Marking done

I finished my marking today, having given out one the lowest marks I've ever given – a 7 out of 100 – to a paper that consisted of a few marginally correct answers in addition to a lot of "No chance" and "Fuck". (I have given out zeroes before, but that was only for cases of plagiarism or non-submission; and at some point someone managed to score a 4.5, but was also given a 10-point penalty for being two days late.)

Because it's against all sorts of regulations (mostly Health and Safety, I think) and also vaguely unethical to post a collection of interesting answers, here's a key to my marking comments as a sorry replacement. I should probably give this out to my students at some point around essay time so that they know what they have to do...

✓ - correct, this is something you get a point for.
✗ - not correct, this is something you would have got a point for if it had been right.
REF - REFERENCE THIS, YOU TOOL!
? - I have no idea what this says or I have no idea what you mean.
?? - I have no idea what you mean, and I'm quite sure you don't either.
! - How many times did I tell you not to write this?
OK - (read: oooo-kay....) This argument is flawed, but there's enough correctness in it that you're getting the point anyway because I'm nice like that.
Hmm - I'm not entirely convinced.
meh - I'm not entirely convinced, but it isn't relevant to the point anyway.
awk - (from awkward) There are better ways of phrasing this.
sp - This isn't spelled correctly.
:) - This is funny, but you probably didn't intend it that way.
:( - I am very disappointed in you.
good - This bit stands out i.e. The rest of your essay is not ____.

I do also write real words.

Wordle

This is fun.

My Ph.D. is about...



My M.Sc. was about...



And my M.A. was about...


Guess what I want to do next...

Stufi

According to ANP:

The European Commission have brought the Netherlands to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg over discrimination with regard to student grants. According to Dutch law, students who want to qualify for student grants to study abroad, need to have been legally resident in the Netherlands for at least three of the previous six years. According to the European Commission, this residency requirement is in breach of EU rules about free movement of labour.

AHRC, ESRC, and friends – please take note. Thank you.

Metro maps

I'm a big fan of the stylised maps often used by metro and railway companies, where geography is made secondary to conveying information, and as a result, the world is just a little bit more typographically pleasing. So obviously different levels of my geekery got together in rejoicing over this map:



Not a true metro or train map, although the buses go through plenty of tunnels, and the 300, 400, and 410 services even go under the sea for a bit. Another bit of the geek in me is happy that there seems to be some underlying systematicity in numbering the bus and ferry connections, although it could have been done a little bit more elegantly.

Perspective

Part One
Somewhere in the Haymarket area. This was a while ago already, but it's a bit of a faff getting photos off my phone onto my computer. (SonyEricsson don't like Macs, obviously.) I think this is a very nice example of how the English language doesn't quite make complete sense. If the road is open, it's closed, and if it's closed, it's open. Whichever way you look at it.



Part Two
Inside Appleton Tower, where you can't see Appleton Tower, but where you can see the new Linguistics and English Language computer teaching lab. Unlike the outside, which is falling to bits, or the view out, which is the netting that is supposed to keep the bits falling off the outside from hurting people, the inside is a true feast for the eye:



Apart from the Logitech keyboards and Microsoft mice, of course. Apart from the price, what's wrong with the proper stuff?

But then there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance here:



Oh dear.

Also: want! (But don't bother with the dual boot.)

What I did at SS17

THURSDAY

Plenary: Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen), 'Endangered language documentation and sociolinguistics: the case of Bolivia'

Session 1:
Miriam Meyerhoff (Edinburgh) & James Walker (York, Canada)
'On the social salience of grammatical variation: existentials in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines)'

Session 2:
Paul Kerswill, Arfaan Khan & Eivind Torgersen (Lancaster)
'Multicultural London English and linguistic innovation'

Session 3:
Frans Gregersen (København)
'Bridging the gap: from macro-macro sociolinguistic analyses to variationist analyses and beyond'

Poster session

• Nadia Nocchi (Zürich), 'Phonetic variants for social variables: some remarks on labiovelars in Tuscany'


• Ariën van Wijngaarden (Amsterdam), 'Ethnic variation: morpho-syntactic aspects of Moroccan Dutch and Turkish Dutch'

