faʲlənə weɹɪŋ

That is where I am right now. There is a four-week linguistics institute this summer, and the them is "language and the world," which essentially means that the emphasis is on empirical linguistics, rather than theoretical linguistics (although, with almost 80 different courses offered at once, the theory does slip in there.) This is incredibly cool. I'm taking four classes, one of which is directly relevant to my thesis project, two of which are descriptions of an extremely common research protocol (eye-tracking and brain-waves, also known as event-related potentials (ERPs)), and one of which was originally going to be a for-fun class, but turns out to be exactly on the sort of stuff I decided I didn't know enough about when I discarded a different thesis idea: computational psycholinguistics. There are workshops, such as, "here's how to use phonetic analysis software to synthesize experimental stimuli," talks by famous people, movies (although they're all linguistic documentaries), and simply eating dinner with someone is an education in linguistics. I chatted with one woman who is working on how computational pragmatics, and with another who is looking at how people use their feet (feet!) in sign language. True, there's work; I have spent all Friday evening, and all Saturday and Sunday reading things, but if I can keep up this pace I will be very, very smart by the end of July.

Aside from the classes and people, there are also a large number of other things that are making this month awesome:

1. The location and weather. This institute is in Boulder, CO, which has plenty of pretty mountains and so on, but which even better than that has lots of thunderstorms! There's been at least some thunder every day, and sometimes quite dramatic rain and wind and lightning. They usually don't last more than an hour or two, and even though they tend to come at dinner time, meaning that I get wet as I walk to the cafeteria, my normal home has very boring, placid weather, and these storms are great.
2. The dorm life! I miss Mr. Philena very much, but it's kind of fun to be in a dorm again. There's a rec room with ping pong and pool and a piano and foozball and air hockey (although I haven't had any time to use them), and each room has a fridge and a microwave, which means that I can have snacks at all hours. My roommate is kinda sorta a young-un, being two years behind me in my program (we arranged the rooming together ahead of time), and kinda sorta a peer, being married and having already gotten an MA before starting here--hence we're both one-year-post-MA. She's totally great, and keeps me from getting lonely without Mr. Philena.
3. The cafeterias! Don't get me wrong--the food is pretty lousy. However, almost everyone is a linguist, and, especially this early in the institute, it happens quite often that I simply sit down at a table and introduce myself to whoever's there, or I'm sitting alone and someone else simply introduces herself to me, and then we talk about linguistics! It's like the first day of school without any cafeteria-anxiety: adults are mature and intelligent, so there tends to be less cliquishness, and everyone's a linguist, so there's usually a common topic of interest. Also, it's lots of fun managing to put together a delicacy from the semi-raw materials. Someone at my table today mentioned that if you mix chocolate milk and coffee you get a passable mocha! I'll try that at dinner tonight, I think.
4. The campus! It's not a big deal, as campuses go. It's pretty similar, in fact, to my home campus: big buildings, green areas, lots of paths for walking, a few streets for driving, maps scattered around in case you get lost. But still, it's a bit of an intellectual puzzle to learn your way around a new campus, and my navigational confidence increases every day.

So here I sit, having read ten different papers/chapters/selected excerpts in the past four days, with three more to go, which I will probably not finish before more are assigned. It's warm, but breezy, and it's almost dinner time, which means that the evening thunderstorm should be coming in pretty soon. And indeed, I just heard two rolls while I was typing.

In my psycholinguistics seminar, we finished up a week or so ago with a discussion of the following paper:

Kemper, Susan, Marilyn Thompson, and Janet Marquis (2001). Longitudinal Change in Language Production: Effects of Aging and Dementia on Grammatical Complexity and Propositional Content. Psychology and Aging 16(4): 600-614.

Briefly, it is a study of the language complexity of a few dozen older adults, starting ages 65 to 75, over a period of up to 15 years. Most adults entered and exited the study at different times, but they were all quite similar in one striking respect, which is shown below. It's aptly named a "spaghetti plot," but it's easily enough read when you understand the organizing principle. Each line represents an individual subject. The y-axis maps grammatical complexity, and the x-axis shows the age of the adult at each observation. (Observations were done at 6-month intervals.)


