Yes or no what?

I was sort of half-heartedly watching ITV's 'This Morning' programme while I was working yesterday (honest) and they were talking about vigilantes. They had one of those viewer polls, where viewers have to text or tweet their opinion about an issue and either the result is an equal split or it confirms what we already knew. 

This was the question put to viewers about this 'issue': 

Perfectly reasonable question. Two opposing points of view to choose between: either vigilantes have a valid role (in the process of catching criminals) or the job of catching criminals is one that should be left to the police alone. Choose the position you agree with and tell ITV. 

But here's how the results were presented: 

Well, yes or no what? Yes, either vigilantes have a valid role or catching criminals should be left to the police? And no, neither of the above apply? 

Clearly not. Obviously, what they meant was yes or no to the first part of the question (do vigilantes have a valid role), as this clearer presentation shows:

Probably no one except me was confused by the wording. I've spent more time than most people thinking about questions over the last few years, though, so I noticed this strange construction. 

The question was presented as if it was an 'alternative question': one where the answer is one of the alternatives that are mentioned in the question. More everyday examples tend to have smaller parts of the sentence given as alternatives, as in Are you coming for lunch or tea? The answer is either 'lunch' or 'tea'. The question from ITV had two whole questions as the options: Do vigilantes have a valid role? and should catching criminals be left to the police?. 

This kind of alternative question, as far as I can tell, is hardly ever used as a real alternative question (as the lunch or tea example is). More often, the second part isn't a real alternative, and you aren't meant to pick one of them as the answer. Instead, the question is really a 'yes/no' question, or one where the answer is either yes or no. You can't answer yes or no to a real alternative question (where # means that the utterance is strange in some way): 

Did you buy that suit or hire it? #Yes.

But in the poll above, and in most cases of apparently alternative questions with two entire questions as the 'alternatives', the answer can be yes or no, showing that they must really be yes/no questions. But! You can also answer by providing one of the alternatives. This is sort of the case for yes/no questions as well, in a trivial sense which I won't go into here, but it's different with these strange halfway things.

This was actually pointed out to me pretty early on in my PhD (by Sten Vikner), who gave an example like Have you done the washing up or have you just been sitting in front of the TV all day?. The question provides two alternatives, and you can answer it by providing one of them as the answer, but it's really just asking Have you done the washing up? and it's more natural to answer with yes or no. I didn't really address this problem then, but perhaps I ought to now.

Thesis - done

I finished my PhD thesis today. I'm not submitting until Friday, but I needed to send it off to my super-helpful and kind friend so she can print and bind it for me. It's been a long, hard slog, especially these last few weeks getting it finished, and today I finally did the last read-through.

Until last night I didn't even know if it was any good - I've worked on it too long to get any kind of distance and objectivity. But then I left it few hours and did a last check for typos and I think it's not that bad, in the end.

I don't feel ecstatic or anything, though. I haven't been out celebrating because I don't really know anyone down here in Canterbury, plus I'm teaching at 9am tomorrow so I can't get drunk. I am having a celebratory glass of wine though: my first alcohol in a couple of weeks so it feels like a treat.

I'm submitting on Friday so I head back up north tomorrow afternoon (if the trains are running - the track's flooded) and it'll be great to see everyone and celebrate properly.

No posts for a bit

I'm submitting my thesis next Friday. At least, that's the plan. It's going to be a PhD-heavy time until then, so I won't be posting anything till at least Wednesday next week, which is when I hope to have sent it off to be printed by. Then I'll be back to my usual language-based waffle and twaddle.

I got a job!

Part of the reason why I was so busy a couple of weeks ago is that I had a job interview, and I got it! I'll be starting at the University of Kent in September, for ten months. I'll be teaching semantics, morphology and research skills.

I'm really excited. It's going to be weird leaving Newcastle after being a student here for 8 years and a person here since 1993, but Canterbury seems like a really nice place and the department very friendly. And I'm thrilled to have got a job, with a proper salary, so quickly.

But all this means that my PhD thesis really needs to get a wiggle on and start writing itself. I'd been expecting it to do it before now but perhaps it's waiting till the very last moment. In the meantime, I'm helping it along. I'm up to the last chapter of substantial writing/finishing, and then will be able to go back and do the fiddly bits. I'm hoping to get the majority done before I go, otherwise there'll be some very late nights till I submit.

