and you may ask yourself, well, how did i get here?

For all of us who are curious about what I do all day:

One way or another, i have found myself essentially doing computational/corpus linguistics, albeit in the least high tech way possible: database building. Database building isn't hard, but it is slow going.

Here I am cross-referencing my database with a program that I used to build my database.

it's metaphorical!

Admittedly I study some really obscure stuff. Literary linguistics is a very small field, comprised of even smaller fields. A lot of people in literary linguistics are really interested in metaphor and figurative language (how it works, what it does in a text, how we understand it, etc), and I know a few people who are getting their PhDs in metaphor (yes, really.) I subscribe to a few literary linguistic mailing lists- these mailing lists are ridiculous; someone with the last name van der Boom manages one of them (I love getting emails from Ms van der Boom for entertainment value alone.)

Sometimes I get emails like this:

"The 2011 [redacted] Metaphor Festival
Thursday 8 to Saturday 10 September

The [redacted] Metaphor Festival is an annual conference on the use of figurative
language, arranged by The Department of English at [redacted] University. It
brings together researchers from a broad range of academic disciplines, working
within different theoretical and methodological paradigms -literary as well as
linguistic - in a creative, internationally oriented and friendly atmosphere.
The importance of figurative language is now generally recognised, and the
Festival offers an opportunity to present and learn about research findings
concerning figures of speech in different types of discourse, and their
cognitive, cultural, narrative, poetic, rhetorical, social or textual functions."

I don't even know where to start with this.

Listen; I am currently working in corpus stylistics, which is not a big field in my already-tiny subfield of the intersection of linguistics and literature. It's like a subfield of a subfield. But it's always comforting to hear there's people working on something much more ridiculous than me.

"we must commute the pasta"

I like being around people who speak more than one language fluently, because it often means that they make some interesting constructions in their non-native language(s), as a result of knowing so many other languages. Similarly, some of these little phrase quirks carry over into one's native language. Although I don't speak any languages other than English, I can read and write in a few others (Old English, French), and I know that my feeble attempts at forming phrases are entirely based in my own language; you often end up making fairly clunky, literal word-by-word translations.

Though occasionally (as a native English speaker) it can get frustrating to try to use some advanced metaphorical language, on the whole, most people are pretty fluent in English. A number of my friends here speak English as well as their native language, and what's cool is that you can almost see what they are literally translating from one language to another. For example: Two of my friends are French and they'll often use gender pronouns to describe inanimate objects ("my chair, she is broken"). My German friends have less difficulty with this, perhaps as a result of the fact that German and English are linguistically really close. (Interestingly enough, my German friends all speak English with American accents.)

My friend Stefano speaks Italian, German, and English fluently, with Italian obviously being his first language. Although his spoken English is not perfect, it is very, very good (and as a linguist he's always interested in hearing how English works for a native speaker!) Sometimes he says some strange things, but they're all very reasonable and logical when you think about it- today I ran into Stefano in the department's kitchenette while he was preparing his lunch, and I asked him what he was making. He explained the dish to me, and as he moved the pasta from the microwave to a bowl, he told me "we must commute the pasta". This is a wonderfully formal sentence to say that you are moving the pasta into the sauce, but it makes perfect sense: you are moving the pasta from one point to another in a large group, and there's a lot of them, so it could take a collective pronoun.

English is hard to learn, you guys - I'm not nearly as confident in other languages as my international friends are! I'm always impressed when I meet non-native speakers whose English is as good as (if not better than!) mine, even if they do sometimes tell me that we must commute the pasta.

from this position I can see the whole place

I don't talk about my work often on the internet, mostly because I want to maintain some anonymity in this space. I'm working on building a website about myself & my research, and I am on what could most accurately be called "a facebook for academics", so I guess if you're really interested you can check out my work on there. (If I ever finish that website I'll be sure to let you know.)

While I am home - technically I am "on holiday" - I still have work to do. Yes, you read that right. I've been working on a chapter (10,000 words) of my masters thesis while I'm home. Anyway, while I've been home I've also been seeing some old friends, who have been inquiring about my work. I proposed a really big project for a 12-month Master's thesis, and it's been cut down a lot to something really specific since then. This was fine, in fact, that's the nature of research. Unfortunately, it meant that I didn't really know how to explain to people what I've been doing: I was explaining it as something between my proposed project and what I thought I was striving for.

