LSA: a week in review (my excuse for not writing since Tuesday)
Hello, linguablogosphere! I've been a little remiss in my updating duties, because, frankly, the combination of nasty summer heat and getting up at 6 am to make it to syntax is killing me. I'm such a lazy college student, I know.
That said, here I am with several days to report on.
Wednesday, aside from morning slothfulness, was lovely. I'm enjoying the class despite the fact that I still find syntax fundamentally uninteresting, which is high praise indeed. After class, I ran into a classmate from sign phonology and we chatted about phonetics, university cultures, and good local coffee shops. She hates syntax and knows cool people whom I also know, so I sense the beginning of a beautiful friendship. ;c)
I also got a lovely Fed-Ex package from my mom, containing my copies of The Ecology of Language Evolution by Mufwene, Chaudenson's Creolization of Language and Culture, and the latest issue of Language. *drool* Would it be dorky, when I take Chaudenson's class, to ask him to autograph my book? ... or, more importantly, I know it would be dorky, but shall I do it anyway?
Wednesday quotes:
"Recall that Monday is a national holiday, and of course we like to celebrate those by blowing things up. (long pause) In the sky. (pause) Just wanna make that clear." - NR
"Part of being a syntactician is learning to be relaxed about things you cannot see." - NR
"That's an excellent point. Does everyone see the excellence of that point?" - NR
"For the things we're doing today, we don't need to know the answers to these questions. Or at least I hope not - 'cause I don't." - NR
Thursday: Over-sleepage. So much for getting work done on TTh mornings before class; it just feels too nice to sleep in when I get the chance. Ah, well, sleep is good, and I got to class on time regardless.
Sign phonology was immense fun, though it still feels odd to be a sign-language person with little phonological training among phonologists with little to no sign-language exposure. It makes asking data-based questions especially, er, interesting (although I suspect "frustrating" is more the word other students might use).
A few of the interesting ideas so far:
- the role of non-manual behavior in a phonological system. Is it prosodic or phonemic? I tend to believe the latter, at least in part; the professors seem to consider it the former. I have yet to be truly convinced, though I'm open to the idea.
- psycholinguistic evidence for parameters (ie, are they psychologically real objects?): there is a recurring theme that perception studies are inconclusive on the matter while production studies tend to show more robust results. (It's amusing, though, that in order to conduct an experiment where you're rating or evaluating production, you as a researcher need a certain level of perceptual discrimination. How do we go about testing whether people produce errors we're not supposed to see reliably?)
Second-language acquisition (henceforth SLA) is also shaping up to be interesting; apparently, the gist of the class is going to be about refuting the fundamental difference hypothesis. This is the idea that L1 is acquired naturally via Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device, but that L2 is learned via different cognitive processes, and this is the first time I've even heard it suggested that there might not be a fundamental difference between acquiring L1 and L2. Stay tuned for further developments.
In Ecology of Language Evolution, we learned about the effect on linguistic development of pirates, earthquakes, and interpreter shortages (oh, my). Apparently, in the early history of trading colonies, there were at first a corps of highly-skilled bilinguals who acted as interpreters. As trade started heating up, the need for interpreters increased beyond the available supply, and as Sali put it, "people who knew a little bit of the language and had seen the interpreters working decided that they could do that, too." ROFL*snort* Ohh, that never happens, does it? *grin* I should note that these unqualified interpreters then introduced all sorts of xenolectal features into both languages they were working with. That never happens, either, does it? ;c)
Not related to particular classes: I'm noting a general tendency. You know those people at conferences who engage in the fine art of what my dear roommate terms "penis fencing"? The ones who see question time as their chance to present entire papers of their own refutimg one infinitesimal point in the original talk, and who resist any attempt at actual clarification or edification?
Yeah, well, they're here too. I kid you not, I've heard classmates say things like, "I've got three questions; well, the first and the third are more comments, really..." I've sat through a classmate's 15-minute harangue denying the validity of generative grammar - which, dude, may be a valid discussion to have elsewhere but which is totally out of place in a class which takes generative grammar as a given theoretical framework. You don't go to a talk on a fine-grained detail of English syntax and hassle the speaker over whether the English language exists. So, come on, folks, let's all pretend to act like grown-ups, shall we?
In other, better, news, ran into the fabulous Gülşat Aygen today, and I'm very much looking forward to sharing the state of Illinois with her. *smile* Also, watching professor-student interactions and lectures really makes me want to teach; which, of course, I will soon enough, but I just can't wait.
Thursday quotes:
"Perhaps we have it all upside-down. Perhaps we shouldn't hold the monolingual native speaker up as a model of language acquisition and use, because multilingualism is in fact the norm. Monolingualism is an accident." - Gita Martohardjono
"MIT is great, but not for technology!" - Suzanne Flynn (on problems with PowerPoint)
Student: ... because there is so much controversy about Universal Grammar -
GM: (looks around at much general MIT-ness) Well, not in this place...
"Why would anyone want to study second language acquisition to answer questions about the mind? That's like looking at the Charles River to try and understand what water is!" - Chomsky to SFlynn, circa the 1980s
"We used what I call an ANCOVA. Well, actually, everyone calls it that." - SFlynn
Student: Does brain plasticity help -
GM: Oh, I'm sure it does. (glances at SFlynn) Well, it probably does. Anyway, it seems to. Yes, people seem to believe that, yes.
"When people say 'poo-poo on so-and-so's task,' well - poo-poo on you." - SFlynn
(see the state of academic discourse these days?)
