tacos + skulls + traffic - sleep = Mexico City

Scientists are all about reductionism, so in the title of this post, I have provided you with a simple, elegant formula that models its contents. No need to actually read it.

However, if you really feel like delving into the details, here is a graph.

And for all you super OCD people, or the few of you who actually happen to care what I think, here is my actual post. Begin:


I have spent the past 2 1/2 weeks working 11 hours a day and commuting for 3 in order to bring you the latest findings in child acquisition of the second-person-singular formal and informal pronouns tú and usted. The results: doing experiments is really hard. Any little thing can ruin your results. Of all the children I tested, only one or two acted as I expected, reliably using the pronoun to choose the correct answer. All the other kids just pointed at random, or always chose the answer on the left side of the screen, or stupid non-linguistic, non-interesting things like that.

Oh, oops, what I meant to say is that they gave "non-adult-like" answers (= P.C. for "wrong").

On the other hand, I did get weekends off (hallelujah!), which I enjoyed to the max with my new friends Jorge Luis, Miriam, and Sergio. This is us at the pyramids of Teotihuacán.

These cuates helped me pass as a Mexican so I could get in free. Now that's friendship!

Hello, yes, this is Hannah on pyramid.

And this is me having the very authentic experience of grabbing a xoconoxtle and getting covered in spines.

For the rest of the day, it feels like having fiber glass particles in your skin. The only remedy is a liter of beer with lemon and chile.

Now about the tacos:

Okay, that says it all.

Now about the skulls: I have never seen a culture so obsessed with death. My first free day, I went to the museum of anthropology to learn a little about Mexico's roots. I knew that a lot of the pre-hispanic cultures practiced ritual human sacrifice. Something to do with making sure the rains would come, or whatever. But what I didn't realize was that it was not just a ritual, it was the ritual.

Decoration taken from the Avenue of the Dead, Teotihuacán.

A human heart. How cute.

People parts.

And though that practice ended with the conquest, the preocupation with death and dying certainly did not. This from an exhibit at MODO (Museo del Objeto del Objeto) entitled «El modo de vivir la muerte»:

Woman with a dead child.

 A display case at the museum of anthropology.

Ofrenda de los niños con deformación cránea."The offering of children with cranial deformations."

After a while, I began to see skulls everywhere.

I just hope I make it home in one piece. If I don't, however, please have someone write my thesis for me.

No, please, not reality! Not quite yet...

After 2 1/2 weeks of vacation with my mother and brother in Southeast Asia I come back to Michigan, a busted car window, and a punctured bike tire. Oh, and three hundred thousand forty-nine things to do for school. Maybe now would be a good time for me to post pictures of my trip. No sense diving back into reality too soon.

First order of business: pho for breakfast.

I got my incense fix soon after that, as it was approaching the end of the lunar month.



We got our nature fix in Ha Long Bay.

We got our shopping fix in Hoi An,

as well as our beach fix.

I got to see a lot of old friends.

And in general, we had ourselves a very good time. Thanks, Vietnam!

Everything you ever needed to know about the Y-model of linguistics in one cute animated drawing!

If you want to know what goes on in my mind (ha!), just look at the walls of my room. I have drawn on them all and frequently invite friends to do so, too. Here are some of my favorites:

The happy octopus, Calen Stone.

Quote from The Little Prince provided by Katie Talsma.

Color-by-number, Anel Guel.

 

My favorite swear-word.

Linguistics, as you might guess, is quite prevalent on my walls, too. For example, below you can see the traditional (read: wrong) analysis of the Spanish copulas ser and estar, just underneath that illustration of the urinary tract, complete with kidneys and prostate (in green), courtesy of Min Jung.

And my masterpiece is here below: everything you ever needed to know about the Y-model of linguistics in one handy-dandy little animation show.

Print and retain for future reference.

From this drawing, you can glean all the essential facts about generative linguistics, namely:

1. Syntacticians are top, Semanticists are bottom, and Phonologists are off somewhere to the side dithering about whether or not to participate.
2. All semanticists are awkward.
3. Morphologists get left out.
4. Abstract symbols arranged into binary branching trees are what the whole show is about.


