a wolf angel is not a good angel

After the 50th referral from a google search on Turnitin, I decided it was time to update my thinking. (What do all of you people looking for “arguments against turnitin” and +turnitin +mcgill think?)

My objection to turnitin is not the presumption of guilt. Unfortunately, I think the presumption is, more or less, fair. Not to all students, but to the 1/3 who admit to cheating. That’s a big number. No one cheats in every class, of course. But I think it’s important to stem the tide. It would be nice if this were done in high school, too.

My real objection is the storage of papers. I decided to pose as a professor and submit one paper I wrote as a test. It came back fine: unsurprising, since I wrote it all in one last minute offline burst. (Someone changed the due date. I was not pleased.) It’s not a very good paper, and it’s nothing I’m going to ever look at again. I was tempted to write something copying from TheSpark, but decided it was more effort than it was worth.

What I think universities need are real and enforced policies against plagiarism or cheating (not all universities need the same policy, and community colleges probably need a different one too — but there needs to be something consistent). I would support it if professors could put papers they thought suspicious in turnitin if it was the case that 15 minutes on Google didn’t generally turn up the source. This would require studying, of course, but it’s probably not so difficult.

One of the problems with cheating is that it penalises the people who don’t cheat. Directly, if the course is curved, but also indirectly, by devaluing the degree from your school.

Which is why I *don’t* understand the backlash against other anti-cheating measures. Why would you care if a program checks for people who have all the same wrong answers as a first step in detecting cheating? Seriously. I remember people being horrified about it, and saying it was against some rule or another. So is not telling someone when you see someone else cheat, and I know how few people do that.

It’s not a simple issue, and I realise that. But it’s not a simple issue on either side.

An article by Deborah Tannen about the speed at which people talk uses as an example Gilmore Girls, a show I watch regularly. (Thanks to languagehat for the link.)

Part of the point of the show is, indeed, the speed at which the characters talk. It’s all about talking. (On rare occasion a scene involves Lorelai or Rory just watching someone who isn’t talking — Dean’s wedding comes to mind, but not Paris’s recent make-out session with a professor.) But the general idea — they talk fast — is fair.

She then says:

But not if the dialogue flies by so fast that it cannot be fully processed or even, in many cases, literally comprehended. The general ideas may get through: I’m sure fans of “Gilmore Girls” and “West Wing” can recount each show’s plot and theme. But I suspect that their understanding is gleaned from the general march of scenes and the gist of dialogue — rather than from the subtle nuances of phrasing and the precise wording or sequence of ideas.

This is unfair to the audience. It’s also untrue. (I don’t watch West Wing, though.) The point of Lorelai & Rory’s relationship is the clever banter. You watch it for the dialogue (which is sometimes better, sometimes worse). The plot lines are not that exceptional: Rory is dating someone but likes a bad boy; Lorelai can’t get along with her parents; Lorelai doesn’t want to tell her parents she’s dating her father’s partner; Rory’s father is (not) getting back with Lorelai; Rory’s father is having a baby. None of these are in any way new, or even approached in a particularly new way.

I catch up, when I miss a show, by the reviews on TWoP (television without pity), where they also focus on the dialogue. When I (rarely) discuss it with other people, we also discuss the dialogue. It’s like (I am told) rap, where the point is the clever wordplay *and* speed, together.

Perhaps this is age-related. It would not surprise me (in fact, Emily and Richard, the grandparents, both speak much more slowly). But it is just plain not true that the viewers of these television shows don’t catch the subtle phrasings chosen.

In my endless pursuit of funny stories about Eskimo words for snow, I’ve found friends who will send me absurd comics about it, too.

And tell me when my images don’t work, and send me appropriately split up ones, too. Thanks, Cougar.

I didn’t, as it happens, leave Canada City to go back to Dullness today. I had *intended* to. But I couldn’t quite make myself.

I might love what I study, but I hate where I live. Leaving is hard. The weather was terrible — there was a 40-car pileup. And I am scared of driving like that. And I’m getting my period which always means that I am utterly miserable for a while. (Luckily I get it every 8 or so weeks only, because I get the world’s worst (P)MS.)

So probably Saturday or Sunday. Unlikely earlier, and unlikely later. It will just depend on weather.

This is why I am fairly convinced I am unwilling to live anywhere just for the privilege of an academic job. Temporarily? I can do it. Permanently? Nosir.

I need some of their shirts.

Need. Really. It’s more than just wanting.

(I also wouldn’t mind one of these. Not that I was a huge Dean supporter — all I really want is a Democrat, any Democrat, to win — but it amuses me. Though I drive a Ford.)

