Spring semester 2013

I'm taking First Language Acquisition and Morphology. Excitement. Well, maybe not, but I've got small children so I'll have informants at hand. In fact, I administered the one and only Wug Test to Little Girl. Even though I explained what she was supposed to do, some items were really vexing. Others were "Daddy, why are you asking such obviously easy questions?" sorts of questions.

So anyway. Get ready for me to blather on about those two fields. I'm still somewhat stumped by the whole v-deletion thing in Latin, so maybe I'll do more with that. I've also got a student project I want to work up for the research symposium in April. Fun times.

Fall 2012: end of semester roundup

Sorry for the late semester silence.

I managed to make it through the ordeal of typology. Phonology was another story. I loved that. So now I am 3 down and 9 to go. Four more requirements to go and then it's all electives. First language acquisition and morphology are on deck for spring—both requirements.

Over the winter break, I want to blog a little about Latin phonology from a constraint-based perspective. I've already done some, but why not flesh it out a bit more? I'm sure it would get me a slot on the student research symposium in the spring. And I want to get it out of my system before it's time to get going on my thesis.

And then on the last night of class, a fellow student saw my Rockford College t-shirt and asked if I knew Ray DenAdel. Well, of course. I remember going to his office on occasion to talk. I remember his classes: he always spoke of long-dead Romans as if they were alive and just outside of class. If I'm half the teacher he was, I'll be alright.

Creeping ergativity in English

Once again, I heard Rick Kogan on the radio. It's like a habit or something. Anyway, one of his guests said something like this (and I wish I could remember the exact quote, but it was like this).

Both me and her went to work.

I'm going to guess that in reading you wanted to * this. And indeed, if it hadn't been "me and her" this would pass muster. Tense is right. General arrangement of constituents is right. Case marking on the pronouns is wrong. Or is it? Here are some more examples.

*Me went to work.
*Her went to work.

I would bet that even the radio guest would reject that. I also suspect that this would be considered wrong too.

*Us went to work.

I also seriously doubt that this would pass muster too.

*Me and him saw the dog.

EDIT: Or maybe it would in non-standard varieties of English. Now that I think of it, I can't think of a situation where "me and him" is so outrageously wrong that you can't use it. So much for the notion of ergativity in English. Because…

But here my lack of corpus fails me, and I don't have a recent speech example. I'm not even sure that my native-speaker intuition will help me here. I wish it did. I'd love to be able to show that this is ergativity creeping in to English.

It looks like it is sensitive to pronouns, which would be the only place Ergativity could rear its head in English anyway, but not any old pronouns. It looks like it needs to be a compound subject with a first or third person (probably singular) in one of the subject slots. I also have a strong suspicion that it is sensitive to conjunctions.

Throw this into the just another thesis idea category.

Final project

As part of the class I took last semester, we each analyzed a language that we had not studied. While my intention was not to choose a Romance language, French is where I had a native speaker willing to help. So French it is.

The point of this exercise was to tease out the way the language works as spoken. I don't know that I did the best job in the world, but I did learn a bit about French. I added a section on the history of French, since I knew a little about that. In all honesty, that may be the best portion of the project for non-linguists who are curious about French.
  French linguistics project

One down…

…a bunch more to go.

I survived the first session of my first class. I didn't even feel lost. I took a quick peek into the Ronald Williams Library, and they've got quite a collection of books by classical authors in Greek and Latin despite not offering either language. Mostly Loeb based on my first glance.

There is a class project, and I will need help if you are a Chicago-area person. I need to do a field study of a language. I will need to interview you in person about your language. I don't know how long it will take. I'd like to hear from you if you speak natively and fluently:

• Sanskrit (well, maybe not native here)
• Farsi/Dari/Tojik
• Russian
• Armenian
• Uzbek
• Frisian
• Or really anything but English, Spanish or Latin (nor Italian and Ancient Greek for good measure)
• Oops. I'm letting my language geek flag fly.

But I don't know the full parameters yet.

I'm also torn about bringing my laptop with. On the one hand, having the whole interwebs at my command would be good digital learning yumminess in addition to creamy graduate school goodness. On the other, it's heavy and distracting. Oh, and would require me to have it on a train platform in the city at a time near midnight. Er. No. I'll make do with my medieval interactive device.

And on yet another hand—we really need μέν and δέ in English—I'm already sick of the CTA bus.

LING 401: Textbooks

I've gotten the textbooks ordered. One of them is from some sort of s used textbook clearinghouse called Bookbyte.com that looks a hair dodgy seems ok. We'll see if they're worth anything. I'll let you know. (Update, 6 Dec 2011: Book arrived on promised day in promised condition, so I don't quite know what the complaints were.)

Here are the textbooks for Linguistics 401: Fundamentals of Modern Linguistics—the class I am taking in the spring:

O'Grady, William et al. Contemporary Linguistics, 6th ed. Somewhere out East       (Boston/NY): Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009. ISBN 978-031261851-3.
Matthews, P.H. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 2007. ISBN 978-019920272-0.

The O'Grady book is way too expensive. It retails at Amazon for nearly $90. It is difficult to find used, though I did. While I have no doubt that there are developments in linguistics that merit an up-to-date book, six editions seems suspicious. The fourth edition was released in 2000. What?! Linguistics is moving so rapidly that you need not one, but two updates in nine years? In the age of the internet, that defies belief. Your book is out of date the instant you send it to press. It's just the nature of things.

Well, I'm getting carried away. I suspect the real answer is that the editions coming one atop the other has more to do with making it look like the book is cutting edge. After all, all things being equal, do you want the book that came out this year or last year? Or do you want to read a blog about it?

Campus tour and a jaw dropper

I took a cursory campus tour with my advisor today. I found out where most of the linguistics classes meet. Necessary, but um, not very exciting. I found out that as part of my fees I can use the school's gym. Also useful, but not too exciting. I also get 750 copies per semester as part of my fees. Really? Why not just cut $75 off my fees? Because I can hit 750 pages, no problem at all.

Anyway, for all of you paying exorbitant tuition (and I'd call my tuition affordably priced), make sure you find out just what your fees include to squeeze the maximum out of them. 750 copies! Un-real.

School e-mail

It looks like the school runs a webmail server. This is good, since I don't know how else I'd have access to my sparkly .edu-style address. It also has Blackboard: keeping class discussions behind closed doors. But I can't imagine who would be interested in the bulk of that. There's also a page to navigate all of the library resources. It's also pretty customizable. Sounds cool right?

Wrong. It's fully off line at least six hours every day. Twelve on the weekends. Um, ah, er, on the internet?

********* / ********* system normal hours of operation:

	Monday - Friday	6:00 AM to Midnight
	Saturday/Sunday	9:00 AM to 9:00 PM