Note the precipitous drop in performance at 74 years. This is not due to any experimental error. It is not the case, for example, that whoever was measuring grammatical complexity changed jobs and a new person started the work. The x-axis is coded by age, not by time, so if subject 3 was 65 when the study started, while subject 18 was 72, they would have reached age 74 and had their measurements taken seven years apart, but they still experienced similar drops in performance. It's really quite terrifying how uniform the results are. I haven't read much work by Susan Kemper, but someone else in class mentioned that Kemper is known (at least by her) as that author who writes really scary articles about aging.

This paper has been niggling at the back of my mind for quite a while now, and so it was with a certain amount of surprise that I read this week's essay in the back of the NYTimes book review, in which a 73-year old author,  Gail Godwin, describes her own experience with the decline of her writing abilities---or more accurately, a decline of lexical access:

And I'm staying at home, making lemon curd. This involves stirring stuff over a double boiler for a while, so here I am, stirring:




Mr. Philena and I have been watching some truly spectacular lightning, but in less than an hour we will have to venture outside, alas, because a person from my program is hosting a pre-Thanksgiving dinner which we are planning to attend. Fortunately, she lives across the street and three houses down, so the outing will not be too onerous.

In many, many novels, especially those written by Jane Austen, female characters make heavy use of a sudden headache whenever they wish to retire from company and be alone. Anne Elliot does this to avoid a dinner with Captain Wentworth. Lizzie does this when she discovers from Colonel Fitzwilliam that Mr. Darcy in fact took an active role in preventing Jane from seeing Mr. Bingley when she was in London. (Hmm--in fact, it seems that there has been scholarly research on the subject of headaches and Jane Austen.) In an Hercule Poirot episode, a woman who wishes to be undisturbed for a while (so that she can change into her alter ego who is actually a murderess!) goes upstairs to lie down with a headache. A sudden headache, in short, is the perfect plot device to make a character disappear for a few hours without anyone asking any questions, and yesterday I discovered why. I do not get migraines, although poor Mr. Philena does,* but some combination of sun, heat, dehydration, stress, computer screens, air pressure, lack of caffeine, or who knows what else yesterday sent me to bed with I think one of the few bad headaches I've ever had in my life. I'm rarely really sick (although once I had a cold that genuinely did take away my sense of taste, so extreme was the congestion), so whenever I feel so bad that I can't actually function properly, I get a bit scared on the one hand (as the lovely writer of Hyperbole and a Half illustrates in the last few pictures of her saga of a health scare a bit more dramatic than my headache**), and a bit fascinated on the other. I remember taking great pains (aha ha ha) to try to figure out exactly where the discomfort was located (sort of behind the eye sockets, a bit in the forehead above them, and some in the back), comparing and contrasting the sensation to a caffeine headache (very similar, but more intense), and finally giving up, taking a tylenol, having a nap, and waking up feeling much better.

But enough about headaches! Let's discuss more pleasant pastimes. One occupation that will have to come to an end now that school has started in earnest is my gobbling up of science fiction books. One particularly good series I have been reading recently (The Sharing Knife, by Lois McMaster Bujold---thank you,mummimamma, for mentioning that there was a new one out) has struck me because it features a female protagonist who is extremely different from the standard heroine of such novels. See, usually these novels are set in a swords-and-sorcery type of world, where if women are to go on adventures they must cease to be like women and start doing manly things, and a lot of plots are built around the girl-dressing-up-as-a-boy or the out-of-place-girl-who-always-wanted-to-do-fencing-instead-of-embroidery-and-as-such-was-socially-ostracized. Yet in this series, the female character is none of those things: she is brought up learning cooking and sewing and weaving, and she is good at it, and her place in the world as a cook and weaver is valued and important. After all, despite what the covers of fantasy novels would lead us to believe, it's difficult to go hunt monsters without clothes: if you don't have trousers and socks you get saddle sores and blisters, and someone has to wash all those bandages after they've been used on your dragon bites. Usually the traditional gender roles in these sorts of books go hand-in-hand with the traditional values attached to the bearers of those gender roles, but if you're building your own world, there's no need to take them together. Authors often try to separate household activities from the traditionally associated undesirable connotations of femininity by giving cooks and weavers and so forth magical powers that somehow spring from the cooking and weaving. What I like about these books (aside from the very compelling world-building) is that Bujold doesn't even need to do that. Domestic skill in this world doesn't need to have anything special about it to be inherently valuable, and that approach is refreshing.

