Still here

Sorry for the non-posting lately. Things have got a bit manic as summer draws to an end and I try to finish off all my various research projects before I have to begin thinking about teaching again (plus some personal life things).

Sometimes (often) people outside academia ask me if I'm on holiday, or what I'm actually doing. I don't get too annoyed by this, because admittedly it does look very much like I'm on holiday when I'm in the pub on a Tuesday afternoon (for instance). But it's simply that the work we do over  the summer is a different kind of work from term-time work.

There are basically three things lecturers do: teaching, research and admin. The idea (I think) is that the proportion should be 2:2:1. My contract is fairly teaching-heavy, so during term time I do a lot more teaching than anything else (and by teaching I mean the actual contact, preparation such as writing lectures and working out module outlines, marking, responding to students, etc). However, I want to remain employable so I still have to do research, and the best time to do this is during the long summer 'holidays'.

We finish teaching in April at my university, and don't begin again till the end of September. There's a lot of admin to be done during that time, and plenty of marking, but there are a good few clear weeks to focus just on research projects in a way that's not possible in term time. Some of my colleagues go off for the whole summer and either work from home or go abroad, maybe to do fieldwork or just to get away. I tend to mix working from home and going into the office, and I allow my working hours to be more flexible so that I can take advantage of what sun we do get if it turns up on a weekday.

This summer, I set myself a few projects that I wanted to work on. Some of these are collaborative, and I've been having regular research meetings with three different people about three different projects. These are all just coming to the point where we have results to analyse and discuss, so now is the time to try and get our teeth into that before there's no more time to think about it.

One thing that I think is essential is not to start on teaching preparation too soon. If you begin it, it can take up the whole summer. That can wait: the 1st of September is when I begin doing it. This is tricky (and there are a couple of little things that have to be done sooner) but it helps me to get more research done. This is a lesson it's taken me a while to learn. Teaching-related tasks are typically more focussed and manageable than 'doing research' so the temptation for me is to 'just do that one thing'. I've learnt now to leave aside those small, easy tasks because otherwise the big, scary ones never get done.

And this year, I've been pleased with what I've done over the summer. It'll take a little bit more effort to get us to the point of having a paper to submit, but a lot of the work has been done.

Some cheeky findings

[This relates to my recent post about 'cheeky Nando's'. If you want to take the survey, do so here. We'd be really grateful!]

Do you call a misbehaving child a cheeky monkey? Do you ever go for a cheeky beer after work? Would you take your Significant Other out for a cheeky Valentine's Day dinner at a nice Italian restaurant? Chances are you said no to the last question, not because you wouldn't make such a romantic gesture, but because cheeky doesn't sound right in that sentence. What's more, if you're from the United States, you probably aren't as keen on the word cheeky in the first place. At least that’s what we thought when the cheeky Nando’s meme went viral a few weeks ago. 

The cheeky Nando’s meme  involved British internet users coming up with ever more incomprehensible (to Americans) explanations of what a cheeky Nando's means. But how come Americans don't know what it means? And, actually, what does it mean? We tried to find out by sciencing.

Undergraduate conference 2015

Our undergraduates had their conference on Thursday last week. Only a few students were able to present this year, but they did some excellent work and it was a really nice day. Here's a Storify of the tweets from the day (mostly by me, but not all).

Undergraduate research

Ten hundred words of confusing syntax

There's an interesting blog called 'Ten hundred words of science', in which people try to explain their research using only the thousand most common words of English (go to the page to find out why and how these words were determined). 

Here's a couple of screenshots: 

You'll notice that using simple words can have the unfortunate consequence of requiring very complicated syntax. The first paragraph is very hard to parse, especially that first sentence which has a very long subject [Big human like men animals that people go to see at parks they pay to get into]. It also has a comma following the subject which is strictly incorrect, but which would only add to the difficulty if it wasn't there. Similarly, the last sentence uses incorrect commas to try to clarify a very awkward construction.

The second entry, on the right here, has an almost incomprehensible sentence in it, the first sentence in the second paragraph. It does get better, and of course I picked two of the worst ones in this respect, but it just shows: simpler words does not necessarily mean simpler writing.

ELL research day

Me and a couple of others were live-tweeting today's department research day - see the complete tweets Storified below!

