Transneptune

Lately, I’ve been posting over at G+. It’s been longer-than-Twitter-shorter-than-blog type half-baked posts. But I think this warrants a blog post.

In Nora England and B’alam Mateo-Toledo’s endangered languages class, we were discussing the issue of getting community members—most particularly kids, the lynchpin of language revitalization—to care about their endangered language. And most particularly, to care about learning that language.

I thought, immediately, of the (misguided) idea of gamification, that is, adding game-like elements to non-game activities. This is the right impulse but the wrong approach. Better than gamification is what I call “finding the fun”. If there is any hope for getting people to do a non-essential activity, you’ve got to find the ways in which it is fun. Taking things that are fun in other contexts and bolting them on is wrong.

So how do you find the fun in language learning? The fun of language is communication. The fun of language learning is mastery of the language to the end of communication. I think that the first thing is to tell people it’s a game. Huizinga, I think, talked about how games supplant the usual social contract of a group, for the duration of play. So by saying “here’s a game,” and actually making a game, you can get people to do things that they might otherwise be reluctant to do. Now, make the game’s victory condition require communication. Make the game’s rules require communication in the target language. Kids will probably want to learn the skills to play the game, which happen to be the language in question.

Preliminary thoughts.

by Kit
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So, I need to always revisit why I am doing a thing. In this case, grad school seems unpleasant currently, so I am trying to see what it is that I like about it. And really, it is the teaching. I very much want to do that. I am sure that I want to do research and publish things, too, but right now that desire is distant, obscured.

I got a great compliment from a student the other day—she said that I was the only TA she had this semester who seemed to know the material. I then had a conversation with another student about the ways in which what they’re learning in intro Ling isn’t, per se, true, but is, I hope, a set of useful simplifications.

This is probably just end-of-semester workload blues. Lemme write 20 decent pages more and talk with you again. I reckon I’ll be fine in a few weeks.

Tags: grad school, linguistics by Kit
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I fear I have gone a little mad. My mind and time have been so occupied by one thing—linguistics—that I retaliate by thinking about another—games and their design—as much as I can. I am filled with a manic energy, and sleep goes by the wayside. I read for my classes as fast as I can, internalize the ideas and render them almost automatic, and then go back to grappling with whatever the question of the week is—how to encourage this sort of story in a game, how to model that. I get to bed at 3am, I wake up at 9 on the days I can get up late. It all fits, somehow.

The theme of one of the games I am working on is this very madness—not the madness of someone trapped by their own mind, but the madness of someone driven, someone with ideas fighting their way out, demanding to be realized. Jonathan Strange in his time in Venice seems not an altogether inappropriate comparison; I fear that were someone to enter my chambers, I might very well be distracted by the sensation that a pineapple were issuing forth from their mouth, rather than words. Except, here, a pineapple is meant to stand for a narrative structure, or a game idea, or perhaps a strange discourse pattern.

This is what I came here for.

And yet, there is more. I do not simply overflow with game design and lack of sleep. I teach, and hopefully clarify. My students are a joy—they ask questions, they understand the material, they dig deeper until they reach the limit of what I can usefully explain and they can understand. I hope I help more than hinder, of course.

So, I ask your pardon if I have been monomaniacal. I am still here, just full-up. I’ve been singing, some. It helps.

Tags: madness, singing, time management by Kit
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I think those are the truest self-identifications ever applied to me. Everything else about me is relatively ancillary.

Yesterday, I got to take the first steps on actually being a teacher. Today, I got to resume being a student. I’m taking two classes this semester: Syntactic Theory with Barbara Fox, and History of Linguistics in the 20th Century with David Rood.

Both classes have a historical bent, the latter obviously, but the former in that it is taking us through the development of discourse-functional syntax from the seventies (when people began to think that Chomsky’s approach might have some weaknesses) up to now, decade by decade.

Barbara was giving an overview of some of the ideas in discourse-functional syntax, and one really interesting idea stood out: some people have described syntax as being fossilized discourse. I find this idea wonderful—it opens, potentially, a mechanism for answering some of the “why”s that have, in my experience, always been dismissed or hand-waved as part of the set of arbitrary systems in language. Of course, as Barbara warned us, in this field, there are many more questions and notions than answers. That’s OK by me.

