Books I Read That I Loved in 2016

(The title of this post is riffed from the Autostraddle column 'Things I Read That I Love' which is in turn riffed from the Emily Gould tumblr, 'Things I Ate That I Love', full credit.)

Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert 
Big Magic is about creativity and inspiration, starting with the idea that ideas themselves, like people and sand and trees and subatomic particles, are actual things that exist in the universe; and ideas are realised when they (because ideas have animacy in Big Magic) find a person to realise them. Does that sound woowoo? But the practical implications are solid. For example, if you want to be inspired, you need to show up - because ideas like to be taken seriously. You should also at least pretend to enjoy your work, because ideas aren’t interested in the miserable artist schtick.

“This is my question, and I think it's a fair one: Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn't it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you?”

But fair warning, you also need to be prepared for massive failure - ask yourself not “what would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?” but “what would I do even if I failed?” because ideas don’t owe you anything. They love you, but they love themselves more; they’re out to get realised one way or another and you’re just along for the ride. 'Inspiration doesn’t look at you and go, “Well that didn’t work.” Inspiration looks at you and said, "That was fun. Look at what we did!" '
 
Read this: if you want to read just one more book about creativity before you, you know, get creative.

  
Quiet - Susan Cain
The book that hailed the revolution. The quiet revolution. The quiet stay-at-home but-we-would-definitely-be-a-force-to-be-reckoned-with-if-we-ever-left-the-house revolution. Look, I don’t know if you’ve even noticed the revolution but it’s there. This book is about introversion and what it means to be introverted in what can feel like an increasingly extroverted world. It’s about what introverts look like as kids - highly reactive, actually, because everything is stimulating to introverts and then as we grow up we learn to withdraw from too much stimulation (it’s the calm kids you have to watch out for - they’re the ones who will be jumping out of planes as adults in an effort to feel something); how introverts can put our introversion on hold and be loud-mouth extroverts in service of things we care deeply about; and why introverts are buzzkills - because whenever we get excited about something, we get hypervigilant and we’re 'constitutionally programmed' to start looking for problems.

"Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload. Introverts' reflectiveness uses up a lot of cognitive capacity, according to Joseph Newman. On any given task, he says, if we have 100 percent cognitive capacity, an introvert may have only 75 percent on task and 25 percent off task, whereas an extrovert may have 90 percent on task." This is because most tasks are goal-directed. Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going."

Read this: if you’re an introvert, because introverts like reading things about introversion, because we think we’re special and we find ourselves to be a fascinating object of study (and we usually are).

Deep Work - Cal Newport
Deep Work is to (intellectual) work what Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run is to running, which is about the highest praise I can give a non-fiction book. I am so excited about the ideas in this book and I hope you read it and get excited about them too. It will convince you that everything you thought you knew about work is wrong and that there is a better way to do it and that even you can excel at working. Even you can get shit done. Basically, 'deep work' is the intense stuff you do in a distraction-free state that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limits and actually achieves something of value - a kind of work that's becoming increasingly valuable, and increasingly rare. That's Part One of the book, and all of it’s commonsense, of course - the kind of commonsense that years of immersion in a culture of unhelpful work practices will have you believing is uncommon.

"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. 

 But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning."

 Part Two is tips and tricks for training yourself to do deep work better - such as learning to be bored (instead of covering over boredom with distractions), ritualising your work practices, and working fewer hours to decrease the amount of ‘shallow work’ you do around the edges of your deep work.

Read this: if you’re pretty sure the only difference between Leonardo da Vinci’s ability to get things done and yours is that Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t distracted by tumblr (although he would have had an amazing tumblr).



The Future - Al Gore
I have to admit that I’ve been reading this book all year and I still haven’t finished it - although on inspection, I’m closer to the end then I thought: it turns out the entire second half of the kindle edition is footnotes and references for the first half of the book, proof that Al Gore loves us and wants us to be happy.

