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Sep. 19th, 2009 10:19 pm1. I'm sick. I hate being sick, and I'm not very good at it. Luckily, I don't get sick very often, but it means that when I have a cold like I do now, it leads to a lot of metaphorical blank stares at my body for letting me down.
2. I opened up the pdfs of all my readings for next week, and I've been slowly working through them, but I keep opening up new articles about Piraha instead. This all is the fault of my syntax TA.
2a. I went to the optional syntax recitation on Friday, thinking I might get a chance to ask some kind of off-the-wall questions that I didn't want to derail the lecture with. Since I was the only person to show up, I got to spend 45 minutes asking questions about whatever i wanted that was even tangentally related to the lecture. i win.
2b. This is why I have all this reading about Piraha - the prof mentioned that there are claims that Piraha is a language without recursion (which in turn means that a lot of UG would have to be rethought) and so the TA and I spent 15 minutes talking about what it would take to show something doesn't have recursion and so forth. We concluded that we are sort of skeptical about lots of things that Everett claims. (The dude argues that the Piraha people - who are a very isolated people in the Amazon - don't count, don't make art, don't have recursion, and don't talk about things that are not present. When anthropologists make claims about the people they have discovered and how they are new! and different! and Other! I get very skeptical.)(Also, I'm a pretty strong believer in a lot of the syntax that Chomsky has done, so I'm skeptical for those reasons too.)
( 3. I also asked about the thing I was talking about in my last post, which the stress differences on nouns and verbs. )
4. In retrospect, my first clue that I wasn't feeling well should have been the sudden desire to watch or re-watch huge chunks of Grey's Anatomy. Oh, self.
ETA: Dude, actual quote from the paper I'm reading: "In this paper, we disagree with Everett on every one of these points. Indeed, the simplest summary of the present article can be obtained by placing a negation in front of each claim summarized above. Some of Pirahã's supposed "inexplicable gaps" (both linguistic and cultural) will be argued to be illusory or non-existent. The remaining inguistic "gaps" will turn out to be (in all likelihood) real, but shared with anguages as diverse as German, Chinese, Hebrew, Wappo and Adyghe. Since these are languages spoken within cultures that do not share the key properties of Pirahã culture as described by Everett, no arguments for Everett's "startling" or "severe" conclusions will remain."
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
2. I opened up the pdfs of all my readings for next week, and I've been slowly working through them, but I keep opening up new articles about Piraha instead. This all is the fault of my syntax TA.
2a. I went to the optional syntax recitation on Friday, thinking I might get a chance to ask some kind of off-the-wall questions that I didn't want to derail the lecture with. Since I was the only person to show up, I got to spend 45 minutes asking questions about whatever i wanted that was even tangentally related to the lecture. i win.
2b. This is why I have all this reading about Piraha - the prof mentioned that there are claims that Piraha is a language without recursion (which in turn means that a lot of UG would have to be rethought) and so the TA and I spent 15 minutes talking about what it would take to show something doesn't have recursion and so forth. We concluded that we are sort of skeptical about lots of things that Everett claims. (The dude argues that the Piraha people - who are a very isolated people in the Amazon - don't count, don't make art, don't have recursion, and don't talk about things that are not present. When anthropologists make claims about the people they have discovered and how they are new! and different! and Other! I get very skeptical.)(Also, I'm a pretty strong believer in a lot of the syntax that Chomsky has done, so I'm skeptical for those reasons too.)
( 3. I also asked about the thing I was talking about in my last post, which the stress differences on nouns and verbs. )
4. In retrospect, my first clue that I wasn't feeling well should have been the sudden desire to watch or re-watch huge chunks of Grey's Anatomy. Oh, self.
ETA: Dude, actual quote from the paper I'm reading: "In this paper, we disagree with Everett on every one of these points. Indeed, the simplest summary of the present article can be obtained by placing a negation in front of each claim summarized above. Some of Pirahã's supposed "inexplicable gaps" (both linguistic and cultural) will be argued to be illusory or non-existent. The remaining inguistic "gaps" will turn out to be (in all likelihood) real, but shared with anguages as diverse as German, Chinese, Hebrew, Wappo and Adyghe. Since these are languages spoken within cultures that do not share the key properties of Pirahã culture as described by Everett, no arguments for Everett's "startling" or "severe" conclusions will remain."
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT