Category: school

least expected sentence in a linguistics text

I can’t read this out loud without laughing:

Judy’s tight laugh seemed to match her tight jeans, her speed-thin body, her dark eye liner, and her tense front vowels.

I read it to John (snicker, snicker), and he responded: “What is that? Linguistics porn?”

No, it’s actually from my assigned reading for my class. It’s from a book called Linguistc Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity at Belten High, by Penelope Eckert (2000). The line in question is the first line of the main text. (See?)

But hey, porn for linguists. Maybe that’s a writing career I could look into…

She lay back in ecstasy, emitting a series of non-linguistic speech events, first a pharyngeal with a low front vowel, then moving up towards a uvular, followed by a long, drawn-out tense back rounded vowel. [ʕa ʁuuu:] she vocalized. “You just did what?” she asked, her final voiceless alveolar plosive fully released and strongly aspirated, so excited she hadn’t realized she’d left her wh-word in situ…

overload…overtired…overdue

I’m going through one of those overload times again. I’m having trouble fitting everything together. While I have massively more time now than I did, say, a year ago, I am still constantly feeling like I don’t have nearly enough time. Which leads me to stay up too late. Which leads me to not get enough sleep. Which leads me to stumble around like a zombie much of the day. Once Phoebe goes to bed, I putter around for a bit before digging in to my work. Then I end up realizing how late it is, and how little I’ve gotten done, so I stay up later. Often in a half-panicked state. Overall, my efficiency is not high these days. I’ve been spending a lot of time working and doing work, but the quantity of actual work I achieve keeps falling short of my expectations.

And due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is my own idiocy, I did not finish an assignment that was due for my class last night. Not because I hadn’t put time into it. Not even because I put off starting it. But because I sank a lot of time into learning stuff that was not actually central to the assignment. And then in the last push to finish, I experienced some technical difficulties. Which set me back a few hours.

At around 1:00 Sunday night (or Monday morning, if you prefer), I realized that even though I could hypothetically finish the write-up within an hour or two, I just couldn’t manage to push myself any more. And I realized that I would be putting my health and safety at risk to pull an all-nighter. I’m too old to push myself that way, and driving to class on no sleep would have been irresponsible.

So I decided to ask for an extension. Even though it probably means getting some points off, possibly even a lot of points. But I’ll take my lumps. Lord knows somebody needs to knock some sense into me.

I need to adjust my expectations. It really doesn’t matter in the slightest what grade I get in this class I’m taking. By that, I mean, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if I don’t get an A. Maybe it would even be good for me. This perfectionism thing is pretty counter-productive. I really need to get over it.

I shouldn’t drink coffee

I’ve been up since 4 a.m., and this time it’s not directly due to Phoebe.

I’ve just come out of a really hectic stretch of days working on a class assignment, working on editing paper that I’m co-authoring with two of my bosses, and preparing a demonstration and presentation of some soundfile and data processing tools for my advisor and two other professors I work with. All of this was while dealing with trying to re-adjust to East Coast time, and even more difficult, trying to get Phoebe back on an East Coast schedule. Then on Tuesday, I was counting on having a solid work day, as Phoebe goes to daycare. But the daycare provider had a nasty virus, so we kept Phoebe home, leading to a loss of 8 or so productive hours. Then we had a rough night where the furnace shut off and Phoebe woke up cold and screaming, leading to an additional loss of sleep and productive hours.

Anyhow, I had the meeting to talk about the file-processing things yesterday, and was so tired from the sleep deprivation of the previous few days, I stopped for a coffee at a Dunkin Donuts on my drive in. (And no, I didn’t get a donut. I was strong.) I don’t drink much caffeine these days, as I know it keeps me awake at night. But I figured falling asleep while driving would be a bigger price to pay than another largely sleepless night. Which is true. But I am really tired, and strangely wired. Even now. Over 12 hours over finishing the coffee, which was supposed to be half decaf, but I’m suspecting really wasn’t. Or maybe it’s just stress. In either case, I was too tired to do much of anything last night, but too wired to sleep.