“Eight years ago, when I was on the road, someone asked me: “What are the drivers of global change?” I listed several of the usual suspects and left it at that. Yet the next morning, on the long plane flight home, the question kept pulling me back, demanding that I answer it more precisely and accurately […] I started an outline on my computer and spent several hours listing headings and subheadings, then changing their rank order and relative magnitude, moving them from one category to another and filling in more and more details after reach rereading.”

The Future is everything you want from a book by Al Gore - brilliant and intelligent and methodical and dull. The gist of it is that we’ve reached a point in human history where we’re experiencing change - in global communications and connectivity, in the balance of power, in human population growth, in science, and in the climate - “not of degree but of kind”. For better or worse, this change is new change, and thank God we have people like Al Gore thinking about it. If only the rest of us could listen.

Read this: if your dad the famous ornithologist died in a freak bird-watching accident when you were a wee child and you don’t really remember him but sometimes looking over pages upon pages of notes squiggled neatly in his fieldwork books makes you feel closer to him.

The Babysitters' Club series - Ann M. Martin
I ain't even kidding.

The Babysitters’ Club books were my ‘secret vice’ as a kid, and like a worn-out blanket or the very first CD single you bought (Lo-Tel’s ‘Teenager of the Year’, mine was), the books are still comforting, you know? Even now. Especially now. Ann M Martin recently said in an interview with The New Yorker:

“I wouldn’t say that I had a feminist agenda, but I certainly had a feminist perspective. I think of myself as a feminist. I wanted to portray a very diverse group of characters, not only from different racial backgrounds, but from different kinds of family backgrounds, religions, and perspectives on life. I just really wanted a group of girls who were very different from one another and who became very close friends.”

It all seems so wonderfully naive; and look, if you never read the BSC series then I don’t think you’ll get it but I hope you have your own childhood book series that you return to once in a while. (If you did read the BSC, did you know that there are blogs dedicated to BSC recaps, What Claudia Wore, and illustrations of Claudia’s outfits? (Because let’s be honest, none of us had any interest in the actual babysitting.) Who can forget that outfit from Claudia and the Phantom Phonecalls with the purple pants, suspenders, white tights with clocks, and lobster earrings? You're welcome.)

Read this: if your favourite country that you’ve never been to just elected an incompetent fascist demagogue and you want to be reminded of the idyll of your childhood where hardwork and being kind to people was important.

Journal Articles I Read That I Loved in 2016

(I riffed this title from the Autostraddle column Things I Read That I Love, which is in turn riffed from the Emily Gould tumblr Things I Ate That I Love, full credit.)

In a few short days it will be Christmas. More importantly, in a few short weeks it will be my one year phd anniversary.

The first major piece of writing that I set myself to complete by the one year mark is the first draft of my literature review. I maintain that a “first draft” should be a wild and untethered thing, free from such bothersome constraints as Minimum Standards. My supervisor disagrees. We'll see. In any case, writing a literature review means trawling through everything I’ve read over the past 11 months, no small feat, to find what's relevant.

Obviously a lot of what I read ends up not being relevant to my thesis, but it would be sad to lose that reading to the depths of my Mendeley archives; so here, here I want to celebrate some of the best journal articles and Bits Of Academic Writing that I read in 2016 that won’t make it to the literature review - starting with this gem:

“It must be conceded that unusual sentences do indeed occur in natural language (who ever doubted it?) and as such may be preserved in corpora, like flies in amber.” (Hanks 2012: 405)

Would that I could write like Patrick Hanks. In ‘The Corpus Revolution in Lexicography’,  Hanks discusses the importance of using corpus data - that is, data sourced from collections of actual human language use - for dictionaries and linguistic theory. Left to our own devices, Hanks argues, our intuitions are pretty unreliable about what’s ‘normal’ in language.

For example, you might think ‘walking lamely’ is a good expression in English - and it is, in the sense that it’s grammatical and makes sense. But if you look at English language corpora, people very rarely if ever actually use the expression ‘walking lamely’, so you probably don’t want to include it as a phrase in your language learning textbook. To that end, Hanks writes

“[…] linguistics is the only scientific discipline in which it is considered acceptable first to invent data, then to explain what has been invented, then to claim that something of general validity has been ‘discovered’” (Hanks 2012: 402).

