walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-01-28 12:06 am
walkingshadow) wrote2005-01-28 12:06 am
You know what's weird? I've heard it before, but this time I really believe!
I was going to make this post all about how lovely the weather was tonight (very windy, cool but not raw, slightly foggy) and how fabulous I felt coming out of Step with Ann (super fabulous! bouncy and bendy with my lungs full of air!), and how pleasing it was to pick up a package at the front desk (thanks ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
afropuff!), but then I opened my mailbox and found an official DEAR STUDENT that told me one of my scholarships was being returned DUE TO INSUFFICIENT CREDIT HOURS and my step sort of lost its spring. Apparently I took too long in getting someone to sign me into Thesis Writing, and apparently nine credits isn't good enough for everybody—though I've found it to be working so nicely for me. The terse communiqué is dated January 13 and I'll spend my day tomorrow first at the Office for Student Financial Affairs (JOY) to see if I can get the money back if I register for more credits (because on the grand master list of Things To Do, "owe the University a couple of thousand dollars" is duking it out with "invest in some syringes and work on a heroin habit" for dead last), and if so I will, you know, register for more credits, possibly thesis writing, and barring that, possibly anything I think I can get away with jumping into three weeks after the start of the semester.
What I'd originally planned to do tomorrow was, yes, go casting around for a thesis advisor (am I really serious about this? I mean really?) and then, like, come up with a thesis TOPIC, and then hand in my degree application. Because I want one, please. The application itself is quite a lot of fun: a single sheet of all the degrees offered by all the colleges of the University, and you check off the one(s) you're applying for. At face value, there is nothing to stop you from saying, "a Master of Agribusiness! I'd like one of those! Or a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine? And maybe a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering to round out my collection." For a few minutes during my freshman year I strongly considered double-majoring in history and astronomy; then I would have graduated with a BA and a BS, and won at life. So much for that. I'm a little stumped as to how exactly I want my name to appear on the diploma. First and last name only? Middle name? Middle initial?
Coming out of the gym the other night I ran into a high school friend that I've kept in touch with sporadically while we've been up here, and after we confirmed that yes, we were on the four-year plan, we agreed on just how much we were ready to go. It's senioritis all over again; what was familiar last year is stifling this year, the freshman are alien, I'm tired of strangers living with me, and I'm really tired of Turlington Hall. This is about pacing too. I meant to be here four years, and it's almost four years, and I'm done with this now. This doesn't necessarily mean I don't want to go to graduate school now, or take classes ever again, because I felt impatient and outgrown all through my last year of high school but never thought of not coming here. This graduate-school ambivalence has more to do with not getting letters, not moving to take the GRE, not investigating; a general stalling-out. And if I'm not sure what I want to be doing or where, I don't think just going anywhere is really the answer. I keep mentioning the political language think-tank, and everyone keeps mentioning it back to me, but do I really want to spend my time analyzing political language? Not only following politics, but paying attention to what politicians are actually saying? There are few things I enjoy less. I wonder if dictionaries would have me, going out to collect words and usages.
The primary question is what do you want to do? and my answer has always, always been I DON'T KNOW. In second grade when everyone confidently declared their intentions to grow up and be doctors and firemen, I wrote a poem about how great it was that I didn't have to decide on a career now because I sure as hell didn't know. I'm pretty sure what I don't want is to get a job and stay there for fifty years, climbing up whatever ladder there is to climb until retirement and social security and fuck-all. I come from Florida. I know I need to work because I need a source of income to keep myself clothed and housed and fed, but as for something that I want to do with my time, as for what would keep me active and engaged from day to day? I'd need to either be creating something or discovering something—making connections, finding out what makes something work, or happen, and why. I like learning, I like talking about what I've learned, and yeah, I might still end up a college professor and lecture on phonotactics all day because isn't it COOL? The other problematic part of the traditional job search-and-selection process is the necessary narrowing down and subsequent falling off of all my options. What if I like everything? Why do I only get to pick one thing? Who thought that up? There's supposed to be this divide among linguists, between the phonologists and the morphologists/syntacticians, and you either love one component or the other, but to me they're all variations of each other, and I like them all. I like, actually, every facet of linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, social-, psycho-, neuro-, and historical. I liked algebra and geometry equally too. I've read the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, and I often find myself thinking specialization is for insects.