Here's a screenshot, in case I wake up in the night and need proof:

When is a draft full?

I've got a note on my calendar that says I intend to have a full draft of my PhD thesis ready by the end of this month. I don't know if that will happen, because I don't know how I'll know when it's a full draft.

I know some people write a draft and it's very rough, and then they go back and edit it, and edit it again, and eventually it's a nice polished version. This is a good way to write, as it means you improve it several times until it's as good as it can be. When I write, I get bored very quickly and don't really fancy going over and over it. I know I have to edit and proofread, so I do, but I do it minimally. So my finished versions are usually not that much different from the first version. (Luckily, the first version is awesome. Ahem.)

With a thesis, you can't help but edit to a greater extent, I suppose, and some sections have been moved around and tweaked to show something different, but then there are whole chunks that I wrote in one go and haven't been back to since. All of these count as first draft material to me.

So how will I know when the cut-off point is, when I've got a full draft, but not a finished thesis? Do I have to have filled in all the gaps and written all the sections? Because once I've done that I'll be fairly close to finishing and it's not going to happen by the end of the month. Is it OK to have notes to myself in it, saying things like 'find out if this is true'? Because that means there's more research to be done, and it's not a full draft. Or is it OK to have the majority of it written, but a few bits still to fill in?

The other issue is that I'm not doing what a lot of people do, and writing one chapter at a time. I've got all my chapters partially written. I would like to have completed each in turn, but that's not the way it worked.

I feel like I want some kind of cut-off marker, a goal to aim at, other than 'finishing'. So I think the solution is to say that a 'full draft' means not having bits to fill in, having done all of the sections and only needing to edit the text that's already there. So I'm also going to move that deadline to a bit later on, I think.

Talking to real people

Today I gave a talk to some real people. Actual non-academic real people. Normally, we only ever have to explain our research to people who already have a good specialist (or at least basic) knowledge of our topic and the background and framework that underpin it all. Everyone understands the technical terms you use, and you can make certain assumptions and everyone will go along with them.

But it does one good sometimes to step outside the warm bath of academia and see what impression you can make on people who don't have a rigorous grounding in the niceties of Minimalist syntax (for example). How are you going to explain what the Final-Over-Final Constraint is to an audience if they don't know what a head is? Or a VP? Or what 'final' means?

I was participating in the Explore programme run by the Centre for Lifelong Learning. They ran a training day for postgraduates at universities in the region aimed at helping us to present our research to a public audience. This is something that I'm interested in, because linguistics is so hopelessly unknown and misunderstood in the popular media, and yet everyone is interested in it. Programmes and newspaper articles about language go down an absolute storm, but the only linguist anyone's heard of is David Crystal. Yes, they've heard of Chomsky too, but not for his linguistics. Your average person knows more about how the Large Hadron Collider works than their own language.

The interest that people have in language was illustrated today, after my talk, when the audience had a chance to ask questions and make comments. They all had something to say, offering interesting facts about other languages, or making observations about the way language is used now or might be at some other time. From their feedback it seems that they found my topic interesting. Wow. Some readers of this blog will be wondering how on earth I made my dry, dull, theoretical syntax PhD into a talk that didn't send them to sleep. It is of course all due to my captivating speaking persona.

But seriously, these are people that learn for fun, so they're willing to put a bit of effort in (although they don't want to feel like they're back at school). However, I knew that for an audience with zero assumed knowledge of syntax, I had to lose a lot of the technicalities but not lose the quality. From the practice run we did at the training day, I found that some people panic at the sight of anything vaguely technical-looking. They pretty much switched off when they saw trees and abbreviations, even though I did try to explain them clearly. For that reason, I did away completely with tree diagrams and replaced them with an analogy of a mobile. I've used that analogy for years, after pinching it from a lecturer, and it works well. Then I entirely removed labels like VP and TP and just did without them. It's convenient for linguists to use them but it turns out you don't need them. Then I filled the talk with cats. People like cats.