Ooh, burn.

(We do have to be careful, though - language corpora can throw up their own little weirdities - linguistic outliers, if you will. For example according to the AP newswire corpus, the phrase “remove [X] from [body part]” was statistically significant in 1998. This is not actually a frequently occurring phrase in English generally, but rather reflects the fact that in 1998, “President Reagan made several hospital visits to have a polyp or other growth removed from his nose, his leg, his arm, or some other body part, and all this was faithfully reported by the Press, before, during, and after the event” (Hanks 2012: 413).)

Moving on...

There was a time - I am so embarrassed to admit this - there was a time when I thought Joshua Fishman’s writing was convoluted and inaccessible. I was wrong. I pity myself. Yes, Fishman writes in long winding sentences, but they take you to the most beautiful vistas along the way, and he is the master of metaphor, coming from a place of deep learning and passion. (Technically this is from a book not a journal article, and of course Fishman will get heavily referenced in my lit review, but I had to share this. I had to.)

“Without an intimate and sheltered harbor at stage 6, an RLS [Reversing Language Shift] movement tends toward peripheralization from personal and emotional bonds and faces the danger of prematurely tilting at dragons (the schools, the media, the economy) rather than squarely addressing the immediate locus of the intergenerational transmission of [the language] (Fishman 1991: 95 - italics my own)

Speaking of metaphors... apparently there is a method for researching attitudes and beliefs that involves asking your participants for metaphors, the rationale being that metaphors are a window into the subconscious or something. Presented without commentary, here are some of my favourite metaphors from Ian McGrath’s “Teacher’s and Learners’ Images for Coursebooks”.

Language learning coursebooks are like:

• ladies’ handbags because we can take what we need from them and ladies tend to take handbags wherever they go
• a professional killer
• an ugly and terrible girlfriend whom you dislike but have to contact
• a bottle of chicken essence
• a fruit basket
• lions and tigers
• toothache
• nothing
• a beehive which has sweet honey and a lot of painful stings
• an angry barking dog that frightens me in a language I don’t understand
• a pair of shoes. It takes time to choose one that you feel comfortable to wear for a long time. A bad pair will kill you, give you blisters. A good one will give you confidence to run, to jump, to fly high
• my boyfriend, who I hate to see everyday, but I regret I can’t see it during exams

Bless.

And finally, regarding the social responsibility of linguists to contest the monolingual mindset in Australia and 'speak truth to power' - what is language?

“Language is central to every sphere of our lives and to all disciplines. [...] Through language we identify people as belonging or not belonging, we can represent or misrepresent people and manipulate the opinions of others, as is happening now in Australia. [...] Language is an instrument of action, through which we promise, pass judgment, complain, invite and exclude. [...] It is the deepest manifestation of culture, the key to revealing our cultural values and understanding those of others. Language, used in a particular way, can make us sick; used in another, can heal us. It can empower or disenfranchise others. So linguists have exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary research and to work in contexts personally meaningful to them.” (Clyne 2005: 2)

Nothing like Michael Clyne to write about language in a way that is both intelligent and moving, without straying into cheap sentimentality. (I have so much to learn from Michael Clyne.)

References:

Hanks, P. (2012). The corpus revolution in lexicography. International Journal of Lexicography, 25(4), 398–436. http://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecs026

Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 

McGrath, I. (2006). Teachers’ and learners’ images for coursebooks. ELT Journal, 60(2), 171–180. http://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cci104 

Clyne, M. (2006). The social responsibility and impact of the linguist/applied linguist in Australia. 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 1–11. Retrieved from http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2005/clyne-social.pdf

Day 9. One summer school, two conferences, and a three minute presentation later.

9 days ago I challenged myself to write a post per day while I attended the CoEDL Summer School, Applied Linguistics Association of Australia conference, and Australian Linguistic Society conference.