Out walking today I thought about the latest airing of grammar and language-usage pet peeves inhelenish's journal, and I had a small epiphany that linked linguistics to history (that is, my understanding and experience of them): as every linguist has to explain to everyone who asks, we study language; we study its components and synthesis and inherent processes; we study how language changes, and in many ways language operates like species: it has reproductive isolates, it has evolution but no direction (something people refuse to understand in biology as well), and it must change; like any species, the only language that's done changing is an extinct one. We have a radical approach to usage, because we say we cannot judge what is or is not "proper"; we don't tell speakers how to speak, we only observe how they do speak and try to generate rules that describe that usage. If people don't actually make words and sentences that way, it's the rule that has to go. My classes have made me aware of the prescriptive rules of grammar as shibboleths of education, de facto markers of class and intelligence. And generally I find that the people who moan about the plebes who insist on spelling words wrongly, using words improperly, and making up new and ugly words, those people are all for language change! just not in their lifetimes. Once I got a sense of how many of the words we use unthinkingly today were considered abominations in other ages, and that any time English teachers have to drill a rule into the heads of their students it means the rule is dead to all parts of language except for the contexts where you need to show you paid attention in English class, I can only be amused at the contortions people get themselves into about "commentate," because I know they'll lose. They will always lose. Anyway, what I thought of while out walking was the quote from Flaubert that I try to keep in the forefront of my brain: "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this."
If everything goes as expected, this will be my last semester and I will never register for classes here again. Classes that I regret never having taken (by department):
Human Osteology and Osteopathy
Art History
Advanced Exposition
Meteorology
History of Rock & Roll
World Englishes
Calc III
Music Literature
Deviance
Statistics (required by just about every major but the ones I considered)
more French (or more Spanish; or another language entirely)
ASL
rotating English-department classes
the hard sciences (I resent my bad high school chemistry and physics teachers because I would have liked chemistry and physics)
And for something completely different, a link from the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
mash_slash community to daegar talking about all the things she noticed while watching M*A*S*H with the laugh track off.
afropuff!), but then I opened my mailbox and found an official DEAR STUDENT that told me one of my scholarships was being returned DUE TO INSUFFICIENT CREDIT HOURS and my step sort of lost its spring. Apparently I took too long in getting someone to sign me into Thesis Writing, and apparently nine credits isn't good enough for everybody—though I've found it to be working so nicely for me. The terse communiqué is dated January 13 and I'll spend my day tomorrow first at the Office for Student Financial Affairs (JOY) to see if I can get the money back if I register for more credits (because on the grand master list of Things To Do, "owe the University a couple of thousand dollars" is duking it out with "invest in some syringes and work on a heroin habit" for dead last), and if so I will, you know, register for more credits, possibly thesis writing, and barring that, possibly anything I think I can get away with jumping into three weeks after the start of the semester.What I'd originally planned to do tomorrow was, yes, go casting around for a thesis advisor (am I really serious about this? I mean really?) and then, like, come up with a thesis TOPIC, and then hand in my degree application. Because I want one, please. The application itself is quite a lot of fun: a single sheet of all the degrees offered by all the colleges of the University, and you check off the one(s) you're applying for. At face value, there is nothing to stop you from saying, "a Master of Agribusiness! I'd like one of those! Or a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine? And maybe a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering to round out my collection." For a few minutes during my freshman year I strongly considered double-majoring in history and astronomy; then I would have graduated with a BA and a BS, and won at life. So much for that. I'm a little stumped as to how exactly I want my name to appear on the diploma. First and last name only? Middle name? Middle initial?
Coming out of the gym the other night I ran into a high school friend that I've kept in touch with sporadically while we've been up here, and after we confirmed that yes, we were on the four-year plan, we agreed on just how much we were ready to go. It's senioritis all over again; what was familiar last year is stifling this year, the freshman are alien, I'm tired of strangers living with me, and I'm really tired of Turlington Hall. This is about pacing too. I meant to be here four years, and it's almost four years, and I'm done with this now. This doesn't necessarily mean I don't want to go to graduate school now, or take classes ever again, because I felt impatient and outgrown all through my last year of high school but never thought of not coming here. This graduate-school ambivalence has more to do with not getting letters, not moving to take the GRE, not investigating; a general stalling-out. And if I'm not sure what I want to be doing or where, I don't think just going anywhere is really the answer. I keep mentioning the political language think-tank, and everyone keeps mentioning it back to me, but do I really want to spend my time analyzing political language? Not only following politics, but paying attention to what politicians are actually saying? There are few things I enjoy less. I wonder if dictionaries would have me, going out to collect words and usages.