I followed the principle we'd learnt at the training day, that rather than start with the general background, it's good to dive straight in to the interesting fact and show some kind of visual (or otherwise memorable) prop. I showed maps from WALS illustrating different patterns of word orders, and how question particles don't look the way they're meant to. It's not the most fascinating graphic in the world, but it's better than a lot of text. I also tried to end on something that they could engage with, and compared my analysis to spurious claims about languages lacking some characteristic or other. I thought that was something they would likely have read about, and have thoughts about, and they did - that sparked some nice discussion. I wish I'd thought to use the Hopi example that came up in the questions, though.

Marcus du Sautoy looking all mathsy

I think that in the middle, some people still got a bit lost. Maybe I didn't explain everything as fully as I should have, or maybe I tried to cover too much and could have sloughed off a bit more syntax. But overall, I was pleased with how it went. I'll work on those things for next time someone's fool enough to put me in front of humans again, and this time next year I'll be the Marcus du Sautoy of linguistics.

Just nobody, not ever, suggest I host this gameshow (I would derail it with anti-prescriptivism):

Writer's retreat

I'm in Alnmouth, on the Northumberland coast. It's a lovely village, set at the mouth of the river Aln (I know - lucky coincidence with the name!).

It's been lovely weather since I got here yesterday too, considering it's still March and therefore technically winter, as you can see from this photo I took this morning:

I've been enjoying walks on the beach, I've popped into the local village store for some kippers for my breakfast, and I'm staying in an adorable little cottage (it really is tiny - just two rooms plus an en suite, but they've done such a good job of planning it that it doesn't feel cramped at all, and I've got a nice outside area to sit in the sun in.

But don't I have a PhD thesis to write? Why yes, I do - and that's the beauty of it. I've come here to write. I'm getting away from it all. I've brought my laptop and a few papers and things that I need, and the idea is to write as much as I can without the distractions of work. I've set a goal to write at least 2000 words a day, and I've done that yesterday (when I arrived) and today. I feel good about that. I'm actually really enjoying it and not finding the writing too hard - I don't, once I actually get going; it's the getting going that's hard. I don't want to get too complacent in case I find it gets suddenly much harder later in the week, but I'm hoping that I can write a decent chapter's worth while I'm here (14,000+ words, if I stick to the 2000 words a day goal), and that'll make a nice dent in what I've got left to do.

Lucky me

I'm back on facebook. I finally made the decision to go back on Tuesday, after a gruelling start to the week made me realise it was the right thing to do.

First, on Monday I had my first meeting with my supervisors in MONTHS. It was a scary prospect, actually, even though they are lovely people and not scary at all. I was suddenly forced to face up to the fact that I had NO work to show for the whole summer and no excuse for that. This led me to conclusion 1: Being off-facebook since June has not increased my productivity.

Then a series of nice things happened to lead me to conclusion 2: Social support will help me finish my PhD.

Before the meeting I took advantage of Friend M who very kindly allowed me to whinge to her and comforted me.

After the meeting I had lunch with a bunch of nice people for Friend A's birthday, after which Friend A sent me a really nice text message telling me to keep my chin up and all would be well.

The next day I had lunch with Friends K and D, during which they took my mind off work, and Friend K reassured me and Friend D made me laugh.

And I would just like to add that I have the best supervisors ever. My first supervisor sent me a nice email on Monday night to remind me that I'm totes the most awesome ever. Or words to that effect. I think it was actually that my research area is cutting edge, but whatever.

Word count shock - higher than expected

It's been a while since I've done a post about word counts. Since I moved here from Tumblr I've tried to be, you know, interesting, so there's been fewer posts about the trials of writing a PhD (which is what this blog began life as).

However, this new development is so shocking that it merits a post. I recently compiled all my comments on all my drafts, and taking a tip from Monica Macaulay's excellent Surviving Linguistics (for some reason not easy to get hold of anywhere but from the publisher), I printed them out and filed them. While doing this I added up all the word counts and it came to.... 37,774. This is astonishing, considering I would have said I had around 20,000, so I'm pretty chuffed with myself. However, I now have to write the other 40-odd thousand, so perhaps I should stop congratulating myself and get on with it.