On a road trip

Originally uploaded by thatgirl

I’m currently in Wyoming, and although gas prices are hitting record highs, we’re really glad we drove instead of flying. This country is so wide and full of sky and space.

So we’re leaving on a crazy road trip this weekend, which involves the states above, plus some others on the way back.  The initial goal is the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy (hah hah, yes, Grice, is there any “inexact philosophy”, implicature, etc.) and then who knows.  Yellowstone, visiting our friend Melissa (formerly of Merce Cunningham and lately of Headwaters Dance Company) in Montana.  Then maybe a Cary Grant-esque jaunt through Mt. Rushmore, and across the UP (where perhaps we’ll see our “wife at the K-Mart“), down to the family, and then back home.

Apparently there are no escalators in Wyoming.  We shall investigate.  Stay tuned, or whatever.

I’m at the point in the semester where I’m knee deep in teaching syntax, which is good as it’s something I don’t often think about but feel that I should know better than I do. It does, however, have the additional effect of making me notice how my idiolect contains all sorts of examples of constructions that many people judge ungrammatical (most grievously, according to Walt, the dreaded resumptive pronoun).

So yesterday, I was with my sister at NYU’s lovely Bobst Library (now less scary with plexiglass barriers — photo of the amazing internal atrium here). Walt called, and wanted to meet up with us later at Old Town, but didn’t recall exactly where it was. So in the course of explaining to him how to get there, I said:

You know that street that the Union Square Petco is on the corner of Broadway and?

So apparently I can extract out of a coordinate construction.  Now all I have to is come up with a naturally occurring subjacency violation (cause that’s the one that loads of papers about have been written) and I can just declare my own dialect.

Saw this when installing from some old Adobe media today:

But who will police the police? Or, “Police police police police police police police.”  See also: buffalo.

Just yesterday I was teaching the first class of an introductory linguistics course, and I asked students how many languages they thought were currently spoken in the world.  Guesses ranged from one to ten thousand, which was pretty good for a first class.  When the last version of Ethnologue came out, it claimed there were 6,912 languages in the world.  As of two days ago, there are only 6,911: the last traditional speaker of Eyak, a native language of Alaska, died at 89 years of age.

The amazing thing about the NYTimes is that you can, in one day, read this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/opinion/16landsburg.html

“All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners.”

and also read this article: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/us/16ohio.html

“Middle-aged men moving in with parents, wives taking two jobs, veteran workers taking overnight shifts at half their former pay, families moving West — these are signs of the turmoil and stresses emerging in the little towns and backwoods mobile homes of southeast Ohio, where dozens of factories and several coal mines have closed over the last decade, and small businesses are giving way to big-box retailers and fast-food outlets.”

Yay for “free” trade.

Over at languagelog, Geoffrey Pullum takes a student to task for writing on a test that some phrases in an example sentence “were not deemed noun phrases.”  He feels that students should be “deeming” anything, as they’re the students and he’s the professor, and that further pomposity was added by the passive voice.  When I read his post, I realized that if I had been grading that paper, I would have interpreted the student’s locution entirely differently: it’s possible that the student used the passive voice to invoke unnamed experts who have already done the deeming elsewhere, and the student was merely reporting on that fact.  I’m sure it would have struck me that the student was weighing in a bit too heavily to make his point, however it’s not entirely clear to me that it was the student who intended to do the deeming in this case.

Either way, it couldn’t have been a very high-level course, as the task was to identify noun phrases in a sentence, so I think all the deeming on that subject has been done.