I’m hoping to wind down soon. Because I’m still too tired to actually concentrate on work, and I still have a lot to do. And I probably shouldn’t spend the day blogging…

grammaticality judgments

I started grad school in the fall of 2000, after a few years away from academia. (I spent those years mostly working in bookstores, in case you wondered.) One of the two classes I took that first semester was Syntax I, a rollicking good time of drawing syntactic trees and judging the grammaticality of sentences like:

  1. Fred put peanut butter on the sandwich. (Sure. Sounds grammatical.)
  2. Bob ate the sandwich. (Totally grammatical. Where’s my sandwich?)
  3. I asked what Fred put peanut butter on. (Yeah, it’s grammatical.)
  4. *Bob ate the sandwich that I asked what Fred put peanut butter on. (Huh?)

The class was a rite of passage, as all new grad students to the program (more or less) had to take it. There were also a lot of undergrad linguistics majors in the class. The course was a fair amount of work, with fairly long drawn-out homework assignments. I didn’t find it too hard, just time-consuming to do the readings and homeworks. But most of the students found it quite challenging, it seemed, and many had a lot of trouble with the homeworks.

One day, when our homework was passed back to us, I happened to see that the woman sitting next to me got a score of 100. The same as me. And I found myself feeling surprised. And I was actually quite startled by my surprise. Because I recognized that it was not just about the challenge to my ego resulting from someone else getting high scores. I realized that I was surprised that she, this particular woman, was also getting high scores.

Why was I surprised, I wondered. She was a grad student in my program, like I was. Clearly she had a college degree, was educated. And from the brief interactions we’d had up to that point, I had a generally good impression of her. She was friendly, outgoing, enthusiastic. But I realized, as I reflected on the incident after class as I headed home, that I had been surprised to realize that she was also smart. And I came to the realization that the reason I hadn’t expected her to be smart was that she had a distinct regional accent.

It was disturbing to me to realize that I’d had this prejudice. Me. A student of language and linguistics. I know that the mainstream American dialect, the accent of TV newscasters and movie stars, is just one of many varieties of the English language. No better, no worse. All language varieties are systematic, grammatical. And the variety of a language that a person speaks is no reflection of that person’s intelligence or abilities, but merely a reflection of that person’s history.

But our society (and I’m sure it’s not just ours) places value on certain language varieties above others. People feel, whether it’s conscious or not, that certain accents sound more intelligent than others. To the average American, for example, a person speaking with a “refined” British accent will sound intelligent, even if that person is dumb as a stump. Likewise, many Americans will consider regional U.S. dialects to make a person sound uneducated. Many speakers of regional dialects consciously “lose their accent,” or shift to the mainstream accent, in order to avoid perceived stigma.

I’ve thought about this brief incident from my own past a bit lately, following various topics in my sociolinguistics class. Specifically, I’ve thought a lot about how perceptions about language affect speakers of non-Mainstream dialects, particularly AAVE (African American Vernacular English). Like the mainstream dialect, AAVE is complex and rule-governed system, albeit with some different grammatical rules than the mainstream dialect. Many people, however, including educators, actually know very little about these non-mainstream dialects. Instead, they often assume that speakers are speaking ungrammatical English, or that the speakers are even somehow deficient cognitively. The impact of this can be particularly harsh on young children starting school.

It’s hard for me to admit that I’ve also been susceptible to subtle linguistic prejudice. But this awareness has opened my eyes to the real risks of discrimination to children and other speakers of non-mainstream varieties of English. And I’m heartened by the fact that many Universities now require teachers-to-be to take a course in linguistics, which hopefully will give them some background knowledge of AAVE and other linguistic variation.

High school movies that are more fun than high school

I’m back from my midterm. Relatively unscathed. But I hate tests. Did I mention that? It’s not that I don’t do well on them, it’s just that they stress me out. And I’d recently thought I was done with them. I mean, I’m so over that sort of thing. Shouldn’t I be over that? Hello? Mid 30s. Have an advanced degree. Not to mention house, husband and now offspring. But studying for a test makes me feel like I’m back in high school. [Shudder.]

Thinking about high school made me think about high school movies. Some of which are way more fun to watch than going to high school. So, here’s a list. Think of it as a syllabus. And yes, there will be a test.

