Baby's First Conference

Just under three weeks ago, I handed in my MA thesis. This means that, unless I really mucked up my thesis, I have completed the second of three qualifications which I need to work in the academy.

This makes it sound like I'm quite far along with my career development, when I am, in fact, the baby still grasping onto adult legs, trying to hold herself upright.

However, I took a baby-step (or maybe a bum-shuffle) along the right path recently by giving my first grown-up paper at my first grown-up conference: the LAGB Annual Meeting at the University of Salford.

I found myself in this position almost wholly thanks to one of the most persuasive and enthusiastic academics I have ever met, namely my supervisor. He only has to mention something as a possibility for it to instantly sound like a good idea, and so I submitted an abstract based on a module assignment, on the basis that I knew the topic well (Indirect Object Clitic Doubling Constructions in Spanish and the Applicative Head) and that I was finding it quite interesting. Although the reviews of the abstract weren't 24-carat (they were more ambivalent than anything else), my abstract was accepted. I then got a mark of 70 on the module assignment itself and promptly forgot about the whole thing, as the MA dissertation took over my life.

On 31st August, in went the dissertation, and when the long-promised sense of relief failed to materialise, a gradual feeling of dread and fear for my conference paper a week later began to kick in.

I had presented the paper once before in mid-July to my department's Syntax and Semantics Research Group. It went fairly well, but didn't seem to garner much interest. 

So, on arrival in Salford, I had the handout and notes from the previous talk, gently modified, and a massive ball of fear in my stomach. I would be presenting on the third day of the conference.

Enter George. Many a student has been sent away from his office or lectures with a better understanding of syntax and semantics after an explanation which invariably begins "It's really very simple..." He talked through the handout with me, picked up on a couple of daft errors, and generally did his usual thing of making everything seem like the simplest idea in the world.

I consequently committed the ultimate sin of writing slides the night before a presentation (the handout just had too many mistakes in it) and my session rolled around fast. Of course, we were in the biggest lecture theatre available, with sloping seating and a projection screen taller than I am. I was the second talk in my session, and was relieved to see a relatively small number of people in the auditorium.

And then they came, like moths to a theoretical syntax flame. I ended up with about 30 people who had come to hear ME speak, including Mark Baker (Rutgers), Lisa Cheng (Leiden) and Norbert Corver (Utrecht). I spoke at 100 miles an hour, stumbled over my Spanish pronunciation and finished about 5 minutes ahead of time.

In question time though, someone must have been looking out for me, because I could actually answer, or at least discuss, some of the questions directed at me! For others, I used a tactic picked up earlier in the week - "I hadn't thought about it that way, but I'll go away and have a look." And indeed, fascinating new angles were suggested, such as Ruth Kempson (KCL)'s suggestion to look at drawing parallels between the Spanish IODC and English constructions with expletives. 

And I survived! George was pleased, as was I (once I'd got past just being pleased that it was over!) That night I could enjoy the conference dinner to the fullest...and judging by some of the faces at the next morning's 10am talk, so did everyone else.

In sum, Baby's First Conference was largely successful. At times, it was like being hit around the head with a syntax textbook, and I was stunned at the speed and insight with which the established academics synthesise information during talks and throw out new angles or different examples with the speed of a bullet train. However, I'm learning more and more about what I'm aiming for, how to talk to senior academics, how to approach things from new angles and, of course, how to prepare and deliver a conference paper.

If I could be so self-indulgent as to offer a bit of advice for other people who haven't given papers before - well, here it is:

• Take any opportunity to deliver the paper at least once before the conference itself, preferably within your own department. Friendly faces and prior practice make the real thing slicker, and less daunting.
• If possible, talk through it with a supervisor or colleague before presenting. They know the ropes and can help you avoid rookie mistakes.
• Take your time. Speaking more slowly doesn't actually drag the torture out, and will make your ideas come across more clearly.
• Try to enjoy it! You're fully engaging with something you're passionate about. Be open to ideas, but stand up for yourself too.
• ...and DON'T MAKE YOUR SLIDES THE NIGHT BEFORE! Typos on Spanish tenses WILL slip in...

These points may be a bit useful, or not at all...but I'll be trying to follow them for my next paper, at the Manchester and Salford New Researchers Forum in Linguistics in November.

Wish me luck!

P.S. Here's the slides, if you're interested:

Indirect Object Clitic Doubling Constructions in Spanish and the role of the Applicative Head from RebeccaLWoods

A new start in September

This blog has been sadly neglected during my master's year, but as I enter the tertiary stage of my tertiary education, I'm determined to give it another go.