Another pastime that I will not be giving up because it is the perfect procrastination tool is watching lousy science fiction television series on Netflix. I might have mentioned my delight with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that has come to an end. I can only take so much dying-and-coming-back-to-life and associated angst before I get bored. The newest delight is Stargate: SG1, which I have only recently discovered is based off the movie Stargate that came out when I was young enough to enjoy it tremendously (although by all critical accounts it was terrible.) I don't, in fact, have any real reason to enjoy it; it's not as good as Star Trek or Firefly, or as imaginative as Heroes, or as charming as early Buffy. It does, however, allow me to be smug about my education. Somewhere out there is a TV audience being catered to who is expected to sympathize with the man-of-few-words warrior who can only wrinkle his brow and go "huh?" when the smart astrophysicist explains that stars move over thousands of years, but the relative difference in position between closer stars is less than the difference between stars that are farther apart. I, on the other hand, fall neatly into the other TV audience, which is expected to laugh at the foolish gun-man and sympathize with the smart astrophysicist, whose carefully scripted explanation sounds just smart enough to make people who follow it feel like astrophysicists themselves. (I also love the moments when people on alien planets speak in not-English, and everyone stares at the anthropologist, while he stares dumbly back at them. It reminds me of my language classes, when the professor says something to me, and everyone stares at me, and an answer is expected, and I don't have it. These moments are becoming fewer, it seems. Apparently, as the season progresses, people on other worlds have started learning English much faster.) Eventually I imagine even my smugness at knowing what electromagnetic radiation is will not be enough to make up for the pretty execrable writing, but for now the ego-stroking and pretty costumes keep me quite happy.

*with truly alarming aura symptoms: the first we learned of it was when he suddenly lost the ability to read and could not remember names of his colleagues, resulting in a night in the emergency room getting CT scans and scheduling MRIs to determine whether he'd had a stroke. Subsequent migraine auras restricted themselves to more respectable flashing lights and tingling hands.

**I love this blogger. Any fan of standard written English (coughaheamMommycough)would tremendously enjoy her treatment of the malopropism "alot". If anyone wants to give me a gift, I would love a mug with the picture and caption "I care about this alot."

Matlab! I have no particular reason to feel that I need it, but some other people in the department do, and they started up a study group, which I decided to join. I am, after all, left to my own devices this summer, and there's no reason not to learn a new skill for free. I hear it is pretty good with "signal processing," which, if I understand correctly, might be a useful tool if I end up doing work with brain waves and electrodes and stuff. I'm not entirely sure I want to do that, though, so for now it's simply a toy, and I am treating it as such. For example, now that I have done a chapter on scripts and if/else statements, I can have the computer respond to your input with suitable responses! In one that I wrote just this morning, I created a randomly-defined variable, and if you then give the right answer to a question, the script will reward you with the first line from one of ten wikipedia articles, depending on the value of the variable. Either it is particularly fond of giving the variable a value between 90-100, or else it simply likes the sentence about pigs, because that is by far the most frequently displayed answer.

Update: In true Mike Slackenerny fashion, I have caged a very nice chocolate chip cookie from the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience's annual bash. I figure I have all the right in the world, because they're right outside my office and making a ton of noise.