The primary question is what do you want to do? and my answer has always, always been I DON'T KNOW. In second grade when everyone confidently declared their intentions to grow up and be doctors and firemen, I wrote a poem about how great it was that I didn't have to decide on a career now because I sure as hell didn't know. I'm pretty sure what I don't want is to get a job and stay there for fifty years, climbing up whatever ladder there is to climb until retirement and social security and fuck-all. I come from Florida. I know I need to work because I need a source of income to keep myself clothed and housed and fed, but as for something that I want to do with my time, as for what would keep me active and engaged from day to day? I'd need to either be creating something or discovering something—making connections, finding out what makes something work, or happen, and why. I like learning, I like talking about what I've learned, and yeah, I might still end up a college professor and lecture on phonotactics all day because isn't it COOL? The other problematic part of the traditional job search-and-selection process is the necessary narrowing down and subsequent falling off of all my options. What if I like everything? Why do I only get to pick one thing? Who thought that up? There's supposed to be this divide among linguists, between the phonologists and the morphologists/syntacticians, and you either love one component or the other, but to me they're all variations of each other, and I like them all. I like, actually, every facet of linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, social-, psycho-, neuro-, and historical. I liked algebra and geometry equally too. I've read the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, and I often find myself thinking specialization is for insects.
Out walking today I thought about the latest airing of grammar and language-usage pet peeves in
helenish's journal, and I had a small epiphany that linked linguistics to history (that is, my understanding and experience of them): as every linguist has to explain to everyone who asks, we study language; we study its components and synthesis and inherent processes; we study how language changes, and in many ways language operates like species: it has reproductive isolates, it has evolution but no direction (something people refuse to understand in biology as well), and it must change; like any species, the only language that's done changing is an extinct one. We have a radical approach to usage, because we say we cannot judge what is or is not "proper"; we don't tell speakers how to speak, we only observe how they do speak and try to generate rules that describe that usage. If people don't actually make words and sentences that way, it's the rule that has to go. My classes have made me aware of the prescriptive rules of grammar as shibboleths of education, de facto markers of class and intelligence. And generally I find that the people who moan about the plebes who insist on spelling words wrongly, using words improperly, and making up new and ugly words, those people are all for language change! just not in their lifetimes. Once I got a sense of how many of the words we use unthinkingly today were considered abominations in other ages, and that any time English teachers have to drill a rule into the heads of their students it means the rule is dead to all parts of language except for the contexts where you need to show you paid attention in English class, I can only be amused at the contortions people get themselves into about "commentate," because I know they'll lose. They will always lose. Anyway, what I thought of while out walking was the quote from Flaubert that I try to keep in the forefront of my brain: "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this."If everything goes as expected, this will be my last semester and I will never register for classes here again. Classes that I regret never having taken (by department):
Human Osteology and Osteopathy
Art History
Advanced Exposition
Meteorology
History of Rock & Roll
World Englishes
Calc III
Music Literature
Deviance
Statistics (required by just about every major but the ones I considered)
more French (or more Spanish; or another language entirely)
ASL
rotating English-department classes
the hard sciences (I resent my bad high school chemistry and physics teachers because I would have liked chemistry and physics)
And for something completely different, a link from the
mash_slash community to daegar talking about all the things she noticed while watching M*A*S*H with the laugh track off.
no subject
And good luck with the thesis stuff - I'm sure you'll figure it out.
no subject
Whoo! I heart it. I just do. :-D
And thanks for the vote of confidence, because I'm running decidedly low on my own. And I was just worrying over the money-for-credits thing and wondering if I haven't really just fucked myself over, but decided there was absolutely no point in worrying until I went and asked questions tomorrow, so I am trying not to! Stupid non-existent thesis. This is all your fault, you know.
no subject
RIGHT ON. I now express my great and t00by love for you (or for, at least, that thought. take as you will)
One of my classes last semester decided to write a book on linguistics for language revitalization programs. They thought I was kidding when I suggested the section "Morphophonosyntax." Ha! It all fits together (and, it seems, especially if you're into functional linguistics). I think this is one of the primary reasons that I'm so interested in historical linguistics, because you get to deal with all those aspects of linguistics at once. Whee!
BTW, do you read Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/) ? There's a RSS feed at
no subject
If I can take it as an expression of great and t00by love for me AND my thought, I think I will! And they do all work the same way, with their rules and their unconscious vs. actualized forms and their, um. Additiveness? As soon as you break down the form of language into sounds --> words --> phrases/sentences, there's going to have to be symmetry there. "Morphophonosyntax" is awesome. I am not familiar with functional linguistics or what it does (other than what I can glean from its name), and I've never done anything with historical linguistics, but anything that incorporates all those aspects will get my attention.
