a little update, plus some thoughts on OE, PIE, and vowels

I haven’t been feeling well, yesterday and today. I am staying home from classes today, so I’ve been sitting on the couch reading Agatha Christie and watching Murder, She Wrote.

I have been really enjoying my classes this semester. I feel like things are going a lot better in the ones I’m teaching — it really helped to have one semester of that class behind so that I could take in all my mistakes from that term and try to fix them this time around.

And I’m still having a blast with Old English, and even with Historical Linguistics, even though that one is giving me a run for my money. It’s still a struggle keeping my head above water all the time, but I don’t mind so much having to sit around and memorize Old English verb conjugations, or comparing sets of data from related languages to figure out how they have changed.

You know, speaking of OE verbs … When I tell people about Semitic languages like Hebrew, ancient Egyptian, and Arabic, and how they don’t write their vowels (except for the ‘weak’ or ’semi-’ vowels /w/ and /y/), but that they only write the consonants and then change the vowels to conjugate their verbs or decline their nouns — when I tell people about this, they seem to think it’s utterly incredible. However, English does similar things. This was brought home to me while I was studying my OE verbs the other day. See, in Old English, there were two basic types of verbs, weak and strong. The weak verbs form the past tense by adding a dental (a /d/ or /t/) to the stem, much as we do in Modern English: look, looked; rule, ruled. The strong verbs, on the other hand, form the past tense by changing their vowels: meet, met. This can (and frequently does) also include the past participle: sing, sang, sung; write, wrote, written. (I have used Modern English examples here, since our verbs have inherited these weak/strong attributes from Old English, and most of my readers, I imagine are more familiar with ModE than with OE.) As it turns out, these strong verbs, the vowel-changing verbs, were inherited from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), while the weak verbs were inherited from Proto-Germanic. That is, the strong verbs came from an ancient, unwritten language, while the weak verbs were made up later, after that language had already split into several different languages. That means that PIE verbs, like Semitic words, only alter their vowels to change their grammatical function. It seems entirely plausible to me, then, that PIE and these Semitic languages might be related to each other, at least in phonological processes if not in semantic or syntactic structure. If PIE had been written, might we find that it indicated only the consonants, and not those tricky, shifty vowels?

The last quote, correctly identified by both elliespen and emily, was from The Music Man, one of my all-time favorite movies.

Jump the tracks, can’t get back, I don’t know anyone ’round here, but I’m safe this time. (32 points)

 

Having received a number of complaints recently from my regular readers, I have decided that I’d best update my blog. So here’s the low-down:

Still working at the Management Department as a receptionist. Still OK with that. Still ready to start teaching again in the fall.

Planning a trip to Cedar City at the end of July for the Shakespearen Festival. Way pumped about that!! What could be better than Shakespeare and Gilbert & Sullivan all at the same time?!

Planning a trip to NYC at the end of August with Katie. Also pumped about that! Immediately after NYC, going to Idaho for a few days. (I miss the old days, when I could so grab a book, hop on a train, and spend the weekend travelling with so little trouble … Ah, so many things I miss about England!)

Geeking out these days about stylistics and LDS literature studies. I’ve been reading articles from the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies online and finding some interesting fodder for research. Also some good (OK, flimsy, but existent nonetheless) excuses for learning ancient languages like Egyptian and Akkadian.

Getting really excited for my Old English class this fall. It’s one of the two classes I’m registered for that I know will be held (I’m always on the edge of my seat wondering about the linguistics classes — they frequently get cancelled due to lack of interest, which is really frustrating, but more on that later). I keep getting all het up about the English language and how wonderful it is, and how we were writing all kinds of things in our own vernacular tongue — including even sections of the Bible — centuries before the other Western European countries started to do so. I tell you, there are excellent reasons why English is the language of the Restoration, and it was no accident that that’s the language Joseph Smith spoke and the one he used to translate the Book of Mormon. Anyway …