I'm not going to lie to you - no matter how interesting and invested in your work you are, when that's all you do on a daily basis, it's hard to see outside your narrow field of focus sometimes. Sometimes it's kind of boring. My research involved building a database, and that was all I did for a month. You can really only look at words so many times before they start to lose their meanings, you know? It took some time to step back and really see what I had been doing every day. And then I realized that I hadn't been doing what I thought I had been doing all along... in fact, I was doing something very different. So now I have a new(er), more accurate description of what I've been working on, which fits and feels much better.

It's also good to get a different perspective on what I've been doing. Glasgow's great because there's a lot of linguistics going on, but I'm not entirely working in linguists and I'm not quite an English literature student - I'm kind of in the middle. I mentioned to a couple other grad-school-going friends lately that I'm having a hard time finding conferences and publications to be looking at, only because my field is so very small. And they all brought up an important point - you WANT to be the one of the only people doing what you're doing, because when you're done you'll have participated in an entirely new approach to your field. (This is very good for my ego, I'll have you all know.)

we've been going transcontinental

It's good to be back in America, but I won't lie - it's been a little strange. I'm sometimes slow to warm up to new places until I get really comfortable there. It's like coming home after your first semester of college - everything is comfortable at home, because you know it.

Though I do really like living in Glasgow, I had missed America a lot; there's a lot of familiar American things that I had taken for granted for the past 22 years. On the other hand, it was like reverse culture shock to come back to the States. I guess I've integrated myself into Scottish/UK culture pretty well. It helps that I'm surrounded 24/7 by Europeans.

My friends in the UK are convinced that everything about America is huge. I respectfully disagreed with parts of this - America itself is huge, you could travel for hours and only make it across a few states - until I came back. Everything IN America is massive! The roads, the portions, the stores.... I went to supermarket recently and was just floored by how much stuff we can cram into one store. I'd have to go to three separate places to get all the stuff we sell in one store. It's almost excessive. I was equally amazed by Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Barnes & Noble. (The other thing that floors me is how expensive America seems to be - I've been thinking in pounds rather than dollars. Of course, when you convert everything, it evens out.)

Now, I am not a fashionista in any sense of the word. I can barely put together an outfit by myself - I have effectively one outfit in a few different colors. When I first came to Glasgow I was amazed at how fashionable and well-put-together everyone was; coming back I am amazed at what some people wear in public - American standards for clothing is appalling. I mean, cargo pants? really? Simultaneously I feel awkwardly underdressed for UK standards and overdressed for American standards, which is a little strange.

I even speak this really weird combination of American and Scots English that I didn't realize I was doing. While I was in London, I kept throwing people off by saying really Scottish things with an American accent, but I chalked that up to simply still being in the UK. I came back here and catch myself saying some really BrE/Scots things, like "hiya" and "cheers", which must make me sound really strange. The other day I said "jumper" - I don't even say jumper in the UK! It's nice to hear so many American accents and not have to mentally translate them, but I almost fell out of my chair when I heard a proper Boston accent the other day in the coffeeshop.

I have an ex-boyfriend who lived in Europe for some time growing up. There's a lot about him I understand now, that I didn't understand before. I've definitely noticed how I feel about a lot of things now have changed from three months ago. For starters, I am really alarmed at how self-centered and self-congratulatory American news is... Yes, there's a lot of America, but things that are happening in the world affect us much more than we think! Previously I was amazed at what UK news chooses to highlight about American news, but I came back and read the past months' TIME magazines, like the Person of the Year stuff and all of that, and it is SO us-centric, which is really kind of disappointing, you know?

I do miss how ridiculous the UK can be over simple things. But it's good to be back in the land of fame & excess.

we're from north america!

I have been here long enough that the initial shock of UK vs American English has sort of worn off. At first I was making a conscious effort to try and translate things into UK English - especially in an international community, many people only know British English - but I've mostly given that up. I probably sounded like a tool. If anything, retaining American English makes for a good discussion point amongst English studies and linguistics people.