• I have graduated with an MA in linguistics! The advantage of an enormous, faceless, anonymous university is that it is impossible for everyone to graduate at once. At the UofC, there was one commencement ceremony for all undergrads and MAs and PhDs, and it took forever and you had to sit through a lot of names and awards being given to people you don't know. At my current school, however, it is so huge that glomping everyone together like that would result in a 12-hour ceremony, so they divide it up by department. That meant that there was a special Linguistics Department ceremony, and I knew almost everyone and I cared about the awards and I liked the speakers and it lasted just long enough. I was also mentioned by name in the faculty address, when the speaker--Professor Oakes--started off with a lighthearted discussion of how he showed up late that morning, just the way he showed up an hour late to my MA oral exam. Then he apologized. Then he gave a terrific address that kind of addressed all my concerns about life in general, and told me everything I know intellectually, but still needed to hear again. It was the nicest graduation ceremony I've ever been to, although I still think that the silly music they play is silly, especially when the (very short) procession of graduates walks too slowly so there's an extra twelve measures of people standing and waiting for the silly music to end. But the food was good: sushi, guacamole, fruit, vegetables and dip, Mediterranean finger food, champagne, and cake.
• I have had two weeks of no responsibilities! It's been great. As I mentioned before, I will be working in Professor Oake and Professor Hall's laboratory (unpaid on my own projects, but still with dedicated desk space), but I needed a special key for that to happen. The key didn't come for about two and a half weeks*, so I spent the time doing a combination of baking and television watching.
• The television watching has been amazing! I have spent the last eight years or so without my own television, so I've been catching up on what I've missed. These include TV shows like "Dexter," (recommended by Melissa), "Dead Like Me" (recommended by my mother), and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (which my mother has been recommending for a long time, and which I always thought was just way too beneath me and unintellectual. However, I gave it a shot, and except for the execrable acting by Angel, it's quite amusing, and full of all sorts of nice fistfights with demons and vampires and stuff. I love Spike. He's quite a brilliant character. A harmless vampire who's all brooding and angsty because he has a soul and feels bad about hurting people and he and his human girlfriend can never have a good life together---that's tiresome. However, a harmless vampire who's all brooding and angsty because he really wants to kill people but has a chip in him that renders him impotent (and yes, they have a good time with that metaphor!) and meanwhile his vampire girlfriend has dumped him for a fungus demon--that's hilarious!)
• Baking has been less amazing, but probably good for me in the long run. The problem with living with a husband and no one else in a household means that when a recipe goes wrong in an edible-but-not-very-interesting way, there's no one to help eat it, but you feel bad about just throwing it away. So I've been experimenting a little, because as good as chocolate chip cookies and pies are, they get boring after a while. Recently it's been cupcakes, but the last recipe I tried ended up tasting quite a bit like a boxed cake recipe, which usually is not the goal when you're making something from scratch.
• I've also been hiking! The husband and I have been doing ten-mile-ish hikes every weekend. Two weeks ago we climbed Mt. Olympia (one of the less Mt. Diablo peaks) and saw beautiful late-season wildflowers. Last weekend we climbed Mt. St. Helena, the highest peak in the Bay Area. The hike itself was pretty easy, because the trailhead starts halfway up the mountain, and the majority of the route is a fire trail with a very gentle grade, but the views from the top were beautiful. Here's Mr. Philena: (if you look closely you can see the summit-marker at his feet.)

           This weekend we'll be doing another hike up the north side of Mt. Tam. It should be full of nice redwoods and ferns and maybe some late-blooming rhododendrons.

• I've been doing more reading of Les Miserables in French! I started it over Christmas break, and I have now finished volume one and started on volume two. In terms of page count I'm probably about halfway done, and I suspect I'll finish it this summer. I tried to read Anna Karenina in Russian with much less success, but perhaps I'll try to keep my Russian up with short stories first, before attempting another doorstop.
• Mr. Philena and I have been reading O. Henry stories. I, along with every other eight-grader in the country, read "The Gift of the Magi," but I've never read any of his others, and they're all good. Some of them are predictable, but, like a good basketball play, the fact that you see the ending coming doesn't necessarily mean that it's any less successful. So Mr. Philena correctly predicted that the ivy leaf had been painted on the wall, and I correctly predicted that the new servant girl was the missing fiancee from Ireland, and neither of us saw coming that the whole time she couldn't read, but all of the stories work equally well.
• Lunchtime!

