more carrots (and peas)

A few years ago, I was working on an intonation project with several people. As part of the research, we were annotating soundfiles for specific phenomena. One of the things we were annotating was the location of a the maximum f0, the point in a given region of speech where the pitch is highest. For the specific project we were doing, we were labelling this point with the symbol ^, also known as a caret. It came up along the way that in some examples, we also wanted to mark another point that was linked to the caret to indicate when the peak f0 formed more of a plateau in shape. It was decided that we should use p to indicate a plateau. In reviewing our decisions about our labelling scheme, one of the women on the project was stressing that while not every peak would have a plateau marker, every plateau should be marked also for the peak. My coworkers looked at me questioningly when I started to snicker at this review of our protocol.

“No Ps without carets,” I said, by way of explanation.


Here are some multi-colored carrots I got at a farmer’s market in July of 2009. I took the picture then, too. I don’t think the carrots would still look this attractive if we still had them.

Here’s one last serving of vegetables for you:

Eat every carrot and pea on your plate.

Try saying that one out loud to a small child (or to an adult with the mind of a 12-year-old).

blocked

My nephew, Diego, is back in the hospital again. I don’t remember when the last time I wrote about him was. I know some people who visit here have kept up with the updates on my sister’s blog.¹ For anyone who hasn’t followed there, I’m happy to say that Diego successfully reached the end of his treatments about 3 weeks ago. It was a long hard road, with chemo and radiation treatments following the successful removal of the tumor back in May. The last chemo treatment meant that Diego was going to finally get to start healing and get back to normal life. And the last week or so, it sounded like he was really getting some energy back.

But cancer treatments are really hard on a body, especially on such a little one. Now he is in the hospital with what appears to be a bowel obstruction. He had one a few months ago that needed to be addressed surgically. It sounds like there is reason to be somewhat optimistic that the obstruction can resolve itself without surgery. We are really hopeful that this will turn out to be the case, as another major abdominal surgery will surely impede his progress getting back to normal soon. Any positive thoughts and prayers you want to send his way would be appreciated.


This somewhat unrelated photo was one I took in May.

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¹ My sister has done some really powerful writing on that blog, while documenting Diego’s treatment and the emotional rollercoaster they’ve been riding. Her posts on finding meaning and how they found out about Diego’s cancer are two recent ones that I’ve found especially moving.


Ack.

It’s 11:47 p.m., and I just realized that I have neither blogged nor taken photos today. I did bake muffins. Maybe I should post the muffins, but I don’t want to get crumbs all over my laptop. A quick look through my photo library left me uninspired about a photo to post. Instead I guess I’ll just ramble. Did you know that I am very capable of typing a lot of words without really saying much of anything?

I will say that today was an enjoyable lazy Sunday. After a long day out yesterday, at a birthday party and then visiting friends with a new baby, we were all tired. Today we didn’t go anywhere or do much of anything. I napped for a good portion of the day.

Now I have about 3 minutes left to take a picture.

Ack.

more peas

I’m seriously falling asleep sitting here with my computer, so I’m just going to post something for the sake of posting something. Nablopomo just brings out that kind of amazing quality. Here is a photo I took of a bowl of peas back in July. (Do you see Phoebe in it?)

peas and carrots or green beans

Imagine that I say to you, “Tonight for dinner we’ll be having peas and carrots or green beans.”

What do you think our menu options are? Can we be having both peas and green beans? Are just green beans an option? If we have peas, do we have to have carrots?

What I’m trying to get at is that the phrase peas and carrots or green beans is ambiguous. How you interpret it depends on what syntactic structure, or bracketing, you assign to it.

In this case, there are two different ways you can bracket it. You can have:

So, with the one bracketing you can either have both peas and carrots or you can have both peas and green beans. With the other you can have both peas and carrots or you can have just green beans. I’m afraid that if you want only carrots, you are out of luck. You are only allowed to have them with peas, or not at all. And if you don’t like peas, you’ll have to hope that you’re getting the bracketing on the right, because at least then you stand a chance of getting just green beans. Artichokes are completely out of the question, which is a shame, because I really like artichokes.