Session 4:
David Britain, Jennifer Amos & Juliette Spurling (Essex)
'Yod-dropping on the East Anglian periphery'

Session 5:
Carmen Llamas & Dom Watt (York)
'Rhoticity in four Scottish/English border localities'

Session 6:
Sander van der Harst (Utrecht)
'Regional variation in Standard Dutch vowels'

Session 7:
Isa Buchstaller & Karen Corrigan (Newcastle)
'Towards a syntactic atlas of Northern England: micro and macro aspects of the interplay between grammar, geography and gender'

Session 8:
Heinrich Ramisch (Bamberg)
'The Northern Subject Rule and its 'northernness': a geolinguistic perspective'

Session 9:
Monika Edith Schulz (Freiburg)
'Past possession and past obligation in traditional British English dialects: the case of had got to'


FRIDAY

Plenary:
Charles Goodwin (UCLA)
'The categories Speaker and Hearer as interactive processes'

Session 1:
Stefan Engelberg (Mannheim)
'Language policies and language contact in the German colonies in the South Pacific'

Session 2:
Bettina Beinhoff (Cambridge)
'Accent and identity: are some non-native speaker accents of English 'better' than others?'

Session 3:
Julia Sallabank (SOAS)
'Endangered language maintenance and social networks'

Poster session

• Hanna Lappalainen (Helsinki): 'Macro and micro perspectives on explaining variation in the use of personal pronouns'

Session 4:
Katharina Straßl (Bern)
'L1, Standard German and local dialect: language choice of immigrant children in the German-speaking part of Switzerland'

Session 5:
Charlotte Gooskens & Sebastian Kürschner (Groningen)
Swedish-Danish word intelligibility

Session 6:
Leen Impe (Leuven)
'Mutual intelligibility of Dutch language varieties: linguistic and extra-linguistic determinants'

Session 7:
Csilla Bartha (Eötvös Loránd, Budapest)
'Language shift in Romani-speaking communities in Hungary: combining macro and micro interpretations'

Session 8:
Remco Knooihuizen (Edinburgh)
'The interplay of language shift and new-dialect formation: the development of Shetland Scots'

Session 9:
Joseph Gafaranga (Edinburgh)
'Towards an interactional model for language maintenance in immigrant contexts'

Plenary
Jasone Cenoz (Euskal Herriko)
'Multilingual educuation for minorities: research methods and achievements'


SATURDAY

Session 1:
Michael Hornsby (Southampton)
'The thwarting of the linguistic subordination norm: whom does it serve?'

Session 2:
Mathilde Jansen (Meertens Instituut)
'Dialect levelling on the island of Ameland' -- cancelled

Session 3:
Wilbert Heeringa & Frans Hinskens (Groningen)
'Sound change in Dutch dialects: 1874 versus 1996'

Session 4:
Meilute Ramoniene (Vilnius)
'Age and language choice in multilingual settings of Lithuania'

Session 5:
R Vandekerckhove (Antwerpen)
'Intralingual subtitling of Dutch on Flemish television: contradictory evaluations of the linguistic scene in Flanders'

Session 6:
Sabine Jautz (Siegen)
'Relational work and constructing identity: expressions of gratitude in British and New Zealand English radio phone-ins'

Poster session

• Golnaz Nanbakhsh (Edinburgh), 'Address terms in Tehran Persian: gender, politeness and language attitudes'


• Ifigenia Papageorgiou (Edinburgh), 'Linguistic heterogeneity in the Greek educational system: a sociolinguistic approach to the 'cross cultural' policy'


• Elma Nap-Kolhoff & Tamara van Schilt-Mol (Tilburg), 'Short and middle-long-term effects of early childhood education in the Netherlands on children's Dutch language proficiency'

Session 7:
Nanna Haug Hilton (York)
'The variation and social meaning of stress assignment in Hønefoss Norwegian'

Session 8:
Terttu Nevalainen (Helsinki)
'The diffusion of linguistic changes in real time: leaders, laggards and the in-betweens'

Session 9:
Catharina Peersman (Leuven)
'"Litteris vulgariter in lingua romana expositis": the use of Old French in the charters of the abbey of Ninove (1137-1350)'

Plenary:
William Labov (U Penn)
'Cognitive capacities of the sociolinguistic monitor'


