DCblog: On doing linguistic research

I have only just discovered David Crystal, the eminent linguist and expert on the English language, has a blog. I was scanning some of his entries, and found this sentence in the middle of the above post:

If a friend of mine has a baby, I usually congratulate them on the birth of fresh data.

It’s a twist on my original theory, but it can still be classed as evidence in favour of the argument that linguists view children as something to study.

On Friday, I got up very early (5 a.m.) and drove to Guildford, Surrey in order to attend the University of Surrey’s Morphology Meeting that was being held that day. The guest speaker, Miriam Butt, spoke about case in South Asian languages. We’d been given a reading list, but it made much more sense with someone going through it, rather than just reading from the page about stuff I didn’t really understand, like ergativity. I’m a lot happier about it now.

Andrew, my supervisor, did his latest on Hungarian case, which involved a wee bit of GPFM, which I understood having done something similar with Spanish at the LAGB, which was nice. There was a talk by someone else, that I didn’t really understand, then Grev Corbett, a proper linguist - and famous to boot! - did a bit on canonical case. He really looked like he was enjoying himself when he was talking, which made it an enjoyable talk.

One of the things I like about these conferences is that the students, especially the new ones, ask the other students who all the proper linguists are. You discover that you’re in the same room as some famous linguist or other, and that said famous linguist isn’t anything like you thought they’d be like.

One person I did meet was very interesting to me - Andrew’s other supervisee! He divides his time between Perth (Australia), Boston (USA) and London, so even though I live in Cambridge, I’m still Andrew’s nearest student. He’s doing something similar to me but on Ancient Greek, it would seem, and part time at that. I’ll know more on Thursday, when we all meet at Essex to discuss our theses.

I also discovered that the organiser of the meeting lives in Cambridge, so I gave her a lift home as she’d come by train. It was nice to have someone to talk to on the journey back. I’ve also now got another linguist in Cambridge to talk linguistics to, so it can’t be bad.

When I was doing my MA, I noticed that linguists only seem to have children in order to study language acquisition, language change and so on.

The Zwickys are examining their daughter’s inflectional morphology here.

Fascinating, but if Opal’s version became popular, how would we say peoples as in nations or races? Peoples or peopleses? Maybe we could use the then obsolete person or persons.

I went to YEMM3 at the weekend. I felt a smidge out of my depth, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I received an email yesterday sent to a linguistics mailing list to which I am subscribed. They’re holding a conference later this year, with a special themed section organised jointly by my supervisor and this other linguist. I emailed my supervisor to tell him that my MA Dissertation looked scarily as if it fell into the special themed category. He said he was glad I noticed and do I want to submit an abstract? My traitorous fingers typed in reply that I would.

Feckity-arse cack badgers, as C would say.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed and dry cleaners depressed?Laundry workers could decrease, eventually becoming depressed and depleted! Even more, bedmakers will be debunked, baseball players will be debased, landscapers will be deflowered, bulldozer operators will be degraded, software engineers will be detested, and even musical composers will eventually decompose.

Linguist jokes

So has Kate Moss been deposed?

My head is hurting; I can read no more Spanish tonight. I don’t know what’s worse, reading Stump or reading Spanish (Gramática de la lengua española by the Real Academia Española). I suppose the Spanish will get easier with practice. But do you know, the worst thing is, the book is one of those old, musty ones, and it’s making me sneeze! At least Stump is a brand new shiny one from the CUP shop.

That is not a compliment to Stump’s work, is it? Oh, well. He should have tried harder. It is my mission to improve upon his work!

Just not tonight.