But it still stresses me out that I don't know how to be polite over here. Well, it's not that I don't know how to be polite; I consider myself to be a very polite person. Cashier at the store, I know you are probably having a shitty time; I want you to know that I appreciate your existence. Waitress, thanks for bringing over my food; no, I don't need anything else, I'm all set thanks. It's just that I don't know what the UK equivalent of politeness would be!

For the most part, I can deal with this sort of thing in mini interactions. In stores or at the coffeeshop, it's mostly fine. Every morning I see the housekeepers for my office on their way out and I will tell them "Have a nice day." (They are still baffled by this, and I have been doing this for nearly a month now.) After purchasing something from a store, I will tell the cashiers to "Have a nice day." ("Cheers" means "Thanks", but it's not the same sort of thing. "Ta" is more of a "thank you" than "cheers", though, and is used mostly as a "thanks for holding the door open" sort of situation.)

Everyone here seems very taken aback by the question "How are you?" (and variations thereof: "How have you been?"). The usual answer I get - once the other party gets over the original processing of the question at hand, that is - is "Yeah, I've/it's been alright." AND HERE IS WHERE THINGS GET COMPLICATED FOR BOTH PARTIES:

In American English, "alright" is used to show indifference. Maybe it was mediocre. It was okay. Nothing spectacular. I've been okay.

In British English, however, "alright" means that it was good, or that they've been well, or that they had a good time.

I'll ask someone how an event was and they'll tell me that it "was alright, yeah". And that means that they really enjoyed it! If you've asked how they've been doing, "I've been great, thanks!" I imagine the pragmatics of these particular conversations would be FASCINATING to study. That said, I think the British English equivalent of "How have you been?" is "How've you been getting on?", but that seems to be used to show concern over something.

Occasionally there are people who are used to interacting with North (Canadians do this too!) Americans, who are used to getting this question a lot, and they usually ask me back - "How was your weekend?" And I will say that it was "alright", in the American sense of "it was okay", whereas they are using it in the sense of "oh, it was very good." Do you see the problem here? (My Irish flatmates will describe something as "grand" if it is good, which is at least a little less stressful.)

Clearly I don't want to come off as an stupid American lumbering around any more than I have to, but it legitimately bothers me that I can't figure out how to come off as polite here. To finish a transaction and not say anything - which appears to be the standard UK response - seems terribly rude to me. The same goes for not asking someone how they have been doing! I don't think I'll ever wrap my mind around this. And I'm sure as soon as I do, I'll be back in the States being horrifically rude to everyone ever.

a day in the life

Every week or so I go over to Glasgow University. Glasgow University is sort of like the BU or NYU of Glasgow, whereas Strathclyde, which is my school, is more like MIT. Glasgow Uni is this amazing, magical, campusy place (complete with trees!). They've got an English language/linguistics department and a literature department, and their library is amazing, whereas Strathclyde is in the middle of the city centre and much less humanities-oriented. (Basically I have a giant crush on Glasgow University.)




Today I listened to a lecture about relative pronouns in the morning and spent my afternoon reading original texts from the 1600s. While this is not the book I actually read (predictably, the special archives collection won't let me take take pictures); I was actually reading about Early Modern English Women's social roles. Last week I was granted access by Oxford to download their full-text Old English and Middle English databases; which means now I have the entire written (documented) early English corpus on my computer. Also today I met with one of the big people in corpus linguistics and a few weeks ago I met with someone who headed the Oxford English Dictionary's recently-published Historical Thesaurus project, both at Glasgow University.

YOU GUYS HOW IS THIS MY LIFE I DON'T EVEN KNOW

the dream of a common language

The Scottish accent is famously a pretty dense thing to decipher. It's a British English accent, but with more to it. I don't know how else to describe it - and on top of that, the Glasgow accent is like the Extra Super Mega Scottish Accent. It's like listening to Sean Connery talk every day. (Some people are less mumbly.) After living here for about 5 weeks I'm starting to not notice it anymore; it's starting to sound pretty normal to me. Ordinarily this would be a terrifying concept to not notice something as big as an accent, but I am generally taking it as a good sign - This is a vast improvement over my first few weeks here, when I understood about 45% of what was being said to me at any moment in time. Though I'm a native speaker of English, sometimes I may as well not be!

