LSC
Well, it’s past the halfway point for Linguistics Summer Camp–that seems to be what people are calling it, though for me it’s a bit different, as I’m commuting from my home four times a week. All the classes are great - but some are much funnier than others. One of the funniest moments came the other day in Gregory Ward and Betty Birner’s class on word order variation. At one point, the latter wanted the class to recall the various types of information-structural status that referents could have, according to a 1992 article by Ellen Prince. She said something like, “Now, I’m sure you all remember Ellen Prince’s ‘92 breakdown.” There was a moment of silence before a wave of laughter. Following which Gregory Ward reassured us all that “she’s much happier now.”
Other fun moments in various classes:
On natural types: “Aristotle’s nice, but that was 2400 years ago” and “The water’s coming along, saying ‘I’m just a natural sort of guy’.”
On accounting for constituents in a sentence: “I guess I don’t have to account for the pad thai.” “Well, it came from a recipe!” “Yes, an old family recipe. Not MY family, though. We called it pasta.”