I have never heard of
no subject
I love the idea of "Morphophonosyntax"; glad someone else agrees! And functional linguistics is a reaction to Chomskyian/generative linguistics: grammar and lexicon not separated, no LAD, no competence/performance distinction, no "rules," etc. etc. I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it (except maybe in sociolinguistics)--you're on the East Coast, yes? And it's mostly a West Coast school, and a tiny one at that.
Oh, historical linguistics! If you talk about the changes between, say, Old English and Modern English, you can't leave any of the subfields out (except the more 'modern' sorts, like neuro- and psycholinguistics). Phonetics/phonology? Ablaut, i-mutation, Great Vowel Shift, etc. Morphology? Loss of affixes. Syntax? Goes right along with morphology. Semantics? Loads of semantic change over the years, plus the phonological and semantic relation to other Germanic languages.
And yes, I'm babbling, and possibly showing off. Sorry ^^;.
Yay! I thought you might enjoy it, especially since they've been talking about how linguistics view grammar (prescriptive vs. descriptive) differences lately. Welcome!
no subject
The Great Vowel Shift is one of my favorite things *ever*; but yes, tracking huge language change like that would make it really easy to incorporate all those things—because they all happened! And when you try to sever one from the other, you get overlap and jagged edges. Babble away! I'll keep going, "ooooh . . . "
Re:
no subject
Err, what's word-based morphology?
Do you know the work of Frederick Newmeyer? He wrote a book, sort of one long counterargument to functionalist/usage-based theory, which has a brilliant introduction. Basically it's a linguist from one school arguing with a linguist from the other school. Then he lays out the principles of both sides. I've not actually read beyond the introduction, but I should--there's a more generative take on grammatic(al)ization and the frequency work that's really popular where I go to school. :)
I love babbling about this stuff. Whee! I will refrain for now, though, since I should go to bed. Meh.
I, too, loved that post. I may have to print out a copy to put up in the Ling Lab, or to distribute to family, or SOMETHING like that. 'Cause it does good. (That was a Geoffrey Pullum post, right? He rocks! There's a book of his journal columns called "The Great Eskimo Snow Hoax" that I really enjoyed.)
no subject
That sounds like something we called the connectionist model in neuro and psycholinguistics, and it WAS contrasted with the Chomsky/(Pinker) lexicon/grammar/rules paradigm. Basically, it's a neural model based on the way computers learn (which makes me wary; these are the people who train computers to learn the past tense and claim they make the same mistakes children do; they also make mistakes that no person ever makes), and they say language is a result of a series of connections between nodes in the brain, and the most frequently-used connections become the strongest ones, and thereby the "rules." It's supposed to be closer to how language is actually set up in the brain.
Word-based morphology was something we went over in contrast to morpheme-based morphology. It uses words as its basic mental lexicon items and, like the connectionist model, is more organic in that the rule emerges from the words. So, there'd be an entry for 'dog' with its phonological, lexical, and semantic information (etc.), and then a word for 'dogs' with all that information, plus the fact that it was [plural]; likewise for 'cats', 'rainbows', etc.; and there'd be an entry that looked like 'Xz' where X was any phonological information, and then its lexical information [N], and [plural]. It worked just the same for derivational and inflectional morphology, and it accounted for all these things that morpheme-based morphology has trouble with: infixation, deletion, vowel harmony, (the process in the Semitic languages that I can't remember the name of, but the root consonants + vowel change thing), back-formation, ETC. It was awesome. The book we used was by Haspelmath, if that means anything to you.
I don't know the work of Frederick Newmeyer, but I'll be sure to look him up now. And Geoffrey Pullum was the Great Eskimo Snow Hoax guy?! I only know him at third-hand from The Language Instinct, but he just shot to the top of my reading list. What is Language Log, actually? Who are the posters and what kind of relationship do they have with each other? I couldn't find any information on the site itself, am I just not looking hard enough?
no subject
Hi, I go to UF and they screw me out of money too!
Ok, so it's not me and the OSF really does suck all kinds of ass? I got a great letter from them telling me I owed almost $1200 because my loan didn't even cover SIX credits about a week ago. Boy did that cause the dance of joy.
Are you grad student or undergrad? Thesis implies grad...but hey, what really do I know? (according to my advisor...nothing...particularly about my future career path.)
Re: Hi, I go to UF and they screw me out of money too!
I'm an undergrad, looking to graduate at the end of this semester. The thesis I keep talking about is the honors thesis you can produce in your major to attempt to graduate with high or highest honors. At this point, that may or may not happen. :-p
As for not knowing anything about your future career path? I don't know if you're in good company, but there are certainly quite a lot of us.