Here's a fairly accurate clip about the Scottish accent:


Anecdotally: the other day I was skyping with A, who is in South Korea, when a guy with a fairly standard Glaswegian accent came by to look at our shower and reported back to me that there was nothing especially wrong with it...and A was dying - "DOES EVERYONE SOUND LIKE THAT?!" Yes. The answer is yes.

You wouldn't think this, but American English and British English are more different than you'd expect. Scots English is different enough from British English (it even has its own dictionary: The Dictionary of the Scots Language) but from what I can tell it's close enough to British English for my general purposes.

There are still a lot of words I don't quite "get" yet, and I feel ridiculous saying almost all of these things. Here everyone would say "loads" where we would say "lots", and the word "wee" is liberally used here to describe something that is small. "What's on?" is equivalent to "What's happening?" or "What's going on?". I have to remember not to ask for "a bathroom", as I will be directed to a shower room; I need to ask for a toilet instead, and "loo" is often thrown around instead. Then there are the things I absolutely cannot wrap my brain around: I keep calling the kettle the teapot, and if I am looking for push pins, I am looking for "drawing pins", which go in a "notice board", not a cork board.

There's an interesting article floating around that discusses how language is directly influenced by the people speaking around you - I can guarantee this is is true. I am trying to let some Britishisms into my language though - I can hear myself trying to replicate the intonation patterns of native UKers, and I'm catching myself describe things as "quite _____", more so than I usually would. Especially in an international setting - where most people have learned British rather than American English - it's often easier to use Britishisms as common ground.

That said, I definitely can't replicate a Scottish accent at all. I sometimes still catch myself being very embarrassed when I speak, because my accent is so flat and boring and very, very American, while a good Glasgow accent is so sing-songy, and all the back vowels are dipthongized. (If you are not a linguisticky type person, this means that they actually have two vowel sounds smushed together. [iu] for /u/ sounds are the most noticable, though /o/ and /a/ have some pretty good ones too. I can't find you a page about this that doesn't involve a lot of knowledge of phonetic background information, but you can probably find something accessible on youtube.)

While I can use a lot of the lingo properly, I can't help but feel like I must sound like an idiot with my ridiculous American accent. (Thankfully, the phoneticists around me say I don't have much of a Boston accent but more of a Canadian accent - looks like Mom's Canadianness rubbed off on me more than I thought! I don't hate Boston accents, but now I am very glad to not have too strong of one.)

quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock

In case you were curious, the Tour De La Bibliothèques is still ongoing. Here is an illustrated guide to my life as a professional reader.

This is what I am researching, explained with dinosaurs and probably much more helpful than my previous post about it:
(from dinosaur comics by ryan north)


I go to Widener every week or so to get copies of articles to read. I look at an on-line catalog, request items, wait for them to arrive, make photocopies of them, return the items, and repeat. Here I am making sure I have all the pages of one article.
If I want to borrow a book, I have to get Dr. Green to sign it out for me. Then I bring all of this home with me.

During the rest of the week, I come to Wheaton College's library, where I sit in the basement with the history books to read and take notes on my computer. Today I am reading about lying.
Because I am super-nearsighted, I have to wear my glasses when I read. Even though I wear contacts in my daily life, my lenses hypercorrect for distance and then I can't read. As you can imagine, this is counterproductive.

That's it! This is what I do every day instead of having an actual job. There's not much to say about being a research assistant. I don't have to get dressed up or anything; I just sort of sit somewhere, listen to music, and read. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I figured it was time to talk about something other than mail fails.

i am a visitor here; i am not permanent

Monday was Day 2 of Research at Harvard! Since I do not actually go to Harvard, I have really limited access to their resources. Though I have the privilege of merely being in this building, even if it is for such a short, short time, I am not really allowed to do very much. If I want to see something, I have to request it; about two hours later someone will deliver it to me. (I like to think there are library elves involved.) I usually interact with about two library staff members maximum.

As a "visiting academic" (that's really strange to say; do I even qualify for that title?) this there are only so many things that you can expect me to know. The floor plan, for instance, is not one of them, especially when you are allowed in a room and a half. Since I don't have stacks privileges, I have no idea where the books I am requesting are. I know a lot of them are generally rather localized in one place based on their call numbers, but I don't know where this place is. It's part of the mythical, forbidden places in the building!