This post is technically meeting my self-imposed requirement to stop worrying and write something.

But one summer school, two conferences, and a three-minute presentation later, this is about all I can muster the energy to do right now:

I still want to finish writing about the rest of the ALS conference - I went to some really fabulous presentations - and I'll try and do that next week

But for now, it's day 9, and I've written my post. Melbourne, you've been amazing. Good night!

Day 8, ALS conference. Jane Simpson spoke about linguistic creativity in fantasy novels and it was the best thing ever.

I’m calling it. Jane Simpson’s plenary this afternoon - “Alternate world languages: Constrained creativity and folk linguistics” - is the best thing that has happened or will happen at the Australian Linguistics Society 2016 conference. Judging by the number of questions (in which a fair few conference-goers revealed their own ‘secret vice’) and the tweets about this plenary afterwards, I’m guessing I’m not alone in this. (Although I may be alone in why I loved it so much.)

Simpson took it upon herself to explore what linguistic creativity in 50 fantasy English-language novels tells us about folk linguistics, folk attitudes towards language, and folk knowledge of language ecologies. (And oh to be an established academic who gets to dabble in their own interests like that.)

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed this lecture so much is that I hate linguistic creativity in fantasy novels.

Hate is a strong word. I stand by it. And you know when you hate something so much you just want to wallow in the theory of it for an hour?

When it comes to linguistic creativity in novels, I’m a Prescriptivist. I want to see the author’s qualifications for why they think they can just Make Stuff Up, and if the author’s qualifications aren’t that they’re J.R.R. Tolkien then I’m not buying it.

Actually I need to clarify that because I’ve just remembered that I quite like JK Rowling’s names for things, like Slytherin, and Hufflepuff. (Did you know that ‘Hufflepuff’ in Welsh is Wfftipwff? (Pronounced ‘oof-ti-poof’)? Brilliant!) But then those are new names for new things and they're cute and I like them, sue me. For everything else, I agree with the critique of this fan here:

“Everyone has a seven syllable name and there are even - argh - random apostrophes. The made-up words are so complicated that it takes a separate appendix to instruct the reader how to say them: a clear victory of world-building over common sense. There’s a vast amount of info-dumping about magic and history and casual references to drinks-that-aren’t-quite-like-our-drink-because-it-has-a-made-up-name and food-that-isn’t-quite-like-our-food-because-it-has-a-made-up name and animals-that-oh-you-get-it.”

Like what’s the point? Yes, you’re very clever, well done, what an ‘exotic’ sounding name. It doesn’t make your story any more believable, go fix your plot holes.

Simpson talked about some really interesting processes by which authors create new words but as a Prescriptivist I’m going to ignore those processes and say that most fantasy names sound to me like they were created with a Random Name Generator.

This is problematic because Random Name Generators seem to be built on the phonotactics of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, which are essentially based on Finnish and Old Norse and Old English and stuff, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that these names are kinda racist, right? Like an Elvish Name Generator will give you names like Haerelwen and Flalhallalor, and an Orc Name Generator will give you names like Ghoragdush and Kzhtuqth. But good people can have pharyngeals in their names too! (I mean I love Tolkien but come on.)

(I love this excerpt on like seven different levels.)

Also can we talk about why when an English-language author wants to portray a character as being ‘simple’ or ‘rustic’, they make them sound like they’re from Yorkshire?

Linguistic creativity in English-language fantasy novels tells us a lot about folk knowledge of how language works; it also tells us a lot about how English-speakers consciously or subconsciously associate different social groups and characteristics with different linguistic patterns, which is kind of huge.

(But mostly I just hate linguistic-creativity in fantasy-novels because I’m curmudgeonly.)

It was a great lecture.

Day 7, ALAA/ALS joint day. Middle-finger pointing, money, and making an online shell for language lessons

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Pretty sure Shakespeare was talking about the ALAA/ALS joint conference day.

