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!

Work (very) hard, play (even) hard(er)

Them's be the housemates...

From last week's sublime combination of pleasing formative assessment marks, University Challenge madness and a fabulous weekend with the housemates and my favourite German (my REAL favourite German as seen below, not this one), I came back down to earth with a bump this week. Goodbye frivolous fun, hello never-ending reading list and unavoidable assignment preparation. To be fair, getting my head seriously down this week is only for my own benefit, because the more I do now, the more Christmas I'll get for my three-week "holiday". The plan is to get at least one full draft down (out of four!) before leaving York, though after today's effort I have faint hopes for two before swanning off to Salisbury.

...and that be the boy, helping to keep me
sane (and putting up with a helluva lot)

And here's the terrifying, towering, tremble-making topics:
Psycholinguistics: syntactic processing, and the localization/lateralization of language functions in the brain.
Directed readings in syntax: multiple WH-fronting in Czech.
Language acquisition: the Critical Period hypothesis, and ultimate attainment in L2 acquisition.
Phonetics and phonology: ...a little bit of everything!

No sweat, eh?!

Fun with ice sculptures way back when

But to get me through all of that, there's two Secret Santas (my poor housemate won't know what's hit him/her, and there's a linguistics one too), two swing dance events next week and the lovely City of York is kindly putting on one of my favourite December events, the Festival of Angels. I first came to the Festival of Angels in my first year with my housemates at the time, all new and nervous and only two months into my undergraduate degree. Five years later, I have those letters after my name, a few more to work for, and I'm proud to be a budding bridesmaid for one of the aforementioned housemates! Who knows what might happen between now and 2016?