Hello 2012, hello Harry Fairhurst...

If you're not from York, you might wonder why Mr Fairhurst merits a blog-title greeting.

If you are from York, you'll know exactly where (rather than with whom) I've been spending my time. Oh yes. The library.

The sunset from my perch in the Harry Fairhurst building.
I did see the sun that day. Honest.

A week today, the first four summative assignments of my Masters are due and, even though the formative ones went pretty well, I can't help but feel a bit nervous. I mean, I'm quite pleased with how I managed my time over Christmas - I got in plenty of present-giving/receiving, daft-game-playing and a superhuman amount of eating over the festive period, don't get me wrong, but I also came back to York with two full drafts and a 2500-word stream of consciousness about multiple wh-constructions in Czech. If I carry on with these workdays in the library, we're on course for the 12th January, I think (and there's a whole host of lovely linguists to lunch with and keep me sane in the meantime).

Looking forward to 13th January, there's a lot coming up this term. We're specialising more this term, so whilst phonetics has been fun, I can bilabial-click-it goodbye and focus on syntax, syntax and more (first language) syntax. There's a really interesting-sounding colloquium in the first week of term about grammaticality versus comprehensibility, so that seems to be starting as it means to go on, and, as I mentioned back in December, the other Rebecca-Louise-syntactician and I will be livening up the department with our art/syntax project. Yeah, they're totally compatible. AND I may even have half a good idea for my dissertation...watch this space!