And spring semester is over. Or, rather, I went to the last night of classes last night.
As you may know, I've decided to post my homework on Scribd—at least the stuff that might be of interest to someone. Why? If someone is interested in how language works, my homework might be of interest. So as much as I think I can get away with it, I try to write for you instead of the professor. Whether I've succeeded or not is another matter that I leave to you.
One advantage of posting my homework beyond wider circulation is that I can refer back to it, which I did on a recent paper. I saw something in subject agreement marker syncretism that reminded me of some work with pronouns I had done. And a revelation hit me: I couldn't have done this (easily) pre-internet. I made the connection, referenced it in the paper and had a bit.ly link pointing back to the previous work. That's really powerful. Building connections between classes, admittedly easier at graduate level, is a major part of education: taking disparate information and synthesizing knowledge.
So what information got poured into my head this semester? Morphology, which may or may not be a thing, and First Language Acquisition. I loved one form the get go and needed some encouragement in the other. Oddly, the classes were taught by husband and wife. They couldn't have been more different for it.
But now I don't have to tangle with stuff I'm less interested in. Hopefully there will be more time for blogging and crunching through texts. Derivational morphology in Latin anyone?
As you may know, I've decided to post my homework on Scribd—at least the stuff that might be of interest to someone. Why? If someone is interested in how language works, my homework might be of interest. So as much as I think I can get away with it, I try to write for you instead of the professor. Whether I've succeeded or not is another matter that I leave to you.
One advantage of posting my homework beyond wider circulation is that I can refer back to it, which I did on a recent paper. I saw something in subject agreement marker syncretism that reminded me of some work with pronouns I had done. And a revelation hit me: I couldn't have done this (easily) pre-internet. I made the connection, referenced it in the paper and had a bit.ly link pointing back to the previous work. That's really powerful. Building connections between classes, admittedly easier at graduate level, is a major part of education: taking disparate information and synthesizing knowledge.
So what information got poured into my head this semester? Morphology, which may or may not be a thing, and First Language Acquisition. I loved one form the get go and needed some encouragement in the other. Oddly, the classes were taught by husband and wife. They couldn't have been more different for it.
But now I don't have to tangle with stuff I'm less interested in. Hopefully there will be more time for blogging and crunching through texts. Derivational morphology in Latin anyone?