So you can imagine my surprise when one of the librarians came back to my desk in the reading room with two of my request slips and said "You can go get these yourself." What?! I can only be in here and in the bathroom! YOU CAN'T GIVE ME THAT SORT OF POWER.

It turns out that I'm allowed to be in a few more places than I originally suspected, including "up the stairs and in the big reading room". This room holds the most commonly accessed books and big huge mega tables for everyone to use. I guess this makes sense. Apparently everyone with access to the library has access to this room; it's in all of their publications about Widener, so I guess it's a kind of famous room. Kind of a shame, because the rest of the library is, in my opinion, way more beautiful than this one room. (The reading room I'm usually in is full of white stone and mahogany wood fixtures with stainless steel accents. We have a giant skylight above us. It is gorgeous.) But it's kind of like saying you like one palace over another... they're both gorgeous in their own way.

Just to get to this other room you have to go up a MARBLE STAIRCASE. However, nobody works in that room to help you, which is why there would be no point to me spending my time there. The library elves wouldn't be able to collect my resources for me.

Later I found out that I'm not granted access to one of the documents I requested that morning. I was sent to another room (Three rooms in one day! so exciting) and one of the librarians took pity on me. She is arranging for me to get special access to this one document! I have to wait for this request to go through, and I will probably have to bring latex gloves to make sure that I don't ruin it with fingerprints or something.

On my lunch break I half-listened to a campus tour guide brag about how she had been in Widener once. Harvard's campus tours won't bring them anywhere near the library the undergrads are allowed into, but they will bring you in front of Widener! Ha ha, kiddos, I AM ALLOWED IN WIDENER...for four more days this year!

Use your education and take an educated guess

You are probably all on the edges of your seats waiting to hear about Harvard. Am I right? HA! I knew it.

I didn't have any problems getting access to Widener. In order to be granted Library Privileges, I had to bring a letter from my public library stating that my needs as a scholar do not exist outside this one building. I was granted Reading Room privileges as expected, which means I am allowed in exactly one and a half rooms in this giant, beautiful library: the reading room and the bathroom (a bathroom doesn't count as a real room in my book; it's a little past the circulation desk, so I guess we'll call that space "half a room"). Apparently I am also allowed in a computer lab if I am not bringing a computer with me; because I am bringing my laptop that has been nullified.

Anyway, this is what my Harvard University ID looks like. (Please appreciate my terrible haircut.) I am allowed into Widener Research Library for 6 days per 12 month period. So even though this card expires a year from now, I have five more days in this library. A day is 24 hours from original swipe-in, so I am allowed to leave for lunch and whatnot. This does not quite factor in the fact that this library is not open 24 hours a day, but no matter. This is Harvard, they can do what they like.

In the humanities (or "Not-Science"), the word "research" usually is translated into "reading a lot of things." The professor I'm working for - an ancient man with an adorably out-of-date laptop - presented me with a 46 page bibliography and told me to look through it and select what I wanted to read. From there, I would find these texts in the library catalog. I am not allowed in the stacks (if you want a study carrel you have to apply for that too. This place does not fuck around!), so I have to request individual journals to make photocopies of the articles. I can request up to 10 things per hour; I don't know if anyone actually achieves this over the course of a day. Dr Green has borrowing privileges, so if I want to take any books out to bring home, he has to do it for me. He is very nice about this, if not very deaf; the rest of the Reading Room was not very pleased whenever we talked.

I spent the morning getting used to their library catalog and generally making a mess of my to-find list. You guys, this is what research was like before the internet! I filled out a bunch of request forms and looked up more things. I've used a lot of the journals listed in this bibliography... and I remembered that I didn't have to go to the Dimond Library to do so. It turns out that a few of these journals are available online through JSTOR! (Un?)surprisingly, you need a Harvard logon to use their JSTOR access, but through UNH's blackboard portal I can still use these resources. DEAR EVERYONE AT UNH: BLACKBOARD DID SOMETHING RIGHT FOR A CHANGE. WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THAT. IT'S CONFUSING RIGHT?

