a wolf angel is not a good angel

I gave a talk today at syntax project meeting. It was syntax only inasmuch as, well, all the sentences I used had syntax. Phonology too, as far as that goes.

I think it went fairly well. I spent a while explaining the semantic theory I was using, and people said they had an intuitive grasp of it, which is as much as I could have hoped for. That’s the real reason this theory is appealing. It works, sure, but it’s incredibly complicated. But the general *idea* makes sense, and so working it out is mostly a matter of the hours you’re willing to spend.

I had some good ideas and info come out of it, and about 73 possible topics for my big paper next year. Which is exciting. Semantics of Austronesian languages is such an underresearched field, I’m really excited about the chance to look at all these things. What does voicing do? It’s so much fun to be excited.

So things went well. I’m pleased. The more I present, the better I do, so it’s all about practice in writing and then talking.

A McGill university student won a lawsuit against McGill, which had initially failed him for not submitting his papers to Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection website.

I’m of two minds about this. I feel sympathy for the professors, who have to grade the papers as well as do searches for those phrases that seem, somehow, familiar. I feel this most acutely for large, intro-level courses. Exams are . . . well, let me just say that no student there finds it hard to cheat in an exam, if they are so inclined.

On the other hand, I too would feel annoyed to know that some random Californian for-profit website was saving a copy of my paper for posterity.

I feel less taken by the “innocent until proven guilty” argument. This is not a court, this is a course. I’m entirely disdainful of the “maybe it was just a mistake” argument.

Studies have said that 1/3 — or more — of students admit to having cheated in their undergraduate degree. I took an intermediate Spanish class in my last year at university, and the number is certainly higher for pre-university studies; I suspect it’s also higher for universities, based on the conversations I had with people.

Truth in blogging: in the group project we had to do in that class, I ended up acceding to the “let’s just copy and paste from the internet!” ethos. I was taking it pass-fail, along with a thesis, a graduate course, and an upper level undergraduate course. I was preparing for a conference, and working 25 hours a week. If they had wanted to do it properly, I would have, but I wasn’t going to do that alone. We did not do well on this assignment.

I think I’ve mentioned this before.

Anyhow.

I don’t see an easy solution. An honour code isn’t going to help much, and McGill has no money to make classes smaller. (Tuition has been frozen for years.) Some solutions that the students gave were annotated bibliographies and submitting drafts. I don’t know how well those would work.

The problem is that students cheat but resist anything that tests for cheating. A few professors came up with a way to test for too-similar wrong answers in multiple-choice exams in courses with large enrollment (intro to bio, chem, etc). If you had the same pattern of wrong answers, and if you sat near each other, something was flagged. This didn’t turn into an immediate failure; further steps were taken.

Students complained. It was unfair, they said. It was against school policy.

I keep feeling that a reasonable use for Turnitin’s services is to only put in papers that you think are plagiarised for other reasons; it’s much faster than google, at least.

Update: a further post on this is here.

The community of Austronesian linguists in North America is quite small. Which is why their conferences are such a blast. (Similar things have been noted about this effect in philosophy and history.) It also means that there’s not so much anonymity. Which probably means that I shouldn’t say this.

As I’ve mentioned before, I wrote a paper on Tagalog semantics. I got data from a friend, in front of his current advisor, my undergrad advisor. So this advisor knew my topic. We’d discussed it, a bit; I sent her the paper.

Apparently, she was reading abstracts for the conference to which I submitted this paper. I get a phone call from her.

“While I was reading your [anonymous] abstract, I realised I should call you . . . ”

It’s nice and all, knowing that (a) there’s a chance we might hear before FEB TWENTIETH (when the deadline was Dec 1) and (b) I should be accepted, but if I ever had wondered whether anything in this field was anonymous (not really, to either the wondering or the anonymity), I can be quite sure now.