*When Professor Hall emailed me to ask delicately, "So . .  . you planning on coming in this summer?" I explained the problem, and she procured me a key right away. I went to the lab for the first time yesterday and did things like turning on my computer, updating the antivirus which had been languishing untouched for two and half weeks, and reading through a statistics book that I'll be working on this summer. Then she showed up and we chatted about a seminar she'll be teaching next semester (and which I'll be taking), which she is using me as a sounding board to help her prepare for. She gave me a reading assignment: Read this article and tell me the parts that make you go "cool!" That's the best kind of assignment.

Courtesy of babylon_poet . Please enjoy*:



*NB: My braid is not actually that long.

As far as I can tell, it is perfect. There is a card on which to write my name and my office hours and tack up by the door, so undergradlets know that they've come to the right office. There is a desk, securely cemented to the wall with cobwebs, a chair, an extension cord that reaches to a rickety power strip that is plugged into an outlet, and wireless internet access. On the various bookshelves are the remains of Tas from years past, including books, notebooks, multiple copies of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, grammars of Arabic, Piro-Arawakan, and Kolami, a handbook for Windows NT, elderly packets of swiss mix, and a case of wine from the Napa valley. In my desk drawers there are pens, a paper wrapper with altoids, a wrapped pair of chopsticks, colored pencils, a book entitled "The Korea Handbook," a CD with the tracks labeled in Korean, and a calendar open to April, 2006. Two doors down the hall is the classroom where almost all of my classes meet. I think I'll be very happy this semester.

He has gone away until Thursday for a training workshop in southern California, and I am on my own until then, when I fly down to join him. I helped him load up the car with luggage---both his and mine, which means I'll be able to walk onto the plane with a book and nothing else---and on my way back inside, I noticed that our garden looked beautiful, but a little bit grassy. So I stopped and pulled up some stray tufts of grass that are peeping out amid the mulch laid down between the monkey-flower and dudleya. Invigorated by the five minutes of stooping and tugging, I went inside and noticed that the couch cushions were a bit squashed and uncomfortable, and after stomping them back into shape, I reflected that the tidy new appearance of the couch did not quite match the untidy appearance of the coffee table. Three hours later I realize the dishes have been washed, the bathroom cleaned, the carpets vacumed, the kitchen floor mopped*, my desk neatened, the recycling taken out, the rugs shaken out, the living room straightened, and the shoes lined up and put away. I feel quite accomplished and pleased: when you include the mopping, this kind of cleaning does not happen more than once a year, so I am done until next August. I celebrate with a homemade brownie. (They're quite good. If you stop by for tea, remember to ask for one. I can't possibly eat them all myself.)

I've finished up the Trollope books in the house, and have moved on to Patrick O'Brian. They are lovely. I can easily gobble up one a day if I start in the morning, but often other things like brownie-baking and classes at the LSA institute intervene. My hope is that I can read most, if not all of the series, before school starts again, so that when I have to start doing things like grading Ling 100 homeworks and researching Proto-Bantu in order to get my paper on phonological changes in the history of Nzadi set for publication in the grammar I've been invited to contribute to, not to mention doing my own classwork, I will not be putting everything off in order to learn whether the destruction of the mizzenmast will cause the ship to broach to in heavy seas with a 72 that has the weather-gauge on us following close behind**.

I also bought blue jeans. For the past few days, since we washed them for the first time, I've been prancing around in them and composing little entries in my head about the superiority of men's fashion over women's, the fact that men's clothes have just as many variations in size and style as women's, despite the surface simplicity of the sizing system that women tend to vocally envy, the striking difference between real jeans and fashion jeans, and other reflections on the clothes-purchasing experience, which is so rare in this house that many mornings recently I have not been able to dress without first sewing up awkwardly placed holes in my pants. Now that the keyboard is in front of me, thought, I realize that it is not a particularly interesting topic of discussion for anyone who does not come into daily contact with my lower half, so I will forbear.

Hmm. That last paragraph was quite a conversation-killer, even for a conversation with myself. I'm sure my sister could turn it into something worthwhile. She's a brilliant writer, and everyone should read her blog here. She's in Mongolia, which already gives her quite the head up anything I could post.

Who wants a picture? ( I have a few )