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.