Archive for the ‘Academia’ category

OxMorph1 revisited

Monday 1st September, 2008 @ 3.36pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

I said I would tell more about my Oxford conference trip after talking to my supervisor about it. So here goes: I got a result!

Although I never knew what the normal process of selecting an external examiner for a PhD student is, I do now. And let me tell you, it doesn’t involve a respected academic asking the PhD student, in person, can they be the student’s external examiner. It does involve the supervisor asking their first choice academic very nicely to be their student’s external examiner and hoping they’ve got the time and inclination to say yes.

I don’t do normal.

posted in Conferences, PhD | Tags: Andrew, examiners, Oxford | 1 Comment »

OxMorph1

Thursday 28th August, 2008 @ 11.12pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

I’ve been in Oxford the last few days for a conference on Romance verb morphology (OxMorph1). That’s what my PhD is about. It was great. More later, after I’ve heard back from my supervisor re the email I’ve just sent him at midnight, after having spent the evening drinking and eating (I’ve now had pigeon, which tastes like duck, which isn’t a bad thing, even when duck is your main course after a starter of pigeon) and drinking. I hope it didn’t come across as if I’ve been drinking. Still, I’m soberer than I was this time last night. I should also go to bed.

posted in Conferences, Food and Drink, PhD | Tags: Andrew, duck, Oxford, pigeon | 1 Comment »

Romanian is dead

Tuesday 12th August, 2008 @ 10.43am BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

I am signed up to do a French course at Hills Road this autumn.

I also wanted to do a Romanian course, and I was all ever so excited about it, but the teacher’s backed out. They did try to get another one, but failed. I’m not happy.

posted in Academia, Language and Linguistics | Tags: French, Romanian | 2 Comments »

Graduated

Thursday 17th July, 2008 @ 10.42pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

No, not me or even a flask, but my mother.  Last Thursday, in fact.  We went up north on the Wednesday, Colin having taken Wednesday to Friday off work.  We took her two bottles of pink fizzy wine and some chocolates, none of which lasted very long.

On the day itself, we all tarted ourselves up and went to Sunderland, where I had to buy a bag because I’d forgotten the one I meant to bring, and Mam had to buy new shoes just because I was buying something and then she had to buy a bag to put the old shoes in and also just because I was buying a bag.  We had half an hour to kill after that, so we had a pint in the Boulevard, which isn’t any better now than it used to be back in the day when I used to drink there occasionally.  Then we went to the Metro station to meet my sister and her family.

We walked to the Stadium of Light, the venue for the big event, and where we had a box and everything - well posh!  My brother asked if anyone fancied a drink (of course), so he flamboyantly pressed a switch on the wall.  We were impressed!  We did this a few more times, just to make sure it still worked.

We talked through a lot of the ceremony - well, they are very dull, except for the two minutes that the person you’re there for walks across the stage.  After a million pharmacy graduates, it was finally Mam’s turn.  We all cheered loudly and she waved to us a lot, and she shook the bloke’s hand and she walked to the other end of the stage, where got her fake certificate for show (the real one to come in the post) and walked off stage, waving, and that was it.

Then we were treated to the postgraduates, which were particularly exciting because for each of the PhD students, we got told precisely what their theses were about.  Truly rivetting.  I’m glad they don’t do that at Essex!

Afterwards, we were fed (curly fries) and watered (fizzy wine) and I raised a toast, and then Mam looked for her friends and lecturers, but she’d spent too much time time eating and drinking and being toasted and missed them.  My sister and her bloke went back home in Newcastle to drop the bairns off, and the remaining people went to the bar, where we were chided for getting another drink, which we had to guzzle.

After that, we went to Newcastle, where we had a pint of Red Guinness (yes, it really does exist, and it’s fruity and not red) each (except for Colin), then met my sister and her bloke at feeding time.  We had Italian, which was really nice (possibly even worth all the palaver of organising where we were going to eat - it’s a good job I took charge, that’s all I can say!), and some fizzy wine and some red wine and a main course and dessert and coffee, then we went to another pub, then we all went home.  It was very tiring, but a really nice day out.

Colin got the Metro for the first time ever, and we discovered that the only place you can buy a ticket is from the machine in the station and that it doesn’t take notes, which is really inconvenient when oyu haven’t got enough change but you do have notes, so you have to go to the nearest shop and buy some pop and get all their change on the way to Newcastle and have to change a tenner with your pseudo-brother-in-law in order to get enough change for the return journey.  And no-one even checks your ticket!

Next day, I had to drive all the way back to Cambridge.  Luckily, I wasn’t hungover, which was nice.

posted in Academia, Food and Drink | No Comments »

Proud

Tuesday 1st July, 2008 @ 7.27pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

My mother has got herself a degree - a 2.2 in BSc Biomedical Science.  Congratulations, Mam!  I’m well proud!

posted in Academia | Tags: family | No Comments »

Adjectives

Sunday 27th April, 2008 @ 11.31pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

This Is Unfortunate

I did a whole essay on the order of adjectives. I wonder if my lecturer would have been as amused at this example as he was at my Scottish smoked salmon example.

posted in English, MA | Tags: adjectives, English | No Comments »

Aspect in the past

Friday 25th April, 2008 @ 8.53am BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

DCblog: On `boilt’

Yesterday, I was discussing aspect in Catalan with my supervisor. It’s all very complicated - more so than you might think. More so than my brain get comprehend, anyway.

So it is with interest that I come across what appears to be a distinction in aspect in synthetic forms (i.e. ‘one word’, not ‘made up, invented’) in certain verbs in British English. The -t form (e.g. burnt) is more focused on a completed action, that only happened the once and it’s over and done with (The house burnt down, to give Crystal’s example) and the -ed form is for more continuous actions, perhaps it’s more describing a state: The house burned for hours (again using Crystal’s example). Anyway, the point is that the -t form appears to correspond to the Catalan preterite tense and the -ed form, only where there is an alternative -t form, corresponds to the Catalan imperfect tense. Yet another complication to add to the list provided by Wheeler, Yates and Dols (1999). It’s possibly reasonably safe to say that this would also to apply to other Romance languages.

–

Wheeler, M. W., Yates, A. & Dols, N. (1999). Catalan: a comprehensive grammar, Routledge Grammars, Routledge, London.

posted in English, Language and Linguistics, Morphology, PhD, Romance languages | Tags: Andrew, Catalan, English | 3 Comments »