I was still waiting for my earlier requests to come through, so I took a lunch break. I don't know Cambridge well, so I ended up going across the street to Qdoba and bringing my lunch back to Harvard Yard. In the maybe 30 minutes I was out there, no less than six people assumed I was a Harvard student and asked me for directions. I am pleased that I look appropriately collegiate.

When I came back, my requests had come through, so I now had the daunting task of remembering why I wanted them and making photocopies. I would just like to throw it out there how happy I am that UNH put all of our information on just one card; I have a separate card from Dr Green just for printing/photocopying. It took me three different documents to figure out that the copier auto-double-sides everything. This copier had a very effective guide of how it worked (COPIES COME OUT HERE, COLLATED PAGES GO IN HERE, MORE PAPER IS AVAILABLE AT THE DESK ASK FOR HELP etc) - clearly they realize that while the world's premiere academics can think about complex things they (we?) cannot handle Xerox machines.

Anyway, Dr Green had to run off to a meeting for the afternoon, so I ended up leaving Widener around 3 pm with three books, six articles, and a fairly infinite number of articles available on-line. Basically I do not have to be in Boston every day (which is a life saver, waking up at 5 am just to get into Boston around 8 was going to kill me!) However, I am now officially calling August the Tour De La Bibliothèques while I read and take notes. On Wednesday I read thirty pages about the sentence "I love you" on my way home; Thursday I camped out in my town's sometimes-commmunityesque college and brushed up on doing pragmatics.

Doing pragmatics is serious business.

Dear Linguistics, YOUR LOVE IS MY DRUG

1. So I went on that job interview. And I didn't fuck it up ... until they very end!
I talked to the ladies who currently are Administrative Assistants-slash-Grammatical Editors; they gave me a cup of coffee, an article to edit, and a red pen. It's like my dream job interview! And apparently nobody's ever done that well on their practice document before, so they were a little bit floored. Basically, they were like "We really like you, we'll let you know by Friday. Is there anything else you want us to know?"

And I was all, "Well, I'm sorry that you didn't get back to me earlier in the summer when I had full availability; I can only do this part-time right now - I've been working (will be starting to work, ahem, whatever) with a professor at BU and then I'm moving to Scotland for grad school."

Lady: (jaw drop)"Well, thanks for taking the time to come in."

And then I walked out. I haven't felt that badass in a while.


2. SPEAKING OF BADASS (this is relative, perhaps if you are not me, you will not feel the same way)
I heard back from another professor I e-mailed recently. He's been busy wrapping up this project which is essentially a corpus of Old English Poetics and language "to detect relationships between, and structures within, poetic texts in [the] Old English [corpus]". He had been away for a week, which means he just got my e-mail and apologized if he missed out on having me on board due to this fact.
But he also warned me that
a) they had run out of funding
b) they were nearly finished with it
c) I AM ACTUALLY OVERQUALIFIED TO DO THIS.


3. Oh, and Sarah Palin called herself Shakespeare and I wrote about it.

YOU GUYS, THIS IS AWESOME.

An Annotated Diagram of the Freelance Writer

Welcome to Day 1 of Living the English Major Dream! Normally I would be sitting around my house, but I decided to drag myself to my local coffeeshop to work.

Just kidding. I totally don't like lattes. That was black coffee.

EDIT (6:28 PM) my column just went up! you can see it at http://www.examiner.com/x-53217-Boston-Linguistics-Examiner

This is a little story about the best birthday present I have received in a long time

Yesterday was my birthday! Aside from a few books that I've been looking forward to reading, I didn't get anything especially exciting until later in the afternoon.

While sitting around the other night, I went to check my assorted Career-Finding-Website newsletters. Presumably if you have used one of these Find-A-Career Dot-Coms, you are familiar with these e-mails. One of them listed that The Examiner was looking for some columnists for their Society & Culture section. Familiar with The Examiner, I quickly skim the list of available Examiner titles: Linguistics Examiner.

"That's me!" I thought. "I could do that!"

So at 11:30 at night, I throw together a quick article about Twitterspeak and a little blurb about why they should hire me as the Boston-Area Linguist.

I receive one of those "we are now processing your information FOR EVER" e-mails. I don't really think too much about it. The next afternoon - on my birthday - I discover they want to give me the linguistics column! And I will get paid per article! (spoiler alert: probably very little.) AND it'll be a legitimate thing (ahem, Beer Summer.)