So I’ve been getting a bit frustrated with the Linguistics division down here. As I mentioned, there are not that many of us taking linguistics courses, and it’s always a bit of a crap-shoot trying to figure out which ones are going to end up being cancelled. I’ve been looking into the idea of transferring to U of Chicago, but for one thing I’m really not so sure that would be able to get in there. For another, though, I got thinking the other day, along these lines: My faculty advisor here is Haj Ross, who is quite well known in linguistic circles, and he has a lot of clout with the department. His philosophy is that he is here merely to facilitate the student’s research, and he is perfectly willing to help me out in any way necessary. I already know that he is willing (among other things) to help me get permission from the graduate chair to take extra courses in Special Problems (aka independent study). I might be able to work things out so that I could take most of the rest of my Linguistics coursework as independent study, which would allow me to highly personalize my degree to what I want. That is, I could do a course on metaphor, or one on LDS Literature Studies, or on corpus-based stylistics, or … the list goes on. I could then use all of that as a springboard for my directed research and dissertation stuff. That might be the best thing I could possibly do for my particular interests. So, I’m also strongly considering staying here. Even though I hate the climate. Hey, if I were doing independent study, I could also conceivably leave a lot earlier and start getting settled someplace else. Someplace where it’s not so hot all the time.

I am also considering doing a pass-through Master’s degree in English Literature while I’m here. And I’ve even been considering the possibility of doing two dissertations, one at UNT and one by distance education at Lancaster Uni, and getting two PhD’s. That would be interesting … but it would also be A LOT of work, which I’m not sure I’m up for.

The last quote was from Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. “… Britannia’s sailors rule the waves! And shall we stoop to insult? No! NO!” *sigh* I’m so excited to see it at ShakeFest!

Arrows that continually glanced off from [his] breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart — have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won. (81 points)

 

hail the conquering hero!

So this weekend I went to Lafayette (laff-ee-yet), Louisiana for a conference on Language and Literature, where gave a presentation about the research I did for my Master’s thesis. I rented a car here in Denton and drove down (about 7 hours) on Friday, presented my paper on Saturday, and drove back again on Sunday. I was really nervous about it, but knew it was something I had to do to start getting used to presenting my research, start getting my name out there, and work my way around in the world of Academia. In the end, it was a really good experience for me, and I’m very glad I went.

The conference was quite a bit smaller than I had anticipated. I knew it wouldn’t be that large, but there were only about 60 people there in all, I’d say. That meant that during my panel, only about 12 people were in the audience. I was very OK with that. I was the only person there to do a PowerPoint presentation at all, which surprised me. Most of the other students there were working on degrees in English, Rhetoric, or Folklore, and apparently these disciplines still just read their paper from the lectern. I, on the other hand, didn’t even stand behind the lectern at all, and I used the computer for my notes, and didn’t even have a fully-written paper with me. In fact, right before the panel started, I got super worried that I might not be able to get the computer to work and would have to just do the presentation from memory. I had written up an outline in a Word document as back-up … but I had never printed one out to use, so that would have been a problem.

Anyway … to make a long story short (“too late!”), the presentation went very well. People seemed fairly interested, although there weren’t any questions for me (or for anyone else — there was very little time left). I got to talking with the guy who presented before me, and it turned out he was also Mormon, so we bonded on that level. We sat by each other for lunch, which was right afterward (Mom asked me later if he was single, cute, nice, etc … oh, those moms!). Almost as soon as I got into the room where they fed us lunch, one of the professors came over to ask me some things about the computer program I had used for my research. While I was talking with him, one of the other professors came over and said he was hoping to sit by me and ask me some more questions about this research. And, in one of the afternoon sessions, someone told me that he had really enjoyed my PowerPoint presentation, that it had just the right amount of information to keep him interested and engaged, but not so much that it was overwhelming. So all in all, it went very well.

Dr. Rice, who talked to me during lunch, also reminded me of just what a unique position I’m in. He mentioned, first of all, what a small area stylistics is in the US, which in many ways is a huge advantage to me. He also got talking about the unusual combination of interests it takes to do corpus stylistics, since you have to have an interest in computers, analysis, and mathematical things, but also in literature, language, and art. And he also brought up the point that that is a very marketable combination of skills, since they are necessary for a lot of jobs in, for example, information mining and other software-related jobs. One of the many reasons why I think I need to do more with computer-y stuff.

