Monday, May 10th, 2004

Time	Event
4:12p	And I was like, Schadenfreude A young woman on the bus behind me was like, rah rah rah to her companion, so chatty, and I was like, that's interesting, she keeps saying 'like', and I was like, I've never really heard that much before. She was like, on and on, and I was like, she seems to use it with a part of 'be', in fact always 'was', preceding any speech or thought. The pauses after the 'like' were when she was like, gesturing or emoting as its complement, and I couldn't see. And I was like, I wish I'd brought my notebook. This was 1.30 on a sunny Monday afternoon and suddenly the army stormed the bus. Well, a ticket inspector, two bus line companions and three police below. He hauled away the chatty woman for using a fake pass, or as he politely put it, you know these passes aren't transferrable. And she was like, Oh aren't they? All curiosity and I'm a bit silly but that's an interesting fact to find out and thank you for telling me, you are a nice man. So she got off the bus to answer a few more questions. In the supermarket I had a few simple purchases, roots and berries, and the stupid bat in front of me was speculating in grapefruit and tuna. She had lots. She stacked all her things on the conveyor belt and I stood with my basket weighing on my arm waiting for her goods to move along the conveyor belt and make room for me. But she had covered the metal shelf at the end too, as one does, while waiting for activity at the teller end to free up belt space. We all do this. Most of us then shift the stranded goods onto the freed-up belt when it becomes available. She didn't. I thought she was a nuisance. I kept waiting, she kept not doing it. I wondered idly, silly thought, if she had even noticed that she had large piles of tuna and grapefruit stranded at the end, tectonically difting away from her other stuff. I became more annoyed, and embarrassed. All the queues were long and slow: it would not be efficient to move to another. Eventually I got so annoyed by her stupidity, I did, and made another circuit of the supermarket looking for temptations. Then I peeked across at that queue. Oh joy! She was still looking forward, and some other people had moved into the empty back half of the belt. Her goods were forgotten, stranded, lost! Then they were swept away into a basket and taken away for reshelving or disposal. She'll get home and wonder what happened to all that wretched tuna and grapefruit she had intended to buy. Stupid, stupid bat! Current Mood: schadenfreudenvoll Current Music: John Adams, El Niño: Dawn Upshaw (4 Comments | Comment on this)
10:24p	Rules and exceptions As expected (from having looked again at past papers) the phonology/phonetics exam was not a pushover. If I'm lucky the other two will be no harder. I got stuck towards the end not being able to think of THREE arguments for an independent weight tier, and I suspect the evidence I gabbled was for the rime, the mora, the foot, but perhaps not weight as such. Well, I didn't do perfectly but I'm not worried. The practical question was on a Bantu language called Bukusu. After a nasal prefix, stops become voiced and liquids become stops, so [taka, raka, laka] would all become [ndaka]. Explain as rules OR constraints, blah blah. The hard-to-explain thing was before nasals in the following syllable: [tama, rama] would become [ndama] but [lama] becomes [nama]. Now the conditioning is not a problem to the human eye, but it is a problem how to put this in either rules OR constraints. The rule has to apply early, and has rather an ugly conditioning environment. The alternative constraint doesn't work in a simple one-stop derivation, because the more regular form [ndama] does occur, just not from that input. (Plus there might be the fiddling technicalities to ensure that [lamba] is syllabified [la.mba], and/or you formulate it as a consonant tier thing, not a coda/onset thing.) All made me think again about why recent systems (OT and P&P) often seem so contrived, and more trouble than they're worth. There are historical stages in explanation. You have data to explain, you come up with simple generative rules. These work 80% of the time, you refine them, they work 90% of the time, you stretch them, they work 95% of the time. (Transformations would be the syntactic equivalent of phonological rules, in what I'm thinking about now.) Are they actually true, or just fairly accurate instrumentalisms? The 5% of data that's intractable or ugly haunts you, and you look again at your previous 5%, the ones that required stretching rather than merely refinement. Why aren't they convincing as explanations? Because instead of coming up with the best explanation, you were coming up with explanation in line with other explanations. You're becoming rule-bound. Well, perhaps these exceptions don't work like that. So you devise a better explanation, coming at it from a different perspective. Problem is, you're still paradigm-bound, and you take it for granted that if the new system is better at the particulars it was designed to answer, it must be a better overall solution too. But why? Clearly in most cases, in phonology, old-fashioned rules are simple, and they work, and recasting them as constraints is ugly, and has many many cases that are quite as intractable as the previous problems. I'm more and more convinced that the Culicover and Jackendoff approach has a lot going for it. Something like the Chomskyan technical machinery is correct, but at a distributed level, localized solutions to different problems, no necessity for a completely global command structure. Current Music: usual Radio 3 late at night unidentifiable (2 Comments | Comment on this)

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