Live Latin speakers wanted

Two weeks ago in the Guardian magazine, Mary Beard (who is becoming nearly as much of a regular on this blog as Marcus du Sautoy) said that if she could bring one thing back from extinction, it would be a 'live Latin speaker'. This week, a reader called Brian Bishop wrote in and said she needn't go that far: there are lots of them and Beard would be welcome at any of their 'Latin speaking weeks'.

Well. This does somewhat miss the point of why she wanted to bring this Latin speaker back. Beard is a classicist, which is not the same thing as a linguist, and she would have her own reasons which would be very different from the reasons I would give for bringing back a Latin speaker, I'm sure. But I think we would overlap in one opinion, which is that it really isn't the same thing at all!

I should think that Beard probably speaks Latin herself. If she doesn't she could of course learn it, if she wishes to hear it spoken so much. The main problem with this is that she is not a native speaker of Latin, and neither are any of the people at these 'Latin speaking weeks', unless any of them were brought up bilingually in Latin by extremely keen parents. (Incidentally, googling 'Latin speaking weeks' does not find any relevant results other than very dodgy-looking Latin summer schools.)

Linguists do lots of different types of research, but almost all of it involves finding out how people speak, recording that and using the resulting data to test a hypothesis. Some linguists use their own intuitions as data, some use other people's intuitions, and some use other people's natural speech.

Let's say I wanted to find out about the use of Isn't he not? and Isn't he? in the Geordie dialect, and what the differences are in the use of each. I might try to record some people's natural speech, and I might do some kind of survey where I asked people what sounded most natural to them. I might use my own intuitions to start me off, but I wouldn't rely on them, because I wasn't born and brought up in Newcastle so my intuitions might not be reliable.

When I wrote my PhD thesis, I needed to know facts about a lot of different languages. I used books for this, grammars that describe how the language works. That meant that I didn't have to spend a lot of time and money travelling around the world finding people to record. But these books can only take you so far. There are two problems with them: the first is that they might not be reliable. Modern descriptive grammars are good, thorough and accurate, written by linguists with a lot of training. The grammars written by missionaries from the SIL are generally very good, too. But an old grammar might be written by any unqualified person with little training, and with who-knows-what purpose. And grammars are almost never written by a native speaker of the language, so even with the best intentions they don't always know for sure that what they're being told is accurate: perhaps their consultants are subconsciously telling them how they should speak - like if you told a linguist that every sentence has to have a subject and then went off and said 'Don't know what he wants all this information for', without using a subject.

The second problem is that they can never tell you absolutely everything about a language. Hardly any of the grammars I looked at for my PhD could tell me if the question particle could be used in embedded questions. Therefore, I had to supplement this knowledge with intuitions about some of the languages. Obviously I don't speak these languages, so I couldn't give the intuitions, so I asked native speakers of those languages. And it is important that they are native speakers. Just because someone has learnt a language doesn't make them capable of making subtle judgements about what is and isn't grammatical, especially when you get into non-standard forms.

There are some linguists who can't ask people about their language because there aren't any people to ask. These are the historical linguists. Someone studying Old English can't ask a speaker of Old English what the language is like, but fortunately there are some texts written in Old English that still survive. Without those, we'd have no idea beyond the reconstructive work that can be done based on regular changes over time. There is a massive amount that can be learnt from historical texts, and historical linguists do some truly amazing things. But it is limited to what exists already, whereas a living language is infinite and can constantly provide new data.

Latin, similarly, has no living native speakers. It has evolved and become the modern Romance languages, but these are not the same as Latin any more than present-day English is the same as Old English (the language of Beowulf). There are living people who speak it, but they are not native speakers, and more than I'm a native speaker of French because I learnt it at school. In fact, these people are even further removed from being native speakers of Latin because they didn't even learn it from a native speaker (in fact, I didn't learn French from a native French speaker, but that's beside the point). There are lots of things we don't know about Latin, and those are the things linguists might be interested to find out, and there's no way we can find them out from modern Latin speakers because their knowledge of Latin is based only on what we already know, not their native competence. We aren't going to get very far trying to find out what we don't already know if we ask people who only know what we already know.