OK … Erin also wants me to talk about the time, a couple of weeks ago, when I was going home for Easter. After we got on the road (and Erin was gracious enough to drive me down to Dallas to the airport), I realized that I had no idea what gate I needed, or what flight number I was on, or even the airline. I had to call about 5 people before I got hold of our friend Matt, who looked up the info for me. I had taken my confirmation number, but I forgot to look at any of the other stuff. Oops. Lucky for me, I still made it.

The last quote was from Stan Freberg’s “The United States of America.”

Never confuse efficiency with a liver complaint. (82 points)

P.S.: As you can see, I have also changed my template. Time for a change. I am still working on getting my sidebar content staightened out, so you’ll have to bear with me for a while.

 

another update

So, life here has been pretty hectic lately. However, this is the celebratory week of the semester, since my nasty six-hour-a-week graduate class on teaching composition is over now. YIPPEEE!!!!

On the other hand, that also means that this is now the middle of the semester, and classes are starting to get a lot harder. I have a Phonology test in a week and a half, and I need to start going on memorizing (and understanding) a whole bunch of phonological features and phonological processes. Yikes! That’s what’s got me most worried right now.

I am starting work on a new website that I would like to use for supplemental materials for the classes I teach. I’m trying to see if I can get it up to speed so that I can use it for next semester when I teach 1320. Speaking of which, I’m very excited about 1320, since it is more literature-based and has fewer actual papers for the students to write (or for me to grade).

Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society’s understanding. (21 points)

P.S. I forgot to tell you the answers from the last post.
(1) “Let me ’splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” –The Princess Bride
(2) a word that is ’sandwiched’ in another word (e.g., scrumdiddlyumptious) –tmesis
(3) “She foresaw that she was doomed to a lonely spinsterhood.” –Gerogette Heyer, Regency Buck (BTW, I decided to give Emily 20 points for that, since she did know it was Heyer, just not which book it was.)

 

politeness conference

Yesterday I spent the whole day in Nottingham for a Politeness Conference at Nottingham University. Before you ask, let me clear up a few misconceptions. No, politeness (as an academic study) is in no way related to sensitivity. No, we did not sit around and learn how to be polite to other people. No, there was nothing there about Robin Hood or Maid Marian. And no, we didn’t analyze each other’s politeness strategies. And yes, politeness really is an academic study — it has been quite influential, especially in the linguistic study of pragmatics.

Politeness deals with how people display polite (and impolite) behavior. In linguistics, it is concerned with the language people use to be polite or impolite. It tries to make sense of statements like the following:

Can you pass the salt?

See, usually the person who says something like that knows that the person they’re addressing literally is capable of passing the salt. So, why do they question it? Why do we put it in that way? Well, it’s one way of being polite (namely, in this case, by being indirect) – it softens the blow of what the speaker is really trying to say. If we didn’t make the utterance polite, we would end up saying something like, “Give me the salt.” In some cases, that might be fine; but in other cases, that kind of statement might offend someone. So, this is what politeness is all about.

The conference was interesting. They were also launching the start of a new journal on politeness, so they gave us all free copies of the first issue. That made me glad, since there are some articles in there that I’ve been looking forward to using. However, for the most part, I was just annoyed by the sense of academic self-superiority that pervaded all the proceedings. I don’t think that people in academia try to be superior — but they really get accustomed to thinking that way. Never before in my life have been so distinctly aware of the Ivory Tower.

Don’t get me wrong — I did enjoy myself, and there were some really interesting things discussed. But I just kept wondering what the point of it all was. Who really cares whether or not ‘face’ is a real concept, or whether it’s the same across cultures. Of course there are practical implications for it all — such as teaching people how to be polite in other cultures, countries, and languages — but in the long run, is it really going to matter whether or not our theory of politeness accurately reflects the way things are? It’s like the classic question about the chicken and the egg — you know, which one came first? Why does it matter? It might be interesting to theorize how things happened, but in the long run, it really doesn’t make any difference which was first, because they’re both here now. If we actually knew for certain that it was the chicken that came first, how would that change the way we do anything?