Now, next time you meet a linguist in line at the grocery store or on the bus or wherever, you don't have to embarrass yourself by asking "How many languages do you speak?" Instead, you can ask a relevant and thoughtful question based on any of these four facts I have provided. Here are some helpful suggestions to get you started:

• In the ongoing struggle taking place at the syntax-semantics interface, with whom would you say the real power currently lies?
• What should we do with all these unemployed morphologists?
• In your opinion, what is the cultural significance of the strictly binary relations assumed between structures alpha, beta, gamma, and chi?*
• Are you a semanticist? Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

However, I must urge caution, as not all linguists subscribe to the basic worldview depicted here. Try breaking the ice first by asking how she/he feels about recursion. If the response includes a long-winded diatribe about Piraha, leave the premises immediately. Or if you're too nice of a person to do that, just change the subject to something involving the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If, however, the word "recursion" elicits a favorable response, then feel free to further test the waters with one of the discussion questions suggested above. If the linguist asks for your opinion on the grammaticality of a number of sample sentences, don't be alarmed. This is not a test; he/she is probably just collecting data. Keep calm and give your honest opinion.

Good luck, and happy discussing!






*This is a trick question. The correct answer is: "Oh, I'm sorry. You must have mistaken me for an anthropologist."

On surviving grad school

I think the only way to survive grad school is to be a total nerd or to have awesome roommates. Luckily, I have both.

Total nerd-ness in the acquisition lab: begin.

In the belly of the whale: Wells A-wing 740

 What's more, we now have some sweet digs in the new Wells Hall B-wing addition!

I may not be a real linguist yet, but damn does my new lab look good!

I estimate that having access to a pleasant workplace increases my nerd-dom by, oh, one billion points, give or take two. Whereas before I would spend all day in the lab as a matter of course, now I actually like spending the larger part of my late twenties there. Check out, for instance, the view:

View of outside. And of Curt's underarms.

What with the big windows, sometimes it feels a bit like being on display at the zoo, but hey, it beats being buried alive at the morgue.

Now for the other half of surviving grad school: roommates. These are, ideally, people who know zero about linguistics and couldn't care less and still think you are cool despite the fact that you are two years into your graduate education and you still have to admit that you can't explain what Reconstruction Effects or Downward Monotone Environments are supposed to be--well, not in words, per se.

Meet Jaclyn Menacher (right) and Anel Guel (left), also known as "The Mermaid" and the, uh, obviously not a mermaid.

Sadly, Anel has left for two years to do Peace Corps in Peru. Te extrano, mi querida tirafuegos! Luckily I still have my beautiful lab, and my other roommate, Jaclyn, to keep me from the grave and/or insanity. Only three more years!

crossing the line...on a bike

Speaking of training wheels, let me tell you about Butter, my best friend on two wheels.

Butter is named so because he smooth in every possible way: slick tires, flawlessly shifting gears, a sleek and glossy finish--though less so the more I ride him. Still, I get lots of cat-calls riding him across town. For example:

"Hey, goreous."
"Can I get your phone number?"
"Hey, little girl!" (not appreciated)
"Man, I wish I was that bike."

and the most articulate of all: "ooowwww!"

The funny thing is, however, that the cat calls immediately stop as soon as I cross the border into East Lansing. Some days, I take it as a sign of EL's more repressed, white-collar nature. (Repressed, that is, except for the squirrels, who gorge on cafeteria refuse and fornicate on the manicured lawns to their hearts' content. I have never seen beefier, lustier squirrels than on MSU's campus.) Or perhaps it's simply a result of the fact that the median age has just dropped to 23. As soon as I enter EL I am an old lady. Plus, I don't like beer pong. Two strikes against me.

Other days I take the contrast as a reflection not on East Lansing's repression, but on Lansing's peculiar bluntness. What else would I expect but cat-calls in a town where the capital building is located two blocks from a strip club? And since the GM plant left town never to return, why should Lansing give a damn about propriety anyway? We're just trying to make ends meet, here.

Still other days, I can't decide which city is supposed to be the "normal" one, or if in fact they are both completely insane.

