Fighting through the haze, and Reading Journal: Week 7, Spring Term.

This past week has been a funny one...I'm writing this on Monday morning, having just handed in my draft dissertation proposal, but I can't seem to think past yesterday. There is in fact a fabulous, Paxman-related reason for this, but I'm not going to go into that just now...

If I try to cast my mind back that bit further, I can dredge up hazy memories of fairly pointless DRAFT dissertation proposal stress, big questions about my future, and a particularly well-warranted, well-oiled night out with the linguistics girls on Wednesday. Suffice to say that there is not much to recall about Thursday.

They might have stolen my Thursday, but they gave us a belter
of a Wednesday night. Photo by Marianna

Is this my life for the next few months? Days blurring into one long streak of hazy stress and photocopied articles, with the odd blindingly brilliant golden moment of excitement to punctuate the MA smog? This is sometimes how it feels, but in those bright, shining commas and full stops lies a life worth living, and more often than not they are a kind of hyphen or trailing ellipsis pointing towards the light at the end of this particularly stressful paragraph of my time on Earth.

Must be a Master's duck. Image from the Duck of the Day Facebook page

Herein ends the grammar-meets-life's-meaning analogy. Suffice to say that though there is much work to be done, September will come, and it will all be worth it in the end. And in the meantime, wonderful people and exciting experiences will keep my head above water (even if I'm paddling like a campus duck underneath).


And here's this week's reading rollcall:


Topics in Syntax

• Bruening, B. (2001). QR obeys Superiority: frozen scope and ACD. Linguistic Inquiry, 32(2), 233-273.

Advanced Topics in Syntax

• Szabolsci, A. (2006). Strong and weak islands. In. M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdijk, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Syntax. Malden, MA.: Blackwell.
  https://files.nyu.edu/as109/public/szabolcsi_strong_and_weak_islands.htm

L1 Syntax

• Plunkett, B. and C. De Cat (2001). Root Specifiers and Null Subjects Revisited. In: A. H.-J. Do, L. Domínguez and A. Johansen, eds. Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development 25. Somerville, MA.: Cascadilla Press, pp.611-122.
• Friedemann, M.-A. (2000). Early French post-verbal subjects. In M.-A. Friedemann and L. Rizzi, eds. The acquisition of syntax: studies in comparative developmental linguistics. Harlow: Longman. Ch. 3.

Other stuff

• Rethinking Comparative Syntax. Project proposal and aims.
  http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/research/recos/
• Otsuka Y. (2005). Scrambling and information focus: VSO-VOS alternation in Tongan. In: J. Sabel and M. Saito, eds. The free word order phenomenon: its syntactic sources and diversity. Berlin: de Gruyter.