The really great thing about attending not one but two linguistics conferences at the same time is finding out the amazing scope of linguistics, all the different things that we do in this big crazy family.

The tricky part is attending all these different sessions and not changing your phd topic afterwards.

For example, children’s pointing gestures in Murrinhpatha. There’s a whole area of study of the development of how we point at things, and there seem to be some “universals” like using your index finger, but then is this really a universal? In some language groups, people point with an open palm, or with an eyebrow, or with their lip. Apparently “nobody” points with their middle finger but that’s not a universal either (linguists probably ought to stop using words like “universals”, “everybody”, and “nobody”). Arrernte speakers for example use their middle finger for pointing, according to David Wilkins, and according to Barbara Kelly’s group it seems that Murrinhpatha kids do it as well.

This is a really interesting observation to me because I’m sure I’ve seen vaguely white English-speaking kids occasionally use their middle finger for pointing, to the chagrin of their parents, and certainly there are whole internet forums of parents who are worried about how they can stop their child from pointing with their middle-finger lest they be read as rude - but the point (so to speak) seems to be that this kind of finger-pointing isn’t a transmitted behaviour. That is, English-speaking kids don’t learn to point with their middle-finger from their parents, they just do it almost by accident.

So first of all, is this actually something English-speaking kids sometimes do? And if it is, does it have the same (morphological) properties as Arrernte and Murrinhpatha pointing? And if this is the case but it isn’t transmitted, would we characterise it as sort of the finger-pointing equivalent of a kid having the potential to produce all the sounds of the world and then having their phonetic inventory shaped by the language they’re exposed to? Hmm…!!

The plenary keynote was from Asif Agha, about ‘money talk’ - how we talk about money, but more importantly how how we talk about money makes money money - if you see what I mean. Objects (coins, notes, shells, salt) function as money only if other people do the same things with them, and the act of using them as money makes them so. I’m not going to pretend to understand anything more about discursive semiotics (there are more things in heaven…), but I will just speak to something I do have authority on, which is that Sir Edmund Hillary, as he appears on the New Zealand five dollar note, was A Bit Of A Babe:

A great set of sessions in the afternoon about Indigenous languages: the (sometimes sordid) history of language policy, the national curriculum, and the affordances and constraints that places on bilingual education in the NT (Samantha Disbray - Charles Darwin University); trends in Indigenous language usage which turned into a fascinating conversation about how you would even collect language use data in the Australian census (not least considering the last time we had a census; remember that?) (Maria Karidakis - University of Melbourne); and the creating of an online 'shell' (like a basic framework into which you can add content for any language) for Indigenous language and culture sharing (Cathy Bow - Charles Darwin University).

Thinking about the online language programme created for Bininj Kunuwok, surely one of the biggest challenges language teachers face is how to teach polysynthetic languages in a way that doesn’t frighten people. Here I wonder if we’d be better avoiding grammatical or linguistic description all together and just presenting example after example until students start to internalise the patterns. I have a sticky note on my office wall that says “the brain is a pattern detector, not a rule applier” (which has been attributed to Patricia Cunningham), and this was the mantra of the 'Say Something In' language learning course I used  - “don’t worry about it now, you’ll get it”. But of course people do worry about it now, and feel that it would help them to be able to see the rule spelled out in front of them. I think we need to see a lot more research about whether adult language learners really are helped by learning grammar explicitly, or whether they just think they’re helped by it.

Day 6, ALAA conference. Black Hitler, positive psychology, and Melbourne is a Welsh ghetto didn't you know?

When I got to the ALAA conference this morning there was a largish group of school children - 5 and 6 year olds, I think - on the lawn out the front, singing what I eventually worked out was the Circle of Life from the Lion King. There is nothing I like more than people doing something earnestly and badly. (Obviously my own life is a endless source of entertainment.)

Interesting plenary from Rod Gardner and Ilana Muskin about using Conversational Analysis (CA) to research classroom interaction in early primary school-aged children. The essence of CA seems to be to ask “why that now?” - why that repair, that change of speaker, that laughter - and the result is an amazingly rich source of data.