Since I was, apparently, less than clear:
I do not like receiving religious cards that are from a religion that is not my own. I don’t give you Chanukah cards; please, do me the favour of not sending me Christmas ones. (I make an exception for anything that is terribly funny.)
The problem is that some people (read, people who were brought up in a Christian household, whether practicing or not, but who have not since *converted) seem to have an odd idea of what a Christmas card is. Or rather, what imagery is Christmas-themed.
Religious and secular are bad words for it, because although a creche is religious and a snowman is secular, a Christmas tree is neither, exactly. So I’ll call things religion-neutral. Things that are religious are not religion-neutral; things that are secular are. Other things — it depends.
So, despite Christmas trees and Christmas lights being not religious, they are also not (in large part) religion-neutral.(I don’t mean to say that only Christians put them up; it’s not true. But there’s a correlation.) Yule logs are not quite religion-neutral, but since pictures of them are indistinguishable from pictures of fires, it’s meaningless. Wreaths are on the verge, as are bells. (I mind neither.) Angels are not religion-neutral. Santa and reindeer are equally not religion neutral.
Which means that when someone sends me pictures of Christmas trees, or Jolly Old Saint Nick (hint in this name), or any of the like, even if it says “Season’s greetings”, it’s a Christmas card. If you don’t happen to know my religion — entirely possible — I’m not sure why you assume I’m Christian.
And the only people who seem to think cards of these sorts are entirely secular are Christian. They’re not secular. Please stop insisting they are.

Tim Burke muses about Barbies and their lack of coolness, compared to action figures. A few comments.
One: his daughter is too young, but my sister isn’t. The new cool doll is a Brat (plural, Bratz). These are much like Barbie, except cooler, a better system of shoes, anda slight problem in having enough outfits. But they’re new, and I’m sure they will adapt. They can stand up, but you do with them much what you do with Barbies: have them change outfits, talk to their friendz, and go on dates with the Bratz Boyz.
This leads to number two: playing Barbie, once you are of a certain age, involves playing out, in excrutiatingly incorrect detail, sexual practices that would shock people. (I am still amazed at what my friends and I — a fairly conservative group, otherwise– enacted.) He says he “doesn’t doubt that Barbie . . . can be ‘poached’ by its consumers”; I just wonder how far this lack of doubt went.
I thought for a long time that we had been unique in this respect. After all, when you’re 14, you don’t go around discussing in what ways you used to play with Barbie. We weren’t. Years later, ina book, I read a description of how another girl and her friends had played with Barbies which sounded quite familiar. And informal questioning — and, mostly, google — has confirmed this prevalence. (I am not sure if it would work as well with the painted-on underpants they now have.)
In thinking about what stories I went through, I am amazed at how very explicit they were. Harlequin romances (which I had never read, then) had nothing on my stories. Lots of erotica has nothing on my stories. (I was going through puberty. I didn’t have sex at 12, my Barbies did.)
I can’t disagree with comments about how poorly she is made. I have clear memories of distorting her head by trying to shove it back on when it fell off, and I had more Barbies missing limbs than not. She couldn’t stand up, rings (and apparently scalpels and other surgical instruments) required a big hole in her head. I believe she could bend at the knees, but not the elbows (I hated the ones with bent arms, and they were always the evil ones. Oh, fairy tales through Barbie: the stories I could tell).
Still — there is more to Barbie than just dress her up and look at her (unless you’re a collector). It’s just surprising to some.

Not me. I’m not sure why. And I feel so grade 8, looking expectantly at the comments, but never getting any. I don’t know if it’s that no one reads or just that I write things that people don’t feel the need to comment about. I would rather have liked comments about the “what symbols are secular”, especially from people who were not brought up ina Christian household. (Mentioning it elsewhere got me a lot of “Christians” (I used the term loosely to refer to anyone who was brought up Christian, as long as they hadn’t actually converted to a different religion. Atheists counted as Christian) who insisted they were secular. But I knew Christians thought that way.)
Anyways. Here’s my query. Do I have readers? Is there any particular reason why they are not commenting? Might as well feel stupid instead of bitter.

A discussion at languagehat has been interesting for me. It’s about grammatical categories in Riau, which is a language/dialect spoken in Indonesia and much worked on by David Gil.
I admit that my knowledge of Indonesian is limited to talks I’ve heard about it, by Gil and others (including native Indonesian speakers, though not native Riau speakers). I’m not sure that Riau is a dialect of Indonesian, but Gil calls it Riau Indonesian, and that’s how I think of it. As I mentioned in a comment, the ethnologue seems to call it a dialect of Malay. But I’ve heard talks on Malay by native Malay speakers. All these native speakers seem to think that their languages have nouns and verbs. But then they’ve all also learned English.
An interesting pointer was also made to a thread on sci.lang about this. Since I’m not sure how well the google links work[1], I’ll quote some of the more interesting comments.
Ross Clark:

The writer of this article seems to know little or nothing about
linguistics, but has had lunch with David Gil in Leipzig and then tried
to write down what they seemed to remember.The account of English case
is bizarre:

“Many of the people who developed modern linguistics had had an
education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence, English was often
described until well into the 20th century as having six different noun
cases…”

I would be interested if anyone could cite a book written any time in
the 20th century, let alone one by a founder of modern linguistics, that
described English as having six cases.