History of Linguistics was interesting, too. We had occasion to read some in French, and I am looking forward to reading de Saussure in French. Sadly, no one in the class speaks German—David was thrown for a bit of a loop there, and is gonna try to find some translations or workarounds for all the Prague-school stuff he was going to have us read in German.

This should be good.

Tags: academic quips, cognitive linguistics, learning, teaching by Kit
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The internet is a weirdly wonderful place sometimes.

I was playing TF2 last night, and first off, I ended up playing with some of my internet idols: Lore Sjöberg and Mark Rosenfelder. I knew I was playing with Lore—both recognizing his voice and having his steam username. But when I was playing as a medic and healing someone with the username Zompist, I knew it was Rosenfelder, and was excited.

And the internet makes that kind of contact easy—we were all there to play a game together. I just happened to wander into the right place. It’s not like there was much meaningful communication, as we were mostly focused on the game, but that’s almost the point. It was casual.

Later, with different people, there was another weird and awesome moment. In an arena game, it had gotten down to a Sniper and a Heavy. Without words, they faced each other and the Heavy swapped to melee. So did the Sniper. And they duked it out hand-to-hand. The Heavy even gave the Sniper his Sandvich.

OK, that paragraph won’t mean much to you unless you know TF2. But it was cool.

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On another note, I’m increasingly thinking about grad school and what I’ll do there. I’m quite excited. I have an apartment, I have friends, I have research questions. The latest notion to pop into my head is that twin languages are really interesting. We’ll see if I keep at that, but it serves as a good reminder for me of all the strange little corners of human language that don’t get enough attention.

Tags: brunching, research questions, tf2, twin languages, zompist by Kit
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I sat in on a seminar at Berkeley. Fantastic. I feel like a fish back in water, my mind latching on to novel approaches to familiar problems—the Problem, really. Human language, what is its form? What are its possible forms?

There are reasons I love Cyteen.

The department seems to offer the most wonderful mix of field work and cognitive theory. The brain is most certainly not a Von Neumann architecture computer, though I think that the arguments for considering it a species of computer are compelling. And to talk of Language, of course you need a broad spectrum of data.

Tags: berkeley, cognitive science, cyteen by Kit
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This is kind of hilariously misguided, I think.

Also: moving east in two weeks.  Looking forward to seeing folks.

Tags: bad ideas, east by Kit
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Mark Rosenfelder, over at Zompist’s E-Z Rant Page, has just posted a very interesting review indeed.  I’m glad to see him talking about this; Chomsky’s approach to data has been offending me for a while now, and Rosenfelder is one of my earliest linguistical influences, though essentially a lay one.  Check it out; I’m gonna see about getting the book.

Tags: data-driven linguistics, zompist by Kit
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One can in fact view construction-based theories of syntax as upholding standards of grammar coverage that the original proponents of generative grammar abandoned, as they sought to reduce the theory’s dependence on linguistic facts. Chomsky (1995: 435) describes this shift in the goals of grammarians as follows:  “A look at the earliest work from the mid-1950s will show that many phenomena that fell within the rich descriptive apparatus then postulated, often with accounts of no little interest and insight, lack any serious analysis within the much narrower theories motivated by the search for explanatory adequacy, and remain among the huge mass of constructions for which no principled explanation exists—again, not an unusual concomitant of progress”. It seems safe to say that most proponents of construction-based syntax would not consider the loss of insightful and interesting accounts a mark of progress, and find the search for putatively narrower theories of explanatory adequacy unrequited.

From Kay & Michaelis, forthcoming.  I am in love with construction grammar.  Just re-read the first sentence there.  That is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long while.  I think I might just be an academic at heart.  (But it’s funny because it’s true!)

Tags: academic culture, construction grammar by Kit
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I just met R.M.W. Dixon!  That’s the dude who wrote Ergativity, which I keep in an honored position at my bedside.  I kinda can’t deal with the awesome.  The worst part?  He’s been in Boulder all summer so far and is leaving tomorrow.

Tags: ergativity, famous people, rmw dixon by Kit
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