Transneptune

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’ve never understood the Quaker use of First Day for Sunday. It makes sense only if Saturday is your sabbath—He rested on the seventh day, right?

However, that’s utterly irrelevant to what I intend to write. Today was the first day of my real graduate student career. I had a TA meeting and attended the lecture for the course I’m TAing. Bhuvana gave a nice lecture, for introductory linguistics, and I observed it, I realized, with a different eye.

The material is all well-known to me. So rather than being focused on ideas and concepts, I focused on the structure of the lecture, and the projected structure of the semester. I began to have thoughts about how I might, someday, teach an introductory linguistics lecture. I began to see this as an apprenticeship. I have had four (well, more than that—seven?) years of seeing college teaching from the student’s point of view. Now, I get to see it from a semi-teacher’s point of view.

So, I’m inaugurating a new category for posts: teaching. Linguistics, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Tags: linguistics, quakerism, teaching by Kit
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So, classes, and thus TAing, begin Monday. I’ve been going to some How to TA meetings, and it’s been good. I’ve realized that I have some relevant experience, from explaining ling to my friends all the time, to wrangling classes of 4th graders, to GMing games. As to classes, I remembered that I took a ling grad seminar at Princeton while I was in highschool. I can do this. It’ll be great.

Tags: cross-training, linguistics, teaching by Kit
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Yesterday was good in many, many ways.  Primarily, I attended a talk at UC Boulder by Adele Goldberg, which was excellent.  She argued clearly, presented an interesting but convincing account of the facts observed in her studies (hear that, Chomsky?  Real data!) and also presented a theory that seemed maybe, just maybe, implementable in the context of Machine Learning.  This is all good.

Further, though, I got to have a bit of a talk with Leah, whom I’ve not talked with in too long, and also, finally, saw a red fox here—actually, two!  That is what I call an evening.

If I didn’t have to head off to work shortly, I’d write more.  Ask me about any of these things, and I’ll gladly elaborate.

Tags: construction grammar, foxes, linguistics by Kit
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One quick note before I go to bed: I have just discovered that one of my idols, C.J. Cherryh* is on the board of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, the product of a near-idol of mine, Nicholas Ostler. And, of course, it is not just the conjunction of two people of Coolness, but also that they overlap in the domain of endangered language activism. Too much for me to handle!

Also worth noting, all of them have rather outdated-looking sites, except Ostler, for whom I cannot find a personal site at all.

* Cherryh is actually responsible for my interest in linguistics. Lon story short, her introductory Latin lessons caused me to act on my passive earlier interest in Latin, which in turn got me interested in making up languages, which in turn got me interested in seeing how human language actually worked. And here I am today.

Tags: c.j. cherryh, endangered language, idols, linguistics, nicholas ostler by Kit
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…which I keep wanting to type as “piranha”.

A mysterious commenter known only as “X” posted a link to this abstract.  I didn’t approve the comment, as the poster was too mysterious, but the article looks interesting, though in a somewhat dubious location on the internet.

However, one thing mentioned in the abstract seemed worth noting in particular: Everett makes many claims about how this one thing he sees in their culture (the Immediacy of Experience Principle, or IEP — gotta have your TLAs!) leads to all these grammatical features, or lacunae, really.  However, he provides no evidence of a general correlation; the linked-to article purports to show that there are other cultures with the same sort of “IEP” that do not have similarly constrained grammar.  That’s just the sort of research I want to see regarding Everett’s claims.

Tags: how to do science in a mushy field, linguistics, pirahã by Kit
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So, I am reading Dan Everett’s very interesting book Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes. His data and observations I trust very much, but his analyses are bizarre, as the following indicates: [Read more →]

Tags: linguistics, linguists need to study math, pirahã by Kit
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