So whatever reason Mary Beard has for bringing back a real live Latin speaker, perhaps for the sheer pleasure of hearing them speak, I too would like to bring one (or ideally, several) back, so that I could do research on their language without having to rely on written sources.

Meta-linguistics

It's a funny old thing, researching language, because you've got to use your object of study to describe your object of study. You have to talk about language using language. Mostly, this is OK, because we can distinguish between metalinguistic mentions of language and actual use of language.

One thing that often happens (and this one isn't linguistics-specific) is that you find yourself using the non-technical version of a word more when you're talking about the technical term (or maybe you just notice it more). I'm researching questions, and I catch myself using question all the time: 'the question is how this can be applied to X' and so on.

We linguists have a fun extra game to play, however. We can use the very linguistic things that we are talking about in the language we use to talk about them. Sometimes this happens by accident, similarly to the above example. But sometimes, you see the opportunity to slip one in as a little in-joke for your readers who are paying attention. I read this sentence today:

The idea... is supported by the fact that only in embedded finite clauses is it possible to front an XP.*

This is a classic example of its type. It's talking about fronting XPs (moving phrases to the start of the clause) in embedded (subordinate) clauses, and in doing so, does just that itself. that only in embedded finite clauses is an embedded clause - it's the complement of fact (it tells you what the fact is). And within it, we have a fronted phrase, only in embedded clauses - it would normally be at the end:

It is posible to front an XP [only in embedded clauses].

Linguist humour. There are whole blog posts to be written about humorous example sentences, comedy names for new generalisations and the like.

*Reference: Breul, C. 2004. Focus structure in Generative Grammar: An integrated syntactic, semantic and intonational approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Measuring impact

These days researchers are asked to assess the impact of their research. It's not good enough to say that you're doing it out of a quest for ever greater knowledge, or because as humans we should strive to find out how our world works. It also isn't going to wash if you point out the great amount of mathematical work that seemed to have no practical application when it was first done but now underpins and is vital for absolutely everything in our day to day life (computers, for instance - the principles behind them preceded the technology by centuries).

So we need to know how to measure impact, or at least how to convince the funding bodies and the REF that we are doing stuff with impact. Even though we don't need to worry about the REF yet, as PhD students, it's wise to get to know about this stuff early.

With that in mind, here's a link to an LSE site with podcasts on just this, aimed at us folk. There are also other resources on the site, and they are holding an event on the 1st December for PhD students.

Crowd-sourcing ancient transcription

There's a really great project going on which you can help with. Here's the text from the website telling you what it's about:

For classics scholars, the vast number of damaged and fragmentary texts from the waste dumps of Greco-Roman Egypt has resulted in a difficult and time-consuming endeavor, with each manuscript requiring a character-by-character transcription. Words are gradually identified based on the transcribed characters and the manuscripts' linguistic characteristics. Both the discovery of new literary texts and the identification of known ones are then based on this analysis in relation to the established canon of extant Greek literature and its lexicons. Documentary texts, letters, receipts, and private accounts, are similarly assessed and identified through key terms and names. Furthermore, an immense number of detached fragments still linger, waiting to be joined with others to form a once intact text of ancient thought, both known and unknown. The data not only continues to reevaluate and assess the literature and knowledge of ancient Greece, but also illuminates the lives and culture of the multi-ethnic society of Greco-Roman Egypt.
The data gathered by Ancient Lives will allow us to increase the momentum by which scholars have traditionally studied the collection. After transcriptions have been collected digitally, we can combine human and computer intelligence to identify known texts and documents faster than ever before. For unknown documents, we can isolate them and begin the long process of identification.
Like any other scientific project, the data will require a lengthy process of vetting and analysis. There are no quick answers or discoveries. We want to make sure our findings are accurate. However, instead of just a few scholars going through the collection one fragment at a time, users of Ancient Lives are allowing professionals to process large batches of data at any given time. These papyri, as owned and overseen by the Egypt Exploration Society, will then be published and numbered in the Society’s Greco-Roman Memoirs series in the volumes entitled THE OXYRHYNCHUS PAPYRI.

They're just getting lots and lots of people to transcribe the hard-to-read texts into digital text, so that they can read them much more quickly. And it doesn't matter if a few get it wrong, because there'll be enough that those are easily spotted and ignored. This is a brilliant use of crowd-sourcing for research purposes.