I just noticed that a week after the conference I hope to attend in Berlin, there is a conference in Paris: application deadline is in one week.

I would like to talk on a similar topic (not least because I don’t think I could write my qualifying paper and two other papers for the same week) as the conference in Berlin, but I can push different aspects of it.

Wouldn’t that be nice? An excuse to stay in Europe longer. And I’ve never been to Paris. (Or anywhere in France. Or Germany, except the Frankfurt airport.) Also, this conference is a little better looking than the other one.

The worst that happens is that I don’t get accepted.

Can’t get accepted if I don’t have an abstract, though. Writing ho!

My grandparents would like me to come over tonight so that they can give me my birthday present before I leave. Which is awfully nice of them.

It is, after all, my birthday in just over 3 months, and I might only be back here twice before then.

I feel, often, that I’m unable to explain linguistics to a general audience. No: I’m unable to explain what *I* study to my family.

When I did syntax I tried to give them the examples of wanna-contraction.

1. I wanna/want to go back to sleep.
2. What do you wanna/want to win?
3. Who do you *wanna/want to win>

The question is why can you not say wanna in the last one?

This is one of those questions you see in an intro linguistics textbook, and the answer is supposed to prove something about — I’m not always sure, but generally something about movement in a GB-ish approach.

I’m not explaining it further because, frankly, it’s boring. It’s neat to figure out (my cousin did), but it’s really not the best way to get people into it. And it has nothing at all to do with any research I’ve ever done.

Steven Pinker has a book on linguistics, which is fine, but he is not a linguist. Mark Baker has one, but apparently comparing linguistics (”wow, hard!”) to chemistry (”wow, harder!”) is not the way to write a best-seller. As far as I know there are no semantics/phonology-for-the-general-public books.

I never know how to explain things. It’s harder, I think, when I first have to explain the language. (I now have a brief intro-to-Austronesian that I can plug into my papers, in essence. It takes a lot of time when I’m presenting, though.)

Maybe I’m just not inspired enough. Maybe I don’t understand my field enough. But after I say “it’s about how language is structured, and what is and is not good”, what can I say in five minutes so that people think it’s sort of cool?[1]

[1] People who don’t are just mistaken, but I wish I could fix that about my family.

And why they almost always suck. (LoTR is an exception; I am told House of Sand and Fog is, but the book was bleak enough for me.)

I ended up watching the last bit of The Witches with my sister. I thought I had seen it, but apparently not, because they CHANGED the ending.

Note to whoever wrote the screenplay: you are not anywhere near as good at plots or any aspect of writing as Roald Dahl. Don’t pretend.

In Malagasy, I have just been told, there is a prefix (maha-) that can attach to any verb, which seems to make it intensional. Or at least does something to it, sort of vaguely intensionalish. (I will stick with English word order and words, because it’s easier, and also I was told this, which means that I don’t have the sentences written down.)

You can say “Bakoly found the book.” Like English, this means that she ended up with the book. You can also say “Bakoly maha-found the book.” This means that she looked for the book, and the implicature is that she found it, but it’s defeasible: “Bakoly maha-found the book but she didn’t find it” makes perfect sense. (”#Bakoly found the book but she didn’t find it” doesn’t.[1])

That doesn’t seem so weird — in fact, the way to say “look for” is maha-find.

The verb kill works the same way. You can’t say “#Bakoly killed Be but he is still alive”; you can say “Bakoly maha-killed Be but he is still alive”. And the root kill is often translated as “beat, kill”.

You can even say “Be was maha-killed by Bakoly but he is still alive.” (If you know anything about Austronesian languages you will be rolling your eyes at what I’ve done with a passive. Bear with me, because the voice system isn’t the issue here.)

This works with all sorts of verbs. Leave, open . . . but maha-x isn’t quite the same as “tried to x”. Maha-x implicates that you succeeded; if anything, “tried to x” implicates the reverse. (I think.)

I’m also not sure what would happen with intransitives. Maha-die would mean an attempted suicide? How about putting in an adverb like “accidentally”? (I suspect that wouldn’t work.) What about unaccusatives?

Mostly this is why you can’t do semantics based on a half hour conversation with a second language speaker[2]. But it’s a problem I hope to look at, sooner or later, and which has yet to be looked at as a semantic (and not syntactic) problem. Sadly my next semantics course will be on something entirely different. Something interesting, but not this. And I will have enough independent work to keep me busy. Still,

[1] A # before a sentence means it’s grammatical but the meaning is not.
[2] Either that or mostly this is why I love being with other people who work on the same sorts of languages so that I can bounce ideas off without giving a brief primer on the field.