#@lingblr pls read and giv me notes my family is dying

[spuriusbrocoli]

6 13 22 23 28 35-39 47 52 53 59 63 74 80 91 95 :P

6. What’s your lucky number?

69 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

(I don’t have one. 四 ig bc I’m morbid)

13. What talents do you have?

I think I’m a damn good academic writer, tbth. Kind of seriously considering doing some kind of side-job YouTube linguist thing after I graduate and have more than $0.00 to my name. And hey, if there’s enough of a market, that’d be a cool thing to do as a side-job with more traditional academia!

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?

Not yet…

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?

Nope! Closest I’ve come is former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

28. What type of music do you like?

Lots.

Usually alt and indie rock, with some indie pop and folk. New Wave and 80s dancepop. Also, some top 40 pop.

Lots of electronicas, too. House, nu-Disco, ambient, indie-tronica, whatever-the-hell-genre The Knife is. Some more experimental rock a la Xiu Xiu and noisecore.

Also trying to get into more cabaret-esque stuff. Big fan of Amanda Palmer. Plus some… neo-Baroque, ig? Idk what to call Patrick Wolf and Owen Pallet.

Teeny-tiny bit of R&B and hip hop. Janelle Monae, Shamir, Lupe Fiasco, Kanye, OutKast. Just kind of the giant must-hears, y’know?

Also, did I mention that my musical tastes are gay as hell? Bc they are g a y a s h e l l . ANOHNI/Antony and the Johnsons, Björk, Scissor Sisters, Hercules and Love Affair, Marina and the Diamonds… Just a ton of gay shit.

35. Have you ever tried archery?

Yes! I was very bad at it.

36. Favorite clean word?

“Have”? Bc it can be a function word and a lexical word.

Okay lemme explain that: So in linguistics, we tend to carve up vocabulary into lexical vocabulary (words that “have meaning”, i.e. name something in the real word) and functional vocabulary (words that act more as glue for a sentence to connect its lexical words).

“Have” is interesting bc it can have meanings in both contexts.

(1) shows “have” used as a lexical verb, where it means “own” or “possess”. And you readers at home could conceivably imagine a synonym for it in this context.

(1) They have a cat.

Compare that to (2) where the “possession” meaning is conveyed in “had” (admittedly an inflected version of the same lexical verb), but “have” itself can’t be given a synonym so easily. You maybe could, but it would really just be a case of using a semantically-similar structure than a true lexical synonym. To even define “have” in the context of (2), you would need to convey information about the cat-ownership wrt time, which isn’t really a definition.

(2) They have had a cat.

See how different those are? That is the difference between lexical and functional vocabulary and why “have” (and these examples) are some of my favorite ways to explain it.

I’ve also as of late become really interested in the word “table”. Now, I work in a restaurant where “table” can mean “a piece of furniture customers eat at” or “a table of customers”. That in and of itself isn’t weird, you get polysemy like that all the time. What’s interesting to me is the way they can be used to mean ostensibly different things in rapid contexts.

So in (3), there’s an example of the first definition. Not weird at all.

(3) I need to clean the table.

Obviously, this is an inanimate object which I am cleaning and not a group of people sitting at a table. And in (4), it’s quite obvious that I mean the second meaning, i.e. a group of people (formerly) sitting at a table. No one would reasonably interpret (4) out of context to think the table was a mimic that left to go find sustenance elsewhere.

(4) The table left.

But what’s interesting to me is how I can embed the two meanings with the same ostensible referent in a discourse. Hell, in a single sentence!

(5) When a table1 leaves, I have to clean it1 .

(The subscripts with the same numerals indicate coreference–i.e., that “it”refers back to “table”.)

I have the intuition that “it” absolutely means the table. I also have the intuition that in the first clause, “table” refers to a group of people sitting at a table while in the second “it” refers to the inanimate object itself. True, this is across a clausal boundary, but it should still be weird that two different meanings of a polysemous word are called not only in the same discourse, but to refer to the same real-world referent.

And maybe there is some pragmatic theory I’m simply ignorant of that explains this. And I wouldn’t at all be surprised if there were experimental work on this with semantic priming studies or somesuch (and if there isn’t this is me 100% calling dibs I will fite you). But it’s an interesting sentence that makes me question how we as linguists think about the lexicon.

So yeah. That’s why you don’t ask linguists language questions.

37. Favorite swear word?

“Fuckass”. Nice and simple.

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

A little under three straight days. I had an absolutely nasty case of poison ivy at the end of the fifth grade. I also have no self-control and needed to stay up so I wouldn’t scratch. I had brief bouts of rest, but didn’t enter a REM cycle for almost 72 hours. Crashed for like 12 when I finally did.

When I got back to school, everyone said I looked like shit, too.

39. Do you have any scars?

A bunch of small ones. An itty-bitty scar that my former section-leader’s dad gave me when I had my appendectomy. A small circle from when I got my hand slammed in a car door by accident. A bunch of internal scars in my ears from a whole ton of various surgeries as a youngin’. And then various minor cuts and burns and scrapes that left noticeable scar tissue behind. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

$200 coat I bought my freshman year of college. I also have a $100+ tie that is my most expensive article of clothing by size. They are both very nice.

52. Favorite food?

One of the three: penne alla bettola, spaghetti alla carbonara, or strozzapretti. That’s a spicy cream and tomato sauce with vodka; spaghetti with pancetta and egg; and a cream-and-meat sauce respectively. I like my Italian decadence.

53. Favorite foreign food?

I imagine this ask prompt was originally a Brit bc holy hell is that a Brit thing to say. I’m also not gonna count the above bc I was raised on Italy. Gonna go with takoyaki or shu mai. I’ve also never had a bad dish with lamb from the Islamic world tho.

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?

Suck until they’re weak and inferior to me, then crush them between my teeth.

63. Biggest Fear?

Sea monsters.

74. Are you ticklish?

Yes. And a kicker, so that’s not an invitation.

80. How many piercings do you have?

Four rn bc two of the holes sealed up.

I got an industrial in each ear done at a very nice (and expensive) place in Northampton. Except while the one in my left ear was still healing, the bar itself broke. I had to go to work, so I couldn’t get anything in the holes for over 12 hours, by which point it had already sealed.

EDIT: I forgot the two boring lobe piercings, lol.

91. Do you like your own name?

Well enough, ig? I prefer Jordan and Conrad as names, but I’ve already bequeathed the latter to the dog, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

95. What are your weaknesses?

Executive dysfunctioning, especially as it applies to task-completion and time-management.