I did my talk this morning, which was at 9.30 - the first one of the day (apart from the ones in the other sessions, that I wanted to see, but couldn’t really not be there for my own) - and the morning after the conference dinner, at which there was wine and overzealous waiting staff in the college dining room. The food was delicious, though. All the food I’ve had there has been good (although I was too nervous to eat breakfast this morning, unfortunately). There was beer afterwards in the pub, and a late night, and an early morning because I woke up before 5.30 and couldn’t really get back to sleep again for worrying about my talk.

I was happy with how it went, though, in the end, although it was a bit short, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s a bad thing when speakers go on for too long. I could answer all the questions, although with hindsight, I could have expanded a bit more on one or two of them. But it’s all good practice for my Big Fat Greek Adventure, which starts on Tuesday.

Because my talk finished five minutes early, I was able to go to one of the other sessions after all, which was good.

Today was the last day of the conference, which has been really good. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, except for many of those in the ten hours before my talk! We’re off out tonight for noodles, then tomorrow, it’s the return to normality, then a debriefing session on Monday, then off, as I said, on my Big Fat Greek Adventure.

Such is the life of a PhD student!

Oh, and I’m losing my voice because I’m talking so much! I started off the week with a sore throat and then midweek, it was trying to be a cold, but I’ve been drinking Lemsip and Beechams Cold and Flu all week, and it seems to have been staved off, whether as a result of the medication or my super-duper immune system, I’m not sure. I’ve got a cup of hot honey and lemon Beechams now.

I had my first ever supervisory board meeting today. It was to mark the end of the year and to see if I should be recommended to proceed to the next year or not. I was told I’d have to do a 5 minute presentation, but I didn’t give myself much time to prepare one. Luckily, I wangled my way out of it: my board chair asked if I wanted to do one, and I said I’d rather not if I didn’t have to, so he said that because my supervisor, my board advisor and himself have all seen me present before, I needn’t, so I said I wouldn’t. The meeting finished on time - my advisor concluded it was the lack of presentation that did it. The chair went through the form me and my supervisor had had to fill in (separately, of course!), and all went well, so he filled in his bit and said the board recommend I proceed.

It’s funny; last term, I didn’t really seem to get anything done with my PhD.  All I seemed to be doing was preparing for presentations.  I’m sure I wasn’t just doing that, though.  I did go through some Romance grammar books, but I didn’t get very far.  I didn’t have many Supervisions, either.  I didn’t do any written work at all.

This term, it’s totally different.  I still do have to prepare for presentations, but I’m also doing proper stuff now.  I’m being given defined stuff to do and discussing it at much more frequent Supervisions.  It’s a bit of a shock to the system after so long of not really doing very much of anything!  Of course, I’m still not doing very much of anything at the moment, seeing as I’m blogging.

Time to get back to those English auxiliaries!

Same as last time, different audience. Me doing the whole thing. Luckily, Andrew answered the questions for me, despite having said he wasn’t going to, which was evil of him. I told him that as well, and he said that was one of a PhD supervisor’s perks, to be cruel to vulnerable people like me. I told him he was sadistic. The next step is to be able to answer the questions myself. I need to be able to pre-empt the questions, and prepare answers for them. Next talk’s in February.

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.

Well, it’s all over now, and I spent a lot of it being very nervous. They did move my bit earlier, so I could spend less time being nervous, and more time being relieved and complimented about how well it went.

The reception of the talk was good: there were a few people who agreed with it, one person who totally disagreed with it (in fact, he came up to me afterwards and said, “Your analysis is wrong,” just like that! I was most taken aback), and one person who learned something from it.  A good result, all in all.

Most importantly, for me personally, was that I spoke nice and loud, not too fast (although I thought I was gabbling somewhat), and it all made sense, and it was what I was supposed to be saying. Such a relief when it was all over, though.

It was good to be able to talk to the other students as well. A nice, friendly bunch.

Got a first draft of the handout for this darn conference I foolishly said I’d present at to read. Got to work out how to insert my MA dissertation in the gap. There’s a month or so to do it all in, and it’s so scary. I’m procrastinating at the moment. Can you tell?