(I think children are fascinating because they’re just like tiny adults, with the same motivations and desires and weaknesses, but without the slightest capacity to hide those things.)

Five three-minute “lightning” presentations today - or as one presenter put it yesterday, “lightning and thunder” presentations. Was particularly taken by Carolyn Pogson’s (Uni of Woollongong) project to create a syllabus for supporting Indigenous kids to develop their articulation/phonological skills within an Indigenous curriculum framework, and without bulldozing their own Aboriginal English speech.

I’ve become a bit cynical about university-level education - the new academia, the business models, etc. etc. - so it was refreshing to listen to Antonia Rubino from the uni of Sydney present on her group’s work to combine language learning activities with positive psychology, to improve the students’ motivation for language learning but also to support the students’ resilience and well-being. I mean we all sort of talk about language learning as being “hard”, but that doesn’t mean it should make you miserable; and to actually be concerned with the wellbeing of students is kind of radical, in my opinion. A really lovely pedagogical approach.

Now I have to admit I didn’t understand too much of the second plenary keynote of the day, from Howard Nicholas, except in a very gestalt way. I think part of his point is that communication is multi-faceted and complex - “speaking ain’t speaking, writing ain’t writing” - and how we interpret meaning involves an understanding of our entire selves, which he demonstrated brilliantly with a clip from Trevor Noah’s “Schwarze Hitler” sketch. I’m not sure where we go from there to integrate these complex communicative repertoires into curricula, though - any thoughts?

Came home from day 2 of the ALAA conference to find the house had gone from predominantly English-speaking to predominantly Cymraeg (Welsh) speaking. I had been forewarned of this sudden language shift  by the friend I’m staying with, but had not truly appreciated the number of siaradwyr (speakers - Welsh speakers, in this context) that could converge on one suburban home in Australia on a summer’s night. Did you know there is actually a Welsh ghetto in Melbourne? And everyone’s Cymraeg was of such high-quality, second-language speakers included. Someone ought to do an ethnographic study of second-language Welsh-speakers outside of Wales. Really nos da, it was.

Day 5: ALAA conference. Do you want some neoliberalism with that?

Why bother learning a second (or third, or fourth) language when “everyone speaks English anyway”? Really fabulous plenary lecture from Ema Ushioda on the first day of the Applied Linguistics conference about motivation and the multilingual mind.

So historically, research on motivation - why do language learners learn languages? - has focused on the instrumental value of learning a second language. That is, it has asked what learners stand to gain by learning a language, in terms of business and educational opportunities, and so on. From this point of view, language learners are assumed to be striving towards native-like proficiency, and in never quite reaching native-like proficiency, are always at a deficit.

What if, asks Ushioda, this way of thinking about language learning motivation is constrained by English language globalisation and neoliberal ideologies?

(I mean dayum.)

And in any case what does it mean to have “native-like” proficiency in English? Whose English? English has long been an international language, belonging to everyone and no-one, and target language norms are a problematic frame of reference.

What if, instead, we ask questions about language learning motivation from what Ushioda calls a 'holistic, constitutive' view - one in which languages are “an essential element of human being’s thought processes, perceptions, and self-expressions”, where speakers have multiple competencies in multiple languages that are neither inferior nor defective but simply different?

When we view language learners holistically as multilingual communicators, we’re not trying to prescribe where second language learners “should be”; we’re describing how second language learners are.

Pedagogically, when language learners are allowed to have multilingual competencies, they can stop 'progressing' (read: struggling) towards some monolingual idea of proficiency, and start expanding and diversifying their linguistic and communicative abilities.



The implications of what Ushioda laid down today for learning endangered and minority languages are manifold. There’s been some talk for a while that ‘instrumentative motivation’ isn’t a very useful concept in situations where there are limited economic or educational opportunities associated with learning a minority language; and when a language with no speakers left is being reclaimed from books and old recordings, it’s difficult to see how you would compare a language learner’s proficiency with some ‘target’ proficiency. So we need a different framework, a different point of view, to research motivation for learning minority and endangered languages in a way that allows us to say something meaningful about why people learn languages, and I think this multilingual mindset is vital.

