ELL Undergraduate Conference 2018

We had our annual undergraduate conference on Saturday, where our dissertation students presented their work. I normally Storify the tweets but they're killing the service in May, so I've just collected the hashtag here (so they're in the wrong order chronologically):

#ELLconf2018 Tweets

Warning: extra care has been taken

Asda's smoked salmon trimmings have this warning on the packet:

Warning: Extra care has been taken to remove bones, although some may remain. 

If you scroll down a bit at the link, you can see it there. For most of the time it took me to make smoked salmon crostini this morning, I was trying to work out why I didn't like this phrasing. Eventually, I worked it out, and I think it's a real-life example of the misunderstanding that conjunctions and subordination work in different ways that I'm constantly correcting in my students' work.

Our online marking software allows you to create comments that you can use whenever you need them. Here's the one I created for this:

Whereas: introduces a subordinate clause (usually before the main clause). It is not followed by a comma, but the clause it introduces is. It therefore looks like this, where X and Y are complete sentences:
1. Whereas X, Y.
2. X, whereas Y.
And it does not look like this:
3. X. Whereas Y.
Although: works exactly like 'whereas'.
However: Unlike 'whereas' or 'although', when followed by a comma, it can introduce a sentence. Also unlike them, it cannot join two sentences unless you also use a semi-colon. If you're trying to do this with 'however', you probably want 'but'.
It looks like this:
1. X. However, Y.
2. X; however, Y. [but I would recommend 'X but Y' instead]
It does NOT look like this:
3. X, however Y.
4. X however, Y.
Therefore: works exactly like 'however'.

The substitution of however for but is the one that annoys me the most: it's pure 'big word syndrome', and sounds clunky.

Back to the salmon, they've used although when but would have been better. That would have given them the precise meaning they wanted to convey, namely that even though they've been totally diligent, there might even so be some bones in the salmon. That would work because but coordinates two clauses, so neither clause 1 (extra care has been taken to remove bones) nor clause 2 (some may remain) has more importance than the other and the whole of clause 1 and clause 2 together is interpreted as the warning.

The problem with although here is that it subordinates the clause that it introduces. In their formulation that's clause 2 (some may remain). This clause, because it's subordinated, can't be the main bit of that sentence and therefore can't be the warning. Only the main clause can be the warning, and the main clause is the one that's not subordinated, namely extra care has been taken to remove bones. They're warning me that they've taken extra care to remove bones, and as some extra information they note that some may remain. That's not right! If they really wanted to use although, they could have: they just need to make the warning be the main clause and although subordinate the real extra information (their claim of diligence):

[Although extra care has been taken to remove bones,] some may remain.  

This is likely an Americanism

One other thing I've noticed in student essays much more this time than previously is the use of likely. Here is the relevant use:

This is likely a result of X. 

I understand what this means, it's not ungrammatical, but it's not in my idiolect (=the variety of English specific to me). I'd have to write one of the following:

This is likely to be a result of X.
This is probably a result of X.

Because the first type isn't in my idiolect, I can't tell whether it's proper 'academese'. It sounded informal to me, until I asked Twitter and was directed to this blog post by Lynne Murphy. It is apparently a UK/US difference. Why my students are using it, I don't know: presumably this usage is spreading to this country.

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

Pharrell-timed discussion

I think there is this idea that a seminar is a place for lively discussion and informed debate. In practice, it's not like that. More often, in my experience, it's the seminar leader who does most of the work, and the similarity of the endeavour to drawing blood from a stone varied depending on a multitude of factors: group size, group ability, group demographics, work set, how much other work has been set that week, what time the seminar is, how hot the room is...

Today I had the first proper seminar for my spring morphology module. It started off badly, with only 50% attendance. After getting just 75% to the lecture, this is slightly worrying, so I hope it picks up. Anyway, the group itself is a good one - both seminar groups are filled with bright, keen students. Today I wanted them to discuss a chapter I'd asked them to read. It's an interesting and important discussion of the kind of data we use by the ever insightful Maggie Tallerman, who taught me everything I know about morphology.