High school movies that are more fun than high school

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
    The movie’s not quite as much fun as the show, but still fun nonetheless. Valley girls and vampires. Plus Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee Wee Herman) has this hilarious extended death scene that is such a treat.
  • Heathers (1989)
    Cliques. Cruelty. Croquet. A wonderfully dark comedy that reminds me that I’m oh-so-glad to be done with high school. Eskimo.
  • Clueless (1995)
    Based on Jane Austen’s Emma. This one’s actually quite sweet. And also has a cool soundtrack.
  • 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
    Based on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew,” and features at least one fairly kick-ass teenage girl character.
  • Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
    Dude. A totally righteous high school movie. With bodacious time travel.
  • Back to the Future (1985)
    The classic Michael J. Fox work. More time travelling, more high school.
  • Better Off Dead (1985)
    I love John Cusack. Especially his earlier works. And it has raisins in it. You like raisins.
  • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
    This movie appealed to me more when I was actually a teenager than it does now, but it’s still fun. It bears no resemblance to my own high school experience.
  • The Breakfast Club (1985)
    Having gone to high school in the 80s, I must include a token of the brat pack oeuvre.

    • midterm mayhem

    I have a midterm tomorrow. Which just feels so incredibly wrong.

    But aside from that, it means I absolutely should be spending my day (or whatever available moments I have during the day) studying, reviewing my notes, and pondering the meanings of various tidbits of sociolinguistics terminology. And it means I absolutely should not be sitting here at my laptop goofing off. Because that would be wrong.

    Here are some things I absolutely should not be writing today:

  • a school-related list of movies
  • my personal adventures yesterday, and our first post-Phoebe “party”
  • a description of the state of our home post-party (is there such a thing as post-party depression?)
  • a discussion of the unexpected spike in my blog hits during a couple of hours yesterday
  • a treatise on the comparative merits of ducks in various types of dishwashers
  • an in-depth corpus-based analyis of squid discourse
  • an advice column about the etiquette of exchanging bananas
  • anything to do with pants
  • a list of things that I should not be writing about

    • Here’s some of what I should be writing about:

  • the nitty gritty of calling a language variety a dialect or language (you say it’s a language, I say it’s a dialect, let’s call the whole thing off)
  • the distinctions among a pidgin, a creole, a koiné, and contact jargons (and not the distinctions among pigeons, crayolas, coins and contact lenses)
  • Acrolects, Mesolects and Basolects (oh, my!)
  • the monogenesis theory, the polygenesis theory and the bioprogram hypothesis (which sound straight out of scifi, but really aren’t)
  • dialect continua, diglossia, decreolization and relexification (which sound almost sexy, but probably aren’t)
  • killer languages

    • wearing my late-night cranky pants

    We’re down in New York again, to visit John’s parents. John’s father has been in and out of the hospital since July, when he (re)broke his hip. So we’ve been coming down here to visit quite often. (Actually, this summer, we estimate that we spent more time here than at home.) I’m glad that we are able to come down here pretty easily, as it’s only a 3 and half hour drive for us. And it’s so important to be with family, especially in difficult times.

    Anyhow, John’s father is back in the hospital again, and here we are. To offer help and support. My main job is to offer Phoebe, who offers much cuteness and huggage. Never underestimate the power of distraction.

    But, while I’m glad we can be here, and even pushed for us to make this trip down this week, I also (selfishly) am going batty. Because I have even less time to myself than I have at home. I don’t know why I expect to get things done on these trips. I had in mind all sorts of work I’d get done, and packed accordingly. Book to read for my class. Stationery for writing the last of my seriously overdue thank you notes. Soundfiles on my laptop for annotation. Microphone to do some recordings for work. Articles to read for work. But the days slip away with socializing with John’s mother, visiting the hospital, and caring for Phoebe, who is going through a tough teething period. The most I’ve gotten done of my work was to start the reading for my class, and then get distracted…

    And once again, here it is really freakin’ late at night. And rather than sleeping or getting to any of the work I should be doing, I sit here with my laptop writing about the work I should be doing and the sleep I should be getting.

    behind

    The passage of time seems to be a recurring theme in my life these days. Or perhaps a running theme. I always seem to be running late, or otherwise running behind schedule. (At the same time, I do very little actual running. Since I’m mostly sitting on my behind.) (Sorry, I can’t resist a pun. It’s a sickness.)