To do this, I decided to revamp it a little by taking the focus away from libraries and onto linguistics. The main change is the name: Alliteration Station is cute, but not so meaningful. The new name, however, is inspired by a quote from Professor Ad Neeleman. He said that studying formal linguistics is like dancing in a suit of armour, as we strive for elegant, simple theories within the tight constraints that we (and Chomsky) have set ourselves.

I thought that this was a brilliant image, so I will strive to be the best iron-clad dancer that I can be...and maybe loosen, or redefine, that suit of armour along the way. I will also try to document it a little more often!

Coming up next: what went down before and during my very first grown-up conference!

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.  

Read(ing week) all about it! Plus Reading Journal: Spring Term, Week 6 (Reading Week)

Cake in Vanbrugh (mine's blatantly on the right)

Ah, reading week. So often a misnomer, but surprisingly accurate in the case of last week (mostly). The weekdays were spent reading in Harry Fairhurst, eating cake and getting very much distracted. I could feel the pressure of the dreaded D-word building, even though it's only a draft proposal due on the 27th and we're not expected to have the entire thing fully planned out. This latter is my stumbling point. However, the reading I did was definitely useful, and now I'm going to try to relax about it a little bit, write a decent proposal for next Monday and then think about the more pressing matters of two summative assignments for the two modules I am actually taking this term. There will be time during Easter to really get down to work on dissertation planning, but for now, CHILDES and minimalism must come first.



Rocking the Bachelor of Medicine hood
with red tights outside Senate House.
Picture courtesy of the boy.

So that was the week. The weekend (which started on Thursday, of course) was a whirl of superb French plays, lots of good food with good company, Audrey's attic, cake with librarians, cocktails with lindy hoppers, pomp, pride, ceremony and church Latin at Queens' College's MA graduation, good ol' night out Revs-style with the Cambridge City Hockey Club and a lovely afternoon spent wandering along the banks of the Cam in the sunshine.

Unrivalled bliss and happiness which I hope will see me through to the end of the Spring Term (or at least until my birthday at the end of week 9).

Dissertation reading

• Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: language, literacy and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mueller, N. (1998). Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(3), 151-171.
• De Houwer, A. (1998). Comparing error frequencies in monolingual and bilingual acquisition.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(3), 173-174.
• Meisel, J.M. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In: K. Hyltenstam and L.K. Obler, eds. Bilingualism across the lifespan: aspects of acquisition, maturity and loss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 2.

Libraries, Opera Houses and WORK (plus Reading Journal: Spring Term, Week 5)

This week has been an interesting, if slightly stressful one (though I guess you already knew that, if you read Tuesday's post!) The list of lecturers-who've-had-to-shove-the-Kleenex-my-way is irritatingly gathering numbers, but I do have a better sense of the direction I need to go in next (not to mention confirmation of the fantastic group of fellow MA and PhD students that I have around me, keeping me sane. They know who they are, and I'm incredibly grateful to them).

Rehearsals at the British Library

Tears and tea-times aside, I came down to London yesterday after going to some guest talks in the department about changes in modal verb use in English and fronting in Germanic. I come down to London to meet up with the German Doctor, but as he's coming across from Salisbury and hospital hours are unpredictable, I get to London early and try to make the most of it. That's how I ended up at the British Library, having, for the first time, pre-ordered a very useful book to London from Boston Spa, which has also got me thinking in a very productive direction. Then, when I left the Reading Rooms, I was greeted by the sound of an a capella choir chanting medieval music, which I think was to promote the Royal Manuscript exhibition that's on at the BL at the moment, and which I am going to today with the German Doctor - very excited about that.

On these Fridays in London, I usually try to meet up with  lovely Lauren, who I met in York, but is now toiling as a publishing assistant here in London. However, she wasn't available, so I continued my tour of Theatre Seats in London with Terrible Views. I started this tour three weeks ago, with an impromptu visit to see Noises Off! at the Old Vic. For £12 I was sat behind a pillar, but still had a whale of a time watching Celia Imrie strut her stuff in an otherwise sold out show. This week, I decided to try my luck at the Royal Opera House. For £9, I was sat right in the top row of the amphitheatre (Upper Slips Left BB26) and greatly enjoyed the 66% of Cosi fan tutte that that seat afforded me. I say 66%, because you can see the kind of view I had in this picture here:

The Royal Opera House from the Gods. But for £9, who's complaining?!