To recap: I get to write articles about things I already think about. These articles are then published! With my name attached! Other people will read them (maybe!) And then, I will (presumably) get paid for it. What's up, relevant resume expierence. I don't care any more, really, if I don't have a "real job". I am actually using my degree directly out of college! Not only am I going be a freelance writer, which is every English major's dream, I get to read about linguistics and think about language and THEN I GET TO OPEN THIS DISCUSSION FOR OTHER PEOPLE. I, for one, am excited. I hope you are too.

I can't stop, that's why I'm hot

One of the side effects of thesis-writing is a sheer and utter disregard for things happening outside your little thesis cave... which is how i almost forgot about the commencement fair yesterday.

Incidentally, I had also forgotten that I'm graduating in a relatively short period of time. (Another side-effect of thesising is that you get so engrossed in your work you don't have time to worry about anything other than your thesis.) This is very convenient in that you don't have time to freak out about graduation or allow senoritis to kick in.

Though I am very sad I did not personally take this picture, I did stand next to this woman while waiting in line to get my cap and gown at the commencement fair. The Alumni Association really wanted us to go on a "Last Hurrah Lobster Bake". And by "wanted us to go" I really mean they had found middle-aged ladies to wear lobster hats and run around screaming excitedly about eating lobsters with your BEST FRIENDS FOREVER for the last time. Also it was $10. Obviously I am not attending.

And, despite my insistence that everyone should stop inviting me to everything ever, I consistently find myself alternating between linguisticking and Social Identity Awarenessing. I've decided I'm not attending anything unless I personally gain something from it. This vague "something" can be personal edification or food, saving me a food-journey. It turns out many social justice-oriented events also feature food, and my ideal event/linguisticking break involves both personal edification AND food, so if you are hoping to get me somewhere anytime soon, you should probably look into combining the two.

Which is how I found myself at the LGBTQ pancake breakfast this morning.. Despite my sheer dislike for Gay (adj.) + {Noun or Verb} to make a noun or verb phrase (Gay Marriage, Gay Lunch, Gay Parking My Car -- credit to Liz Feldman), I definitely attended Gay Breakfast today rather than sleeping. Free food > sleeping, and by waking up early/napping (far more realistically, this is what I've been doing) I have more time to work. Right?

For those of us keeping track at home, I have written eleven pages of my thesis from Saturday into Tuesday. This morning I've been editing my thesis as a whole, in preparation for Judgement Day With Shelly tomorrow, and I'm sort of amazed at what I've produced. In approximately three weeks I have not only restarted my thesis from word one, page one but synthesized four different theories into a working understanding of linguistic productivity, wrote a total of 17 pages out of my expected ~20 pages (one word and a period on page 17 totally counts) and have been loving every second of it. Despite my sometimes-vocal claims that this is exhausting and I can't wait for it to be over, I really do love this. Either I am delusional - probably from too much coffee, not enough sleep, or some combination of the two - or I have a very successful academic career ahead of me.

Character Study: Dr. Lieber

Since Shelly keeps coming up as a Major Character in my life, I think it is time to define her for you, dear reader.

Dr. Lieber is kind of a big deal.

And when I say that, I mean it- She studied under Noam Chomsky at MIT in the 1970s and while there, developed the prevailing system of understanding underlying linguistic structure which basically says that the properties of each individual word item, both within the word itself and how the word functions in a sentence, are inherited by morphology (the study of word-parts, which is what I've been working on) and syntax (which is the organization of words into phrases which turn into sentences). In picture form, this structure looks like what is seen to the right: Any time a letter (N, P, V representing nouns, prepositions, verbs) is repeated that means it allows for phrasal attachement. This can be applied to word-parts in that you can separate little bits of words which make sense individually and allow for attachment and word-formation. If this makes your head hurt, imagine taking a class strictly devoted to things like that picture. Shelly teaches this class at UNH, and is notorious amongst the 35 or so Linguistics majors on campus for using all of her example sentences about Fenster and wombats.

(Which brings me to the next related thing to talk about - this picture, brought to us by someone in the UNH linguistics department in front of the English building. If you can't read it, it says "Fenster kissed the wombat" in IPA. This is a linguistics joke and a funny one at that - mostly because nobody knows we exist, nor will the rest of the English Department understand it!)