I remember reading about this — that English had however many cases, all of which were coincidentally identical, or something. So it didn’t strike me as impossible. People said all sorts of things.

I’d also be curious to know what lies behind “tones that change the
meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian”?

Intonation as a grammatical feature, something else Gil strongly argues against. Like tone, but not quite.

I’ve heard Gil talk about Riau Indonesian a couple of times. He seemed
to be trying to suggest that it has no grammar at all — just words that
can be strung together in any order you want. Unfortunately, since even
a linguist talking to people bumps them into a higher and less
grammar-less register, the only way you can experience the real RI seems
to be to hang around down at the dock with David Gil. Which makes it
hard to evaluate his hypothesis.

I don’t think he argues something quite that harsh, though; he seems to have meanings and impossible ones, though I’m not sure how it’s derived from his almost structureless ideas.
And Larry Trask says:

Anybody know what Riau Indonesian might be? The author’s brief and
unhelpful comments make it sound like a pidgin.

The only interesting point in the article is this: is the noun/verb
contrast universal? Linguists have been debating this for decades.
Nouns and verbs are certainly the only parts of speech for which
anybody wants to claim universal status, and I have the impression
that most linguists would like to regard them as universal, but
dissenters have existed for at least half a century.

The Salishan and Wakashan languages are the favorite candidates for
languages lacking the noun/verb contrast, but there have been several
other proposals. Somebody proposed Tongan a few years ago. But it
would seem odd to me if Tongan lacked this distinction while other and
closely related Austronesian languages maintained it. And I find it
hard to believe that a dialect of Indonesian — if that’s what Riau
Indonesian is — would have lost such a central feature of the
grammar.

I do not believe that Tongan — or Tagalog (as the comments at lh suggested) — can be seriously said to not have an N/V contrast. Tagalog certainly does, and I’m almost positive Niuean (Tongan’s closest relative) does (Diane Massam studies Niuean; Yoko Otsuka studies Tongan; a huge group of people study Tagalog). I have studied Malagasy (and Tagalog) and I am quite sure it has nouns and verbs. Informal conversations make me believe that they all also contrast adjectives (in a way that seems to work for Mark Baker, though I’m not sure).[2]
I don’t know enough about the Salishan languages, so I have no comment on it. But Indonesian is Austronesian, so I’m safe(r) there.
Austronesian languages, like other language families, are very different from Indo-European. The idea of subject is ill-conceived in these languages. I call something a subject because the term is convenient, but I try to make it clear in anything I write that this is a terminological convenience, and that what I call the subject (the ang-marked thing in Tagalog[3], the thing in the final position in Malagasy) does not bear too close a relationship to what we call the subject in English. Anyone who has looked at these languages realises that the IE terms of subject and object, active and passive simply fail. So I’m not averse to seeing languages that work very differently from english.
I love it, in fact. I am fascinated by languages and by neat factoids in them.
On the other hand, I get tired of the extremes to which these are sometimes taken. Neat factoids are cool. Neat factoids that aren’t true aren’t.[4],[5]
This is my problem. The details of the language are not going to be solved by a bunch of bloggers who’ve read an article that most likely misquotes David Gil. No, my problem is what stunning lack of knowledge people have.
Saturday a friend and I met up in a city halfway between us. We were wandering down what is, probably, the main street and into weird stores. In -20 degree weather. We looked at lots of stores.
In one of them a girl at the cash found out that a customer spoke some dialect of Arabic. I forget which. She wanted to know how to say My little parrot in that language; she’d been compiling a list.[6] Fair enough. After all, the I can eat glass project amuses.
But then they went on to talk about how oh-so-very-different the languages are. Someone suggested watching Whale Rider (a very good movie) because it “used a lot of the ancient language”. (I refused to leave during this conversation; my friend watched me and laughed.) English is so . . .
There’s only one university in that school, and it has enough decent people there that the introductory linguistics courses are fairly reasonable. I am not sure why she didn’t take one. (She was obviously a student.)
It was all the worst kind of idiocy. This is what frustrates me. Other languages are fascinating in how they differ from the ones we speak. And there are good and interesting debates about it. But it always gets bogged down somewhere in the realm of mystical people from another culture, preferably across the world (Native American languages are somehow less cool), who are so unknowable that we can just sit in awe at their enviro-friendly, part of the earth language.

