Handouts and Stephen Hawking

I was watching a documentary about Stephen Hawking the other week. Among the many interesting things I learnt was the fact that he doesn't use handouts at his talks. Or at least, he didn't at the talk that was shown in the film. I'm assuming that to be representative of his general practice.

For those not accustomed to the wonder that is the conference handout, an example is here. Its purpose varies. For me, it's a prop for your audience, a summary of what you're saying so that they can follow along while you're saying it and have a record afterwards. I think it should be clear enough that someone who wasn't there can read the handout and understand the basic idea of the talk. It might, if you use Powerpoint, be a printout of the slides (often this is what you will get).

Theirselves and meself

As you know, the paradigm of reflexive pronouns in English is as follows:

myself
yourself
himself/herself/itself
ourselves
yourselves
themselves

What I had never noticed until yesterday was that it's not logical. No surprise, we are talking about English, a language not known for its logicality (not that any languages are, particularly). But I'd never spotted the illogicality in this context before.

xkcd on trochee fixation

Vocabulary quiz

I found this vocabulary quiz. It's by Merriam-Webster Online and quite good fun, though a bit too easy. Points for getting it right, and more points for getting it right quicker.

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.

Weekend in London

Clock tower at the Palace of Westminster (Big Ben)

View of St Paul's cathedral from the Millennium Bridge

Sculpture on the wall of LSE by Richard Wilson

Lion on the Palace of Westminster

If we do be clever

I have a pub quiz team, and one of the quizzes we go to has a bonus question which is worth five points if you get it right, but you lose five if you get it wrong. You can also choose not to play, and not take the risk.*

We were deliberating this one week, as we had an answer but it was risky, and we wondered if we should try to be clever or just play it safe. My team-mate said to me,

If we do be clever...

Copula be is not normally a verb that can take an emphatic do in Standard English. (It can in some dialects - it sounds kind of West Country to me, I think.) However, in this instance, it was required. If she had said

If we are clever...

then our cleverness is an attribute that we have, not a temporary behaviour. Be in this utterance is a dynamic verb rather than a stative one, but that doesn't quite explain it. Other verbs that can be stative and non-stative can take do:

She has two children.
She is having a baby.
If she does have a baby...

I think this might just be a lacuna, a gap in the language. There's no grammatical reason, as far as I can see, for be to act like a stative verb even when it isn't.

There are other tests for whether a verb is stative and be in this sense has mixed results:

We are being clever [progressive]
??They forced us to be clever [complement of force]
??Be clever! [imperative]
??What we did was be clever [pseudo-cleft]

*In fact, that's a linguistic issue in itself. The wording of the instructions is:

Five points for a correct answer, five away if you get it wrong or don't play.

This is ambiguous, with the scope of the disjunction not clear. Is it that there's five points off if you get it wrong OR you can choose not to play, or is it that you lose five points IF you either get it wrong OR don't play? In other words, is the structure this:

...[DisjP [DP 5 points off if you get it wrong] [Disj or [CP don't play]]]

or this:

...[CP if [DisjP [TP you get it wrong] [Disj or [TP you don't play]]]