"I'm very wordy on the handout, but you can read it at your leisure, in another boring class, perhaps." - SFlynn
(awww ... but that's when I *blog*!)
That said, here I am with several days to report on.
Wednesday, aside from morning slothfulness, was lovely. I'm enjoying the class despite the fact that I still find syntax fundamentally uninteresting, which is high praise indeed. After class, I ran into a classmate from sign phonology and we chatted about phonetics, university cultures, and good local coffee shops. She hates syntax and knows cool people whom I also know, so I sense the beginning of a beautiful friendship. ;c)
I also got a lovely Fed-Ex package from my mom, containing my copies of The Ecology of Language Evolution by Mufwene, Chaudenson's Creolization of Language and Culture, and the latest issue of Language. *drool* Would it be dorky, when I take Chaudenson's class, to ask him to autograph my book? ... or, more importantly, I know it would be dorky, but shall I do it anyway?
Wednesday quotes:
"Recall that Monday is a national holiday, and of course we like to celebrate those by blowing things up. (long pause) In the sky. (pause) Just wanna make that clear." - NR
"Part of being a syntactician is learning to be relaxed about things you cannot see." - NR
"That's an excellent point. Does everyone see the excellence of that point?" - NR
"For the things we're doing today, we don't need to know the answers to these questions. Or at least I hope not - 'cause I don't." - NR
Thursday: Over-sleepage. So much for getting work done on TTh mornings before class; it just feels too nice to sleep in when I get the chance. Ah, well, sleep is good, and I got to class on time regardless.
Sign phonology was immense fun, though it still feels odd to be a sign-language person with little phonological training among phonologists with little to no sign-language exposure. It makes asking data-based questions especially, er, interesting (although I suspect "frustrating" is more the word other students might use).
A few of the interesting ideas so far:
- the role of non-manual behavior in a phonological system. Is it prosodic or phonemic? I tend to believe the latter, at least in part; the professors seem to consider it the former. I have yet to be truly convinced, though I'm open to the idea.
- psycholinguistic evidence for parameters (ie, are they psychologically real objects?): there is a recurring theme that perception studies are inconclusive on the matter while production studies tend to show more robust results. (It's amusing, though, that in order to conduct an experiment where you're rating or evaluating production, you as a researcher need a certain level of perceptual discrimination. How do we go about testing whether people produce errors we're not supposed to see reliably?)
Second-language acquisition (henceforth SLA) is also shaping up to be interesting; apparently, the gist of the class is going to be about refuting the fundamental difference hypothesis. This is the idea that L1 is acquired naturally via Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device, but that L2 is learned via different cognitive processes, and this is the first time I've even heard it suggested that there might not be a fundamental difference between acquiring L1 and L2. Stay tuned for further developments.
In Ecology of Language Evolution, we learned about the effect on linguistic development of pirates, earthquakes, and interpreter shortages (oh, my). Apparently, in the early history of trading colonies, there were at first a corps of highly-skilled bilinguals who acted as interpreters. As trade started heating up, the need for interpreters increased beyond the available supply, and as Sali put it, "people who knew a little bit of the language and had seen the interpreters working decided that they could do that, too." ROFL*snort* Ohh, that never happens, does it? *grin* I should note that these unqualified interpreters then introduced all sorts of xenolectal features into both languages they were working with. That never happens, either, does it? ;c)
Not related to particular classes: I'm noting a general tendency. You know those people at conferences who engage in the fine art of what my dear roommate terms "penis fencing"? The ones who see question time as their chance to present entire papers of their own refutimg one infinitesimal point in the original talk, and who resist any attempt at actual clarification or edification?
Yeah, well, they're here too. I kid you not, I've heard classmates say things like, "I've got three questions; well, the first and the third are more comments, really..." I've sat through a classmate's 15-minute harangue denying the validity of generative grammar - which, dude, may be a valid discussion to have elsewhere but which is totally out of place in a class which takes generative grammar as a given theoretical framework. You don't go to a talk on a fine-grained detail of English syntax and hassle the speaker over whether the English language exists. So, come on, folks, let's all pretend to act like grown-ups, shall we?
In other, better, news, ran into the fabulous Gülşat Aygen today, and I'm very much looking forward to sharing the state of Illinois with her. *smile* Also, watching professor-student interactions and lectures really makes me want to teach; which, of course, I will soon enough, but I just can't wait.
Thursday quotes:
"Perhaps we have it all upside-down. Perhaps we shouldn't hold the monolingual native speaker up as a model of language acquisition and use, because multilingualism is in fact the norm. Monolingualism is an accident." - Gita Martohardjono
"MIT is great, but not for technology!" - Suzanne Flynn (on problems with PowerPoint)
Student: ... because there is so much controversy about Universal Grammar -
GM: (looks around at much general MIT-ness) Well, not in this place...
"Why would anyone want to study second language acquisition to answer questions about the mind? That's like looking at the Charles River to try and understand what water is!" - Chomsky to SFlynn, circa the 1980s
"We used what I call an ANCOVA. Well, actually, everyone calls it that." - SFlynn
Student: Does brain plasticity help -
GM: Oh, I'm sure it does. (glances at SFlynn) Well, it probably does. Anyway, it seems to. Yes, people seem to believe that, yes.
"When people say 'poo-poo on so-and-so's task,' well - poo-poo on you." - SFlynn
(see the state of academic discourse these days?)
"I'm very wordy on the handout, but you can read it at your leisure, in another boring class, perhaps." - SFlynn
(awww ... but that's when I *blog*!)