Why am I telling you this? Because I like vegetables. Also because this actually relates to my research. The project I’m working on right now is looking at how people produce and perceive ambiguous coordinate structures like these, especially with respect to intonation. Because when you speak, you generally (but not always) give cues to the structure you intend. You may not even realize when you’re saying it that your menu options are ambiguous, but chances are that if you are offering peas and carrots or green beans, you will use aspects of your speech–specifically the timing of what you say and the patterns of the pitch of your voice as you say it–to indicate which structure you mean. Your prosody acts to group the words you say into meaningful chunks so we know what our vegetable options are.

So, what will it be? Do your options look like this?

Or this?

Images by John. Vegetables prepared by me.

(This confusing bit of a post is brought to you by a tired brain, and was in part prompted by a two-month-old request from Nora that I write more about linguistics. I just hope she likes peas.) (At some point, I’ll try to tell you a bit more about what I’m actually looking at, when it doesn’t involve vegetables.)

more scribbling with light

I played around a bit more with making ghost photos last night. I was having a lot of fun. Perhaps these reveal more about my methods. (I’ll explain myself soon. But for right now, I’m so tired I can barely form sentences and need to get to bed.)

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falling down on the job

I’ve been sitting here working, denting my usual spot on the couch, starting to fall asleep, and thinking I should go to bed. Then I had that moment of panic when I realized that I hadn’t blogged today. Happily, it wasn’t even 11:00 yet when I noticed. So, here we are, with another lackluster post.

But here are some photos from after the tree work was done.

Last night, the guy who did the tree work told me that the big tree next to our house was over 100 feet tall, and was over a 100 years old. I hadn’t realized it was so old. (Or so tall, for that matter.) I’m really sad about it, and keep questioning myself about whether getting it cut down was the right thing to do. Obviously whoever built this house made an effort to keep the tree when the house was built, since our house is only about 30 years old. At the same time, I don’t see how we could have left it. It was too tall to maintain, and overhanging the house. We had to have people climb it in the past to cut back the limbs. We had multiple recommendations to have it removed, and there has been so much damage to the back of the house due to over-shading.

As you can see, it’s not like our yard is now totally bereft of trees. I just feel bad about the whole thing.

ghost of the pants


The pants phantasm…a pantasmic apparition.

Today marks the 4th anniversary of the start of my blog, and also a day that has personal significance for me and my pants. I feel like I should have something pithy, or at least witty, to say. I wanted to write something fun or silly or brilliant featuring pants. It’s been ages since I’ve put together a pants list. But instead of writing about pants, I wrote the word pants. In light. Which I have to say is actually fairly fun and silly. It is also luminous, which is at least a synonym of brilliant.¹

I have to keep chugging away at my research to at least maintain the illusion of progress, and there hasn’t been much time in my day or room in my head for blogging or pants. I’m being haunted by the spectre of an abstract submission deadline for a conference, which is looming only 2 weeks away. I had really hoped to have something ready to submit, but it’s looking less and less likely. But I want to keep my momentum, and hopefully I’ll be ready to submit something more substantial to another conference with a spring deadline. And there’s that tiny chance that I can still make the December 1st deadline. A little ghost of a chance.

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¹ I did not edit this photo at all, and I am quite pleased with myself for figuring out how to do this.

going after the low-hanging fruit

A few weeks back, Sue had a theme for our project 365 group of “idioms.” You’d think I’d be all over that one, but I totally missed the boat. When push came to shove, I came up empty-handed. Which is just a crying shame, since I think idioms are the bee’s knees.


A low-hanging apple, from September.

(It’s been challenging keeping up with the daily blogging and the daily photo-taking. I’ve been really pushing forward with my research, and still busy with other life obligations, so I find myself looking for quick-and-easy subjects. Apparently this includes a fair amount of fruit.)