I had a whale of a time though; the music was exquisite, the story is very funny (if seriously misogynistic) and was portrayed in a superbly camp manner by some incredible singers. There was a twist though; the singer playing Don Alfonso was taken ill at very late notice, so late that they couldn't even get a singer in from Paris (as you do, apparently). So, a member of the cast of Le Nozze di Figaro starting tonight sang Don Alfonso from the stage apron and the Assistant Director of Opera provided his body! Fabulous fun (especially when Don Alfonso sings "I'm not a bad actor" to the wooden gestures of a non-actor...) but it didn't spoil the show in the slightest.

Anyway, back to work. Here's the week's reading. At some point I'll start leaving annotations/thoughts/actually useful information alongside the references, just to prove that I have actually read this stuff...!

L1 Syntax

• de Cat, C. (2005). French subject clitics are not agreement markers. Lingua, 115, 1195-1219.

Topics in Syntax

• Hong, S. and H. Lasnik. (2010). A note on 'Raising to Object' in small clauses and full clauses. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 19, 275-289.
• Postal, P. and G.K. Pullum. (1988). Expletive noun phrases in subcategorized positions. Linguistic Inquiry, 19(4), 635-670.

Advanced Topics in Syntax and Semantics (UG)

• Schlenker, P.  (2005). Non-redundancy: towards a semantic reinterpretation of binding theory. Natural Language Semantics, 13, 1-92.

Dissertation reading

• Schmitz, K. (2006). Indirect objects and dative case in monolingual German and bilingual German-Romance language acquisition. In: D. Hole, A. Meinunger and W. Abrahams. Datives and other cases: between argument structure and event structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 239-268.

Current modus operandi? Don't ask...

Right, boys and girls, it's getting serious now.

It might only be February but it's now officially fewer than 7 months until the dissertation hand-in. I thought I was a bit ahead of the game, having a project to work on which already has a substantial amount of work done on it, bibliographical references and even some test items.

No, Mr Moneybags, I'm not entirely sure
where to go from here either...
Image from thestudentroom.co.uk

Mais non, chérie. Firstly, I am increasingly aware of the massive difference between undergraduate and postgraduate expectations.


Student says: "I want to look at this bit of my language because nobody else has already". Supervisor says, "Go ahead, undergrad, you may pass go and pick up 200 credits. But hold up, postgrad. What's the theoretical question you're trying to ask? How does this truly add to the literature on bilingualism/language acquisition? Essentially, why should you bother with this?" 


Good question, oh supervisor mine...can I get back to you after a good banging-of-head-against-wall and a couple of late nights of reading? Good-oh.


Secondly, you want to go into a school and have a chat to the kids. Excellent. But you want to go into a foreign-language school. Alright, your choice is narrowed down somewhat but it's a still a go-er. But the school says no.


Oh dear. Get back to me in a couple of weeks and I may be OK (and booking flights to Germany to find my German monolinguals, but that's not the end of the world either).


Thirdly, that whole ethics approval thing? Yes, well, obviously you have to rewrite the bits about the school, add in the bits about possible having to schlep overseas, have another look at vast bits of your theoretical background and study design - oh, and the deadline's Sunday. Bon courage, intrepid Masters' student.

This would probably have been a
better way to phrase it.
Image from the Mr Men Wiki

I may well be dramatising the whole thing slightly, being prone as I am to a smidge of overexaggeration and the viewpoint that hyperbole is the best thing, like, ever. But the fact that I find myself already in week 5 of term 2, with two other 5,000 word assignments looming scares me somewhat. Of which the side-effects include tiredness, irritability and a certain inability to be eloquent in front of important people. I managed to stand up for bits of my proposal well enough, but when reflecting upon the way in which I had been working to date, the only phrase which came to mind was "arse-about-face". Which I said. And which luckily made my supervisor laugh rather than cringe.

Mah boys at Granada TV. The interior wasn't
as old-school as the exterior.

On the plus side, the results from the first term are so far encouraging - a 78 average gives me a pleasant cushion within the range for a distinction, though Psycholinguistics is still to come back. I can also confirm that we will definitely be on University Challenge at least once come July, as we were officially accepted by the good people at Granada TV and we will be filming our first round match on Sunday 26th February! May it be the first of many (because when you're already up to your eyeballs, why not go that bit further and submerge yourself completely?)


There are so many metaphors going on in my head that I can't possibly choose one to end on. But this merry-go-round/rollercoaster/Monopoly board of a Master's isn't letting me off just yet...wish me luck.

Reading journal: Spring Term, Week 4

I just realised that I artificially beefed up last week's reading journal by putting half of this week's texts on it. Slap my wrist for trying to play the "oh-so-overworked student" card. Here's the joys of Topics in Syntax from this week anyway:

• Authier, J.-M. (1991). Remarks and replies: V-governed expletives, Case theory, and the Projection Principle. Linguistic Inquiry, 22(4), 721-740.