para INFINITIVE. Because I got a short explanation from him and engaged him in communication, I remember that information several years later.

Coming up: Points specific to non-native language vocabulary