Perhaps, then, it is totally appropriate that the following incident occurred right at the border between East Lansing and the actual Lansing, between inhibition and blue-collar flair, between manicured lawns and burned-out industrial leftovers:

I drew up to the stoplight under highway 127 and heard a car come up beside me, windows down. Stripped of the illusion of escape that a moving bike provides, no matter how slow, I braced for a possibly uncomfortable encounter. What I heard was,

"Hey, you know what? You are really beautiful."

Completely at a loss for words, all I could do was turn around and give a confused smile.

"Yeah, I was watching you pull up to the stop and was just like wow. I know you must get that a lot."

Words returned.

"You know, I think that is the most respectful compliment I have ever received."

And that was pretty much it. The light turned green and we drove off after a cordial "have a nice day." Every time Butter and I cross under 127 we remember that guy, whoever he was, and I tell Butter that I hope I can have that sort of guts, too. I'd like to just say what I think and not try to get anything out of it. Just call a spade a spade and say what I like when I see it without worrying about whether I'll get it or not. That day I was wearing a T-shirt that said "Love Fearlessly," and I think that one way to put that admonition into action is to do just that: speak the truth and expect nothing.

peace!

photo shoot with a 2-year-old

Eleanor is the youngest member of the intentional community where I live. A week after beginning to speak English, she decided that the next thing to learn was the digital camera. I helped her with the first point-and-shoot, and then she was off!

Point and shoot #1.

Mommy Zhewei.

Eleanor-eye-level view of the Common House dining room.

Eleanor-eye-level view of the Common House dining table.

Eleanor-eye-level view of a Common House purple fuzzy slipper.

me.

It's much harder to capture yourself.

Perfect!

After the shoot, she treated me to an embellished story about my roommate Jaclyn's car accident, involving poop and pee. I'm ashamed (ish) to admit that I put the idea of poop and pee into her little head, foolishly assuming that she would laugh about it and then move on to another topic. Mom and Dad, you can be duly proud of her and pissed (and poo-ed) at me.

The typology of linguists

Generally speaking, there are two branches of linguistics: sexy linguistics, and unsexy linguistics. Sexy linguistics includes things like discourse analysis, ethno-linguistics, eco-linguistics, and other subfields that involve notions like 'culture,' 'power structures' and 'creativity'. You know, something you can talk about in a bar without hurting your chances of scoring a phone number or two.

Unsexy linguistics is called generative linguistics, and it is inordinately obsessed with rules, formalisms, and things called 'minimal pairs' which are basically like little experiments.

Exhibit 1: minimal pair showing wh-movement in English
Imagine the question to the answer "She loves Cromwell."

(1) *She loves who?

(2) Who does she love?

Findings: The wh-element corresponding to "Cromwell" cannot remain in-situ as the object of "love," but must move to a higher position in the sentence. 

Perhaps because of their obsession with principled rules, generative linguists haven't generally paid much attention to cross-dialectal differences. Or at least, not to those distinctive turns of phrase that make it so easy and fun to stereotype people from other places. So I've had to do quite a bit of my own research just to be able to hold my own when doing impressions of British people, Australians, Southerners, and people from the Indian subcontinent.

As a research assistant, I have had the good fortune to come across many different dialects of Spanish, and my imitations are getting pretty good. Here is a sampling from my increasingly vast repertoire (if I may be so bold):

Exhibit 2: dialectal stereotyping

Imagine the response to a statement like "The sky is green."

Schoolbook Spanish: No es cierto. 

Nicaraguan: No me digás eso, que a vos no te creo.

Mexican: ¡Ay, guey! No manches.

Dominican: Coño, mujel, pero si tú 'ta loca.

Chilean: Vos estái completamenta alocá, ¿cachái? 

Findings: Ha ha! This is fun! 

My opening post is not about linguistics...

...it's about love.




"Youth is quick to despair because it is so quick to hope."
I think that's what someone wise once said to me, or maybe 
I read it in a book because the truth
is easier to swallow in black on white.

When I met you I was no longer my teenage self.
"No one likes getting older, of course, but I would never want to go back."
I think I said, or maybe 
I was just casting around for something mature to say and feeling
like a liar because my teenage self
was wide awake and already looking for some way
to make you mine.