SOME TALKS I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE

• Kutlay Yagmur & Eveline van Kooi (Tilburg), 'Language maintenance and shift patterns of Dutch immigrants in Turkey'


• Robert Lawson (Glasgow), 'A violent vernacular? Unpacking the associations between language and violence in Glasgow'


• Rias van den Doel (Utrecht), 'Similarity between L1 regional variation and L2 deviation, and its implications for the language learner'


• Mercedes Durham (Glasgow/Aberdeen), '"The dialect doesna seem to be very cool": language attitudes in young Shetland speakers'


• Jenny Nilsson & Margareta Svahn (SOFI, Sweden), 'Context influence on intra-individual dialect variation: the case of [r] and [R] in West Swedish teenager conversation'


• Susanne Wagner (Freiburg), 'Frequencies, quality and quantity: how best to analyse null subjects in English'


• Søren Beck Nielsen, Christina Fogtmann & Torben Juul Jensen (København): 'From community to conversation, and back: generic use of second person pronouns in Danish'


• Ulrike Vogl & Matthias Hüning (FU Berlin), 'Why Dutch? how to account for changes in language use over time'

MY PRIZES

Best talk: Nanna Haug Hilton
Best discussion after talk: Heinrich Ramisch
Best plenary: Charles Goodwin
Best poster: Nadia Nocchi

Dinner-time experiment, Dutch-wise

Last Wednesday in the Language in Context Research Group, and repeated this Friday in the English Language Research Group, a talk by Claire Cowie and Ross Pirie on ‘topic restrictors’ or ‘viewpoint subjuncts’ in English. The most interesting one, in the discussion afterwards anyway, was -wise – as in ‘Your performance was quite good, choreography-wise–.

German does the same thing, they can use -weise, apparently. Says Erik. But in Dutch, you can't do -wijs or -wijze. Despite some prompting from Claire and Miriam, I couldn't think of the Dutch equivalent off-hand. I have since, I think. It is technisch.

The rest of this blog post is a cop-out: the text of the e-mail I sent Claire. (Claire is from South Africa, which is why there's no translations of the Dutch as I think she'll cope with her L2 Afrikaans. If you don't have an L2 Dutch or Afrikaans, tough.)

On a completely different note... I've been thinking about what Dutch does in the absence of a "-wise" type particle. It took a while, but I think I've found our equivalent: "X-technisch (gesproken/gezien)". I did a little Google search, which came up with the following. (What one doesn't do to avoid marking first-year essays.)

Mostly, the hits are for "technisch gesproken/gezien" by itself, which may or may not have anything to do with technique. Probably quite similar to English "technically (speaking), ..." - from "The XCV-25 is technically a solid machine" to "The Berwick football team plays in the Scottish league, even though Berwick is technically in England."

Some examples from Dutch (10 each for gezien/gesproken, and some without a verb). I've not glossed or translated them as I think you'll cope in most cases (and you may not be interested enough to care anyway)...

(1) ... het behoort, compositorisch-technisch gesproken, tot de periode van Schumann of Brahms, met hoofdvormen en rondo's...
[still retains some of the "technique" meaning; the technique of composing]

(2) Ik vertel elke dag precies wat ik eet-technisch heb uitgevreten.
[a clear example]

(3) Evolutie-technisch gesproken blijkt een erectie tevens een goede methode te zijn om het zaad van de man bij de eicel van de vrouw te krijgen.
[fairly technical again]

(4) Mechanisch-technisch gesproken dan.
[I'm waiting for a 'techniek-technisch gesproken'...]

(5) Het enige voordeel dat promovendi hebben boven hun leeftijdsgenoten in het bedrijfsleven zijn de vrije dagen. Nou ja, CAO-technisch gesproken dan.
[CAO=collective employment contract]

(6) A/D-converters zijn namelijk voor een deel gebaseerd op kansberekening indien het signaal 'ruis' bevat (datacommunicatie-technisch gesproken dan).

(7) ...maar verder gewoon alleen kijken zonder getuigen, eigenwaarde-technisch gesproken.
[this was something about watching porn: only without witnesses, self-respect-wise]

(8) Carrière-technisch gesproken is het opnemen van ouderschapsverlof dan ook de beste manier om je kansen om zeep te helpen.