[1] Almost called it dejanews there. Wow. What brought my brain there? Weird. And a waste of good neurons.
[2] Enough name-dropping yet?
[3]This is not unique in clefts,which are more like Englishpseudo-clefts. But that’s irrelevant.
[4] The words for snow, an amusing variant of which set up the punchline for today’s Zits. I have a collection of amusing words-for-snow articles. I don’t care that it’s false, it amuses me.
[5] I was somewhat disappointed by the part of the Economist article that made it sound so exciting that some languages don’t have words that determine definite from indefinite nouns.
[6] I wonder if she meant it as my small parrot or my widdle-biddle parrotkins. Anyhow.

I was watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent last night. It featured a story of backbiting English professors. Now I normally hate CI; the female cop is terrible, with no personality, and so infinitely better than the male that the show is sad. But I found this one amusing, if just for the picture of academia it showed.[1]
I couldn’t figure out a pithy and amusing post, and, sadly, I have not seen a single comment on it. I feel it would be a nice thread like the MLA titles thread over at IA. Or possibly Chun would blog about it. No such luck.

[1] I really can’t imagine a school that would let you be in a PhD program full-time for TEN years. I know people who are at 7 or 8; they’ve all been parttime for years, and are close to done. I don’t even know of schools that allow that many extensions.

Found out recently that a friend of mine hates his PhD program. Is miserable. Phones — and goes — home regularly. Wants to quit.
I didn’t really know what to tellhim. Certainlyhow*I* was last year– something he had not been aware of, as we were not in touch so much. And how it’s common. Which helped; it’s always good to know it’s normal, that you’re not the only one. (I still am not entirely sure why this is kept so secret. I have no idea how anyone else in my department felt in their first year, except that 2 other people in my year were unhappy (we are 6; I knew about 1 at the time and the other later).)
We discussed leaving; I told him that I had decided, prior to a conference we were both at last March, that if it went badly I would leave after the end of the year. It went well; it went wonderfully well. It renewed my confidence in my own work and, far more importantly, my love for the field. (Also it was near beaches. I swear, that was only part of why it was so good.) I told him of someone I knew at his school who had been miserable and made it through (and didn’t wish she had left academia).
But then, of course, there was the risk that after another year he’d feel it was too late to quit, and that he might as well stick it out and finish his dissertation. He knew people who had done that and regretted it, who said they would have left if they’d've known how they felt at the end.
So it’s hard to say. I don’t think he really wants to quit the field, but I know that I am biased, I know that I want him to stay, I want him to be part of the field I am in.
I offered that the second year is better. It is. And he came back for this semester already, so . . . I don’t know.
Sometimes I want to be doing something else, too. Not that I don’t want to do what I do — just that I want to settle down some place, I want to be able to save for a house or other grownup sorts of things. I feel like my life is on hold, in ways. But I enjoy linguistics; I want to do linguistics. We’ll see, I guess. At least I have some contacts in industry.

While in Epcot, we had a nice conversation with one of the people working at the Canadian pavilion. We were mostly asking her what it was like working there. (It was something I had always been interested in doing, though I never actually did anything about it really.)
My father asked had there been any incidents because of Canada’s stance on the war in Iraq. Not really, she said. One person said something, but that was it.
But, she said, she had had three different French roommates all go home.[1] Why? Because people buy wine and smash the glass down in front of them, or on the building. Or because people spit on them.
I was amazed. I suppose I shouldn’t have been. But really. These people (a) did not have any impact on the decision made by the government (though it’s likely they were against the war) and, almost more importantly, (b) are the people who have good enough feelings about the US to go work there for a year, and who will come back with stories about incredibly boorish Americans. Want to make sure that you have an even worse international reputation? I guess we know the way.

[1] I have no idea if similar things have happened to Germans or not.