meanguistics

[meanguistics]

The excuse that my professors often used was that [r] is quicker and easier to write than [ɹ]. I know it seems like a silly thing to worry about when they're the exact same symbol, just rotated on an axis - and if you're learning the whole IPA, there's a whole slew of other symbols that you have to get used to writing, too, so why not add this to the list? But if I'm completely honest, it was true for me. It saved some time for me when I was transcribing speech - especially running speech. And it works perfectly well for dialects or languages in which true [r] is absent. In the end, our professors were conscientious enough to teach us to make clear notes about when we were using [r] in place of [ɹ] when writing academic papers.

why do intro to ling professors insist on not teaching us [ɹ]? why did i learn it as [r] when that’s a trill? We already had to learn that smorgasbord of vowels and diacritics, what difference would teaching us [ɹ] be?

[meanguistics]

The first time you recognize the holes in Chomsky's theories

[meanguistics]

Seeing the one other guy in your SLP classes like

[meanguistics]

Trying to pretend everything is normal while you juggle class, work, and grad school apps

[meanguistics]

When an SLP professor displayed a phoneme chart

that used English spelling conventions

[meanguistics]

When you overhear family bragging about your degree

[meanguistics]

Since this blog has always been strictly humor-oriented, and I only ever spoke about my personal life if asked directly, I hesitated in composing this note for a long time. However, each of these scenarios is based in my real life experiences, and if I'm going to continue to do that, then you are inevitably going to notice a few fundamental changes, and I think those should be explained. I'm going to go ahead and apologize for the length of this; brevity isn't really my forte.

As you may have guessed, I am heading to graduate school. After what seemed like a needlessly (but unfortunately necessary) gargantuan effort last fall, in the spring I found out that I was accepted into the program that I had been dreaming about for nearly a year. Bad news, though: the program is at a private university, where tuition is impossibly high (seriously, not all of us have hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw away, America). In lieu of financial ruin, I elected to defer and spend this academic year working on improving my chances of receiving funding, which involves taking prerequisite courses.

And this brings us to the real core change in my life: I'm taking a slight detour out of linguistics and into the field of speech-language pathology. I love linguistics (and presently, I miss it very dearly), but I didn't see much a future for myself in it, and in recent years SLP has really stuck out to me both as a field I am passionately interested in studying, and a career I think I will truly enjoy pursuing.

That being said, much of the content here will still be linguistics-centered. But you will also notice the inclusion of SLP content, because that is what I'm living right now, and sooner or later I'm going to run out of undergraduate misadventures to reminisce about and publish here.

[meanguistics]

Omg. I dunno if you tumble anymore or if you'll see this but you're blog is my whole soul. Js.

Salut!

I am so glad that there are other people out there who can empathize (and let’s be real, mostly commiserate) with me. I do still tumble. I apologize for my rather lengthy absences and bizarrely sporadic updates in the last year or so; life has been a roller coaster, to say the least.

All that being said, I am presently in a strange limbo between undergraduate and grad school for the year, and I am having all kinds of new experiences. So new posts are right around the corner. And they are sure to be extra sassy.

[meanguistics]

The kind of people who call themselves "intellectual"

At a party, when another graduate tried to insist on correcting my use of "their" as a genderless third person pronoun in front of friends who had heard my anti-prescriptivist diatribes one too many times

[meanguistics]

Being stuck in grad school limbo while everyone else starts their lives

[meanguistics]

When you finally graduate with a Linguistics degree

[meanguistics]

What is language? 8 myths about language and linguistics

What is language?

Language is an arbitrary, conventionalized association between a symbol and a meaning: there’s no necessary connection between the meaning of a word and how it’s represented in language (spoken, signed, or written). This idea comes from Saussure.

If there was a necessary connection between symbol and meaning, we would expect there to be only one possible language. Even for domains where there’s a closer link, such as onomatopoeia and the first words that a baby speaks (often mama, baba, papa, dada since these are easy to articulate), there are still differences cross-linguistically. And for other words, such as dog, chien, perro, languages differ even more.

The conventionalization criterion distinguishes language from other, non-linguistic forms of communication, such as body language and gesture. Two monolingual speakers of English are equally likely to produce similar or dissimilar gestures in describing a given situation (such as a ball rolling down a hill) as a monolingual speaker of English and a monolingual speaker of another spoken language, but two speakers of ASL will produce signs to describe that situation in a way that are systematically similar to each other and different from another sign language such as BSL. 

What is grammar?

Read More

[meanguistics]

This is held at my school and headed in part by one of my favorite professors. If you have $500, it is 100% worth your time.

Breath of Life workshops are a great way of connecting people interested in revitalizing their language with archived linguistics materials. I’ve never been to one, but I’ve heard good things. 

From the website and Facebook page of the Oklahoma Breath of Life workshop: 

The Oklahoma Breath of Life, Silent No More Workshop is a week long (Sunday through Friday), intensive workshop in linguistics and language renewal. The workshop is especially designed for indigenous people from communities who no longer have any fluent, first language speakers. With motivation from community members, archival documentation, and training in how to use this documentation, these languages can have a new breath of life and can be spoken again.

There’s also another Breath of Life workshop in California in June. Registration for both is in mid-April, and both have some financial aid available. A longer discussion of the 2012 Oklahoma workshop is in this paper by Coleen Fitzgerald and Mary Linn. For more general language documentation/revitalization, there’s also CoLang, which I have been to and throughly recommend. 

[meanguistics]

Have you tried ProQuest? It's an online database of theses, abstracts, and academic articles with an entire section dedicated to linguistics and language behavior. If you've ever performed searches on other sites like JSTOR, or even GoogleScholar, you should be able to navigate the site just fine. Last semester I wrote a research paper over what I thought was a fairly obscure topic, and this semester I'm doing something similar, and ProQuest has continually surprised me with how many useful articles it spat out at me. Now, I've only ever accessed ProQuest through my university, so I'm not sure if it's open to the general public - but on that note, I don't know if you're also university student, and if you are, if your university has the same access to certain research as mine. Let me know how it goes!

Preferred Gender Pronouns

Okay, I need help linguistics of tumblr. I am trying to write (or at least propose) a paper on the need/evolution/existence of preferred gender pronouns but cannot for the life of me find any other research on the topic. I know (or at least am quite sure) research exists, but where is it hiding? Would anyone happen to know where to look?

[meanguistics]

When the new Linguistics major is actually cute

[meanguistics]

That point in the semester when you realize your vocal tract is just a flap of muscle in the hole in your face

[meanguistics]

"Oh, you're a Linguistics major? So then you've read Chomsky."