    So here I am. Doing my reading for my sociolinguistics class. Which is not until Tuesday. It’s Friday night. So that means I’m way ahead of the game, right? Well, I should be. I mean, I’m reading the right chapter for this week. But here’s the deal. I’m reading from an old edition of the textbook. So far, it hasn’t been much of an issue. But now we’re reading the chapter on Language Planning. And it’s a little bizarre to be reading about language policies in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia “today”. So you see, even though I’m a couple of days ahead, I’m still more than a decade behind. This edition came out in 1992.

    15 years ago.

    This has lead me to reflect upon a number of things.

    As I mentioned before, the class I’m taking is mostly full of undergrads. Probably mostly around 20 years old. At that time my edition of the textbook came out, I was 20 years old, and an undergrad. At that time most of the other students in this class would have been in kindergarden. In 1992, they would have been reading, what, Dr. Seuss? Books in the “I Can Read” series? The Berenstein Bears?

    And what seems particularly striking to me, as I read this outdated chapter, is that these folks probably have no firsthand memories of the existence of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. And they grew up without knowing the Cold War.

    Anyhow, I don’t have much time to write more about this now. The reflections I’ve had about growing up in the Cold War era. About the impact of the Cold War on U.S. culture and pop culture. But at some point I may write more…and maybe even make a list.

    Ok. Back to my reading. And I wonder why I’m running behind?

    …and then she was all like “that’s what I’m sayin’. Quotative ‘be like’ is used all the damn time.”

    A couple nights ago, I posted a bit about the quotative use of “be like.” That’s the usage of the verb to be plus like to signal a quotation, like in the following constructed example:

    So I ran into this guy I know, and he was all like “hey, baby,” and I was like “huh? what’s your deal.”

    So I posted some stuff, based on some reflections I’ve had about an assignment for a class I’m taking. (And by the way, I haven’t yet done the readings relating to that assignment. There’s actually fairly extensive literature on this topic.) And anyhow, a friend of mine from school made some interesting comments. She uses the quotative “be like” as an example to illustrate prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar with her intro to linguistics students. Here’s some of what she says:

    Two points I make are: 1) quotative “be like” is used far more widely and by much more of the population (and extends into much older segments of the population) than we assume, 2) quot. “be like” could be grammatical someday. Both points surprise the students.

    She’s got her students keeping an ear out for uses of the quotative “be like,” and particularly paying attention to the age/generation of the speaker. (‘Cause she’s all like, “I totally use ‘be like’ all the time, and I’m as old as dirt.” Well, what she said was that she has “fallen out of the traditional ‘youth’ demographic.” As so many of us have fallen.) Maybe we’ll get to hear more about this later. (I mean, the use of “be like” across generations, not the falling out of demographics.)

    As far as the second point goes, I totally agree that the quotative “be like” could be grammatical some day. I actually expect it will be. What with the way its use is ramping up, I don’t even think it will be that far in the future. My friend comments that she believes that the use of “said” is already getting rarer, and that she expects she only uses it in more formal situations. I would posit that it’s not only about formality. It actually serves a function that isn’t directly covered by other verbs in English. I mean, it allows you to quote someone without committing to the actual verbiage. I guess we could otherwise say “said something like” or “thought something like,” but really I think “was like” means “spoke words and/or produced gestures and/or had thoughts indicating an attitude/reaction/emotional state that could be characterized by the following linguistic expression, which may or may not have actually been uttered by the person to whom it is attributed.” The verb “say” implies more of a commitment to actual spoken words, while “be like” doesn’t. I’m imagining possible dialogs (which I apparently enjoy doing…):

    A: He was all like “you suck.”
    B: Did he say that?
    A: No, but he gave me that look.

    vs.

    A: He said “you suck.”
    B: Did he say that?
    A: WTF? Are you actually listening to me? Yeah, I said he said it. You suck.

    Okay. There are my musings for now. I still have some fun googling results to share, but right now I think I’m going to try to get a wee bit of a nap. (Phoebe woke me up around 5:00 this morning.) And then I should probably do some of my actual work.