I wanted this discussion to be interesting for the students, more so than just doing exercises. I put some discussion questions up on the projector to get them going. I even started them out with an easy exercise to get them in the right frame of mind. Then I split them into groups of 5, not so big that they would fight to be heard, but big enough to generate discussion. Trouble is, with only ten students, that's only two groups, and the room was suddenly silent. Each group could hear the other, and it was too intimidating, and no one said anything.

First, I tried to stimulate conversation by joining each group. That was successful for about three seconds. Then, fantastically, I realised the problem was feeling self-conscious, and put some music on. I had to ask the students the best way to do this, of course, but having been told to YouTube something, I just picked the first song on the 'music' channel, which was Pharrell Williams' 'Happy'. Straight away, discussion was easier because they weren't aware of the other group and me being able to hear everything they said. OK, they were still shy and quiet, but it really did make a difference. They talked till the end of the song (well, with some lulls) and then we discussed the questions in the full group.

In future, all seminar discussions will be accompanied by songs.

Quantifier fail

This is an illustration of yellow.

When the UGs at my university hand in their essays, we have a big massive 'handing in day' where two-thirds of the School turns up within 4 hours and they submit all their work to one of four PhD students (one of them being me). It's a bit manic because there's so many of them, and because there's a lot of form-filling to be done, and UG students may be bright but they certainly aren't good at following instructions.

They have to fill in one white form for each piece of work they're submitting, which has the details of that essay on it, and then there's a yellow form which is a global cover sheet and lists all the modules they're submitting work for. Simple. Er... no.

So lots of them apparently haven't read the careful instructions they've been given, and come to ask us what forms they need to fill in. We say to them,

You need one white form for each essay and one yellow one for all of them.

This leads a number of them to think that they need a yellow one for each essay too (if we meant that we'd be violating at least one of Grice's maxims - perhaps the maxim of quantity?). We tried calling it a 'global sheet' instead but that didn't seem to help that much. The trouble is the word all. If I was to say that

all of the essays need a yellow form,

I think that would fairly unambiguously mean that they needed one for each of them. What about this:

You need a yellow one for all of them.

I think that's probably ambiguous too - but not if it follows the instruction about the white forms. Then if you add in the word one, I think the contrast between each and all should really be clear. And yet, for many people (admittedly sleep-deprived and stressed people), it isn't clear at all.

I can't quite work out, actually, if it's a problem with the quantifier or with the article. Perhaps it's because we have two possible interpretations of the indefinite a yellow form: generic or specific. On the sense we mean, a yellow form refers to one yellow form; on the misunderstanding, it refers to multiple instances of a generic type of yellow form. Then compounded by the fact that all can mean 'a set as a whole' or 'every member of a set', we have an issue.

Hey - everyone got their work handed in (apart from one poor chap who turned up ten minutes late), I drank two cups of coffee and ate two chocolate biscuits, and we'll do the same thing all over again in the spring.

Syntax for beginners

I'm teaching some syntax revision sessions yesterday and today, for students who have to resit first year syntax. Yesterday only one student came, and then one more turned up right at the end having got the time wrong. But still, the one who was there said she found it helpful so my time wasn't entirely wasted.

The night before, I tried teaching my partner how to do syntax. He has never done any linguistics in his life, and isn't even academic (he left school before he got his A-levels). Nevertheless, we thought it would be interesting to see if he could understand it.

Rather than try to teach him all the terminology, which of course you can't just learn instantly, I had him work it out logically, asking him how he would split the sentence into two, and then that constituent into two, and so on. I had him thinking about the relationships between the constituents, and what modifies what (a lot of terminology actually transfers well to real life). And he was surprisingly good at it - he got everything right, pretty much first time.

So why can't the students do it? It's partly because they get bogged down with having to learn all the terminology and what's an NP, what's a modal and so on. But it's also noticeably the non-scientifically minded students that end up resitting. We get almost all arts students doing linguistics, because they've followed on from an English language degree, and they aren't the best at linguistics. Often the best linguists are the science students, the ones who are good at maths and logic and understand relationships and hierarchies between things. That's what my partner is good at and he picked it up straight away and totally got the basic principle, which is something that a lot of the students miss completely.