Shelly's work is mostly in morphology despite her important strides in syntax. She co-developed the prevailing formula to measure productivity of affixes through corpus study (in Not-Linguistics-Speak this means "what my thesis is centered around: The Formula.") This - among MANY other things related to word-formation and how it functions - is her main focus of research. She's been working on assorted projects of word-formation rules and how they are understood to speakers of language for a very long time.

She is very, very well respected in her field. So going in to see her today was an intimidating moment, as you have hopefully understood. I have weekly "homework assignments" for her related to Thesis 2.0; this past weeks' was to read three of her articles on word-formation and synthesize a methodology of measuring and understanding word-formation techniques in regards to her own research. But - for those of us keeping track at home, the work I brought into her was described as "on the correct path" (translated from Thesis Advisor-Speak that means "Yes, you're close. Now do this that and the other thing and it will be better. But yes, mostly.")

I AM DOING SOMETHING RIGHT!

State of the Thesis 2.0

(yes, I have named my new thesis "Thesis 2.0". you love it.)



My weekend consisted of:
1 book called Productive Morphology
3 articles to embellish principles presented by the first book (including one which heavily featured "graphs", "math" and "logarithms", written by my thesis advisor)
(= one new thesis as of Saturday morning)
1 book about the philosophy of language and constructing meaning, Wittgenstien's The Blue and Brown Books and preliminary research on word-organization in the brain (thanks, friends) to further some ideas I have

plus a great many post-it notes, lots of coffee, not a lot of sleep and not eating very much = A PROTO-THESIS STATEMENT.

this is coming together nicely. let's hope it is deemed acceptable.

lunch has been cancelled due to lack of hustle

So remember that time that I was getting freaked out by my thesis? Here's a story for you.

I had a meeting with my advisor today. The meeting pretty much went like this:

Shelly: There's no thesis, no coherency, and you haven't proven anything yet. You're not going to, if you continue on as you have been. These are merely notes on your corpora research. Consider them a reference from now on. You need to find this book, read it, and come back in a week with at least three pages written... and it needs to have an actual thesis.
Heather: Okay.
Shelly: When are you presenting? April sometime right?
Heather: April 23rd.
Shelly: That gives us a month. Good luck.

Essentially all the work I have done in the past six weeks is nullified. Which leaves me with absolutely nothing written and A MONTH TO DO IT ALL. So basically I am never eating or sleeping again.

(Conveniently, today I also got a job calling people around dinnertime to have them take surveys. I had submitted an application to the survey center a while ago. This would have been helpful about almost three months ago, when I wasn't doing anything of especial importance. I mean, I was, kind of, but I had the time to be flexible and work on a regular schedule... which is why I put in an application at the beginning of the semester; I certainly wasn't expecting to suddenly have to REWRITE 23 pages/6 weeks of work. Also today I had scheduled a census field worker test, hoping to have a summer job between undergrad and grad school. Go figure - of course today would be the one day I needed to read and essentially know an entire book.)

I think the correct phrase here is "take your balls out of your purse", which is exactly what I did: I ran off to the library, hoping they would have this book (thankfully they did) and IMMEDIATELY start reading it. I only recently finished reading and annotating tonight; tomorrow I'm assembling my thoughts and re-reading parts of it in hopes of being able to start writing on Saturday.

my thoughts today while reading
But this is okay. The way I'm looking at it, everyone has their Thesis Disaster story -- this is mine. It's totally fine. It just means that Beverly, my old and crotchety computer, will not blow up as she has been threatening to do; my hard drive won't erase itself; nobody in my family will die while I write my thesis. Right? Knock on wood, for sure.

it's like nataliedee.com made a portrait of me

íslenska

I spent my junior year of college translating Old English into Modern English. This was easily one of the most tedious things I have ever done. But, Intro to Old English and Beowulf were easily two of the best classes I have ever taken. Sometimes - though not frequently - I find myself missing it.

THAT SAID...I would be very okay if I never had to see any more epic poetry.

but, i find myself getting unnecessarily excited over the existence of the following collection of Early Icelandic poetry:

i think this speaks volumes about me.