(9) Sinds de invoering van FUWAVAZ is de hoofdverpleegkundige geen onderdeel meer van het primaire proces. P&O-technisch gesproken dan. Voortaan heet hij of zij "operationeel of tactisch manager".
[P&O=personeel en organisatie (HR)]

(10) Als je een fotograaf bent die puur portretjes maakt, die geen eigen studie heeft, ben je een bijna niet te grijpen persoon, belasting-technisch gesproken.

(in the first 210 of 14,700 Google hits for "*technisch-gesproken")


(11) Juridisch-technisch gezien kan thans bijna alles, maar het gaat erom wat wenselijk is.

(12) Medisch-technisch gezien kunnen we heel veel, maar als we dan thuis komen, moeten we ineens terugvallen op niet-professionele hulp vanwege bezuinigingen.

(13) Medisch-technisch gezien speelt allereerst het probleem van de afstoting.
[these two could actually be proper 'technique' ones: as regards medical technique...]

(14) Belasting-technisch gezien wel ja.

(15) Literair-technisch gezien is hij eerst en vooral een round character i.p.v. het gebruikelijke flat character.
[also techniquey]

(16) Aangezien ik licentie-technisch gezien één jaar recht heb op alle updates die uitkomen, zal ik waarschijnlijk binnen enkele maanden naar versie 7 overgaan.

(17) Een knoeier ben ik schaak-technisch gezien.

(18) Doel hiervan is inzicht te geven in de mate waarin per artikel de kasbudgetten, budgettair-technisch gezien, een andere aanwending zouden kunnen krijgen.
[I would have 'budget-technisch', but maybe for some people there is a constraint that this only attaches to adjectives? Although there are examples with nouns, and even one or two verb roots (2 and possibly 17).]

(19) Juridisch-technisch gezien is ingrijpen in de ziekenfondsverzekering, respectievelijk de WTZ, relatief eenvoudig.

(20) Hij is verzonden, dus morgen of maandag komt hij er al aan. Besteltijd-technisch gezien dus dik in orde.

(in the first 80 of 111,000 Google hits for "*-technisch-gezien")


(21) Nee, dit is arbo-technisch niet toegestaan als er mensen in moeten werken.
[arbo=Health & Safety regulations]

(22) Dit is juridisch-technisch niet correct omdat nog andere vreemdelingen zich soms kunnen beroepen op het statuut van staatloze.

(23) Dit is registratie-technisch niet mogelijk.

(24) Ik ben het wel met je eens, dit is markt-technisch niet slim.

(25) Dit is begrijpelijk, maar proces-technisch niet logisch.

(26) Ruim twee weken in el casa de mi padre e mi madre. (Dit is Spaans-technisch vast niet helemaal goed, maar fijn is het wel.)
[I like this one]

(27) Dit advies is weliswaar juridisch-technisch niet bindend, maar algemeen gaat er een groot gezag uit van hetgeen de Commissie hierin stelt.

(in 95 Google hits for "dit is * technisch niet")


A wide range of sources, from blogs/forums to legal and parliamentary documents. Appears to be reasonably evenly spread over Dutch and Belgian web addresses.

So there.

Notes of mystery

Because I am foreseeing lots of marking this week, I'm not really starting any big projects. This is the perfect time to tidy my desk, put stuff in the appropriate files (or the waste-paper bin) and generally get a bit more organized.

And then I find a piece of paper which I think – from the notes on it – dates from about September 2006. On the note is a mysterious sequence of abbreviations:

BS
IS

CB
DC
DPlay

BH
IH
BC
IC
C.

I have no idea what I meant by this. I'm chucking out the note because it's now useless. If I ever get a brainwave and think, ‘I wrote down ten abbreviations on a piece of paper that had to do with this’, this blog post will have saved them for posterity...

Sir Bob was wrong

The good news is that I don't have to teach discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication for at least another year. And that's assuming I'll still be here next year, and that I'll still be teaching English Language 1. If I'm not, I mightn't have to teach these things for even longer.