The older I get, the more of a pragmatist I become. And modern academia is really no place for a pragmatist.

Anyway, on a bit of a happier note, I’d like to recommend Walter E. Williams’s online ‘course’ (a series of 10 articles) entitled “Economics for the Citizen.” Dr. Williams had last fall semester off from teaching at George Mason University, so he wrote up this series of 10 articles to try and teach some basic economics for the average citizen. Very interesting stuff. Between Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have gone into economics. (Don’t worry – I’m just kidding.)

Oh yeah, and I found out the other day that Jonathan Culpeper will be supervising my dissertation. I’m excited about that, since I’m using his framework on characterization for my dissertation. That, and I just generally like Jonathan. My dissertation, by the way (or, incidentally), is about the characterization of James and Lily Potter in the Harry Potter series.

I ask a simple question, and I get a parade. (30 points)

 

conferences galore!

So, I think I posted something earlier about submitting some proposals to the Accio 2005 Harry Potter conference, in Reading, UK. I was supposed to hear back from them by the week of January 31st, and as of today, I hadn’t heard anything, so I thought they hadn’t accepted either of my proposed papers. However, it turns out that I had forgotten which email address I gave them, and I only checked that one today. They accepted me for a presentation called “Exploring the Language of Harry Potter”, which is intended to be an overview of stylistic devices in the Harry Potter books. I will link the abstract on my website, for anyone who’s interested.

Also, there’s a Politeness Conference being hosted at the University of Nottingham this March, and one of my professors is a keynote speaker (he’s been doing lots of work in impoliteness, and has gotten lots of attention for it recently). At the end of our pragmatics course last term, he told us all about it, and said that if anyone was interested, to email him around February, and we would get together a group of Lancaster people to go together. I emailed him recently, and so we’re getting the plans ready for it. It looks like I’m pretty much the only student interested in it, so I will basically be going out there with Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, Geoff Leech, and a couple of others. These are heavyweights in the stylistics and pragmatics arenas, so that’s pretty cool. And I’ve been waiting for a good way to get to know Mick Short better … he’s a personal hero of sorts. Should be exciting!

“You want the moon? Just say the word, and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Say, that’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, [name].”
“I’ll take it.” (20 points, just ’cause it’s such a great movie!)

 

Marxism in the linguistics classroom

Remember way back when I posted something about Linguistics apparently not being as good a place as English for teaching Marxism, feminism, and queer theory? I based that statement on the fact that the English Department at Lancaster Uni had much better facilities than the Linguistics Department. If you remember that, I hope you’ll also remember my retraction, in the next post. I would like to add to that retraction today, with a description of a brief encounter from my CDA (critical discourse analysis) class.

The class was focused today on the CDA approach of Norman Fairclough. After giving us some background about Fairclough, the professor then outlined the most recent evolution of his methodology in CDA. At one point, she mentioned that his work is clearly influenced by Marxist theories. A moment later, a young man in the back of the classroom raised his hand to ask a question, which went something like this: “Just what implications does Marxist theory have for academic study? Because in my country, Zimbabwe, we view Marxism as a totalitarian theory.” The prof’s ridiculous answer went something like this: “You have to be sure and differentiate between the theory and the application of Marxism. The theory is not the same as the application, and the theory itself is not necessarily totalitarian.”

What tripe! If you’ve ever read the Communist Manifesto, the basis of Marxism (and note that it was he and not Stalin or Lenin, as the prof further claimed in her little speech today, who termed his ideas ‘communism’), you’ll know that it is an inherently totalitarian theory. If you disagree, please let me know, because I’d love to hear just how anyone thinks that Marxism — either communism, or its ’softer’ form of socialism — could possibly be applied without a totalitarian government.

Even moving beyond that claim, though, I’d like to ask what is probably the more pressing question in modern Western academia: What good is a theory, if its application consistently produces bad results?

Today’s quote (60 points):

“Rebellion to tryanny is obedience to God.”