However, in general, Fridays are not very good days. They consist of a lot of running around. I'm teaching from 10 to 12, then there's the postgraduate lunch in Teviot (something that over a year into the project still doesn't want to take off, but we keep trying), and then there's usually a research group meeting of some description from 1 to 2. Which means that by the time I come to my office ready to actually do some work, I'm completely drained of energy, and like fuck am I going to start anything new.

Mondays, in comparison, are much better. Freshly re-energized from the weekend, I do not have teaching in the morning, and the fortnightly research group is at the sensible time of 3pm. Once you get back from that, there just is not really any time to start anything new anyway, so it's okay to just sit and answer some e-mails. So I actually quite like Mondays.

Not only Bob Geldof and his Boomtown Rats had the wrong end of the stick with their I don't like Mondays. It also appears that Fridays get a much more positive review in popular culture: I remember Friday on my mind by the Easybeats, and Friday I'm in love by the Cure. Of course this is not likely to be a representative sample of the weekday song population, but as it's a Friday afternoon, I'm really not going to research this in depth.

On average, though, this year's lot appears to be a bit more on the ball than last year's, although they may not necessarily speak a whole lot more. I'm also not sure of their ontheballness comes out of a general interest in the topic – I suspect this to be the case for some of them – or out of an obsession with high marks and wanting to know exactly what to say in an exam and how to say it, rather than wanting to understand what a phoneme actually is or what the point is of conversation analysis – I am quite sure a number of my kiddies fall into this category.

Do I know what the point is of conversation analysis? No. Do I care? Not really.

By this time last year, I had seven of my then first-years having befriended me on Facebook. One group even had a tutorial group reunion (well, the people that they could remember, anyway – and quite frankly, I had forgotten about a fair number of them as well) two weeks ago, for which I was invited as well. I had expected it to be slightly awkward, but it was actually quite good fun. This year, I have more students, but none of them have tried to befriend me on Facebook yet. There was a vague attempt in one group (the Thursday group) to have a tutorial outing, but that never got properly organized. There was mention of the Big Cheese though, so I'm not exactly sorry it came to nothing...

I'm looking forward to teaching starting again in the first week of next semester, with some interesting topics: social and geographical variation in English, and history of English. The days will be getting longer by then, so Fridays may no longer be as depressing.

In the past week I have...

• been to Ikea and bought a Billy and a Benno, among other things;


• finished The English by Jeremy Paxman (see below);


• had the Evil Article finally accepted in Transactions of the Philological Society;


• been sore-footed, for which I blame KH's idea that we should set with a 150 degree turnout;


• failed to get internet banking, probably because they only have my mobile and I gave them the landline and so there are ‘discrepancies’ between different sets of information;


• decided to do some NeighborNet stuff for my PhD, as well as do some geostatistics;


• contacted the necessary people to actually do NeighbourNet stuff and geostatistics;


• learned about Romance plurals;


• purchased two Faroese CDs through iTunes – Fram á hermótið by Páll Finnur Páll (*) and Hugafar á ferð by Høgni Reistrup;


• done some other things not worth mentioning.

Book review:

Paxman sets out on a mission to explain why the English are so damn, well, English. This mainly involves an explanation of how the English are so English, of what Englishness actually is. Another recurring argument in the book is that the English actually aren't very English at all; this is reserved for a tiny proportion of the English that Paxman calls ‘the Breed’. The Breed are the ones that live in the countryside, that are all about honour, dignity, patriotism and Etonian nepotism, that think "what-ho" and "jolly" are actual words, that excel at hunting and sports, that would gladly sacrifice a limb if it meant a Frog or a Kraut would lose two – all these quintessentially English things. The rest of them are really poor buggers who don't even have an identity. The Scots, Welsh and Irish are better off than the plebs of England; they may have been kicked off their land and replaced by sheep, or sent to work in the mines, but at least they have an identity.

But although Paxman's book is a very enjoyable read, and quite instructive about the essence of Englishness and its diachronic continuity within the Breed, I haven't been able to figure out the real crux: why are the English, if only a select few of them, so English? Or more importantly, why are most of them not?

(*) In Faroese this gets a dative: við Pálli Finni Pálli. Joyful geekery.

Why I missed my tutorial

Paraphrasing:

Sorry, but I had to do a week's military service in South Korea.

The disturbing thing is that it's true.