Day 4, CoEDL Summer School. "Isn't that weird?"

“Just because the brain looks like a bowl of porridge doesn’t mean it’s a serial computer” (Michael Arbib, I think)

The brain is really weird. I’d love to be bothered to find a more nuanced word that captures the complexity and oddity of it, but “weird” is what I’ve been using all through summer school and weird it is. And then you get neurotypology, which attempts to make connections between one weird system (neurology) and another weird system (language) and the whole thing is completely bonkers. (In a good way.)

Like this little weirdity: stated as simply as possible, the brain makes predictions, and if something doesn’t go as predicted, you get a particular kind of "blip" or “neural signature” in the electrical activity. Due to the timing and type of the signature, it’s called an N400, but the name isn’t important - just think of it as something you can see on an EEG graph when the brain is surprised.

One way you can surprise the brain is to read a sentence where the final word is wrong for the context - for example, “She buttered her bread with socks”. In this case, “socks” is obviously the wrong word for the context, and you get an N400.

But! Again in overly simple terms, if you read that sentence and the final, wrong word is capitalised - as in,

        “She buttered her bread with SOCKS”

- then you don’t get an N400. The brain isn't surprised.

The (post-hoc) story for this is that the visual system notices the capitalisation early on before it’s even properly processed the word, and alerts the rest of the system that something weird is coming up - capitalisation spoils the surprise.

Well, that makes sense. I think.

But wait! Simply drawing attention to the incorrect word doesn't seem to be enough in itself to stop the brain being surprised; for example, you don't get this effect just by highlighting the word in a different colour. In that instance, the brain is still surprised enough to produce an N400. The fact that you can also reliably surprise the brain in these studies at all, where you might suspect that the participants are starting to figure out that “hey, some of these sentences are a bit weird”, is also weird.

What could be happening is that CAPITAL LETTERS actually encode a meaning that coloured letters don’t - in the age of computers and texting, capitalisation has started to carry the extra (emotional) meaning of shouting, and something about the visual presentation of the word having meaning - as opposed to just being visually more noticeable - might be enough to interrupt the brain's usual "I'm surprised by the rest of the meaning in this sentence" thingy.

Isn’t that weird? That’s so weird. The brain is so weird.

Moving on! Rotokas, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, has one of the smallest phonemic inventories (meaning, number of sounds) in the world. It used to actually hold the world record for smallest phoneme inventory, and then a researcher more recently discovered that the Rotokas language, much like the language name itself, has an ‘s’ sound in it

At this point, “Linguists are not very quantitative” is I feel a relevant observation from Nicholas Evans.

Then there's this gem - apparently one day the speakers of a particular Papuan language had a meeting and decided to switch around the gender markings on all their words - so masculine words became feminine, and vice versa. The researcher who allegedly identified this somewhat surprising (N400!!) language switch “published a paper about it without a shred of evidence, produced a dictionary exemplifying it, and then died”.

That’s the last of my summer school updates - tomorrow I’m off to the first day of the Applied Linguistics conference. (Can someone explain to me how two of the biggest linguistic events in Australia happened to have a clashing day? I really, really need a timeturner.)

Day 3, CoEDL Summer School. Have bubbles, will travel.

Only a half day at summer school today - but what a day. Somewhere on the third floor in the Babel building at Uni Melbourne, my worlds collided again - you know those times where you think, I didn’t plan this but somehow all the elements of my life have come together and I’m exactly where I should be right now?

So no flippant remarks for this #coedlsummer post, more a genuine moment to say, “whoa”.

Child language acquisition. Just what the crap do we even know about child first language acquisition (FLA) anyway?

Barb Kelly and Jill Wigglesworth laid it out in ‘Making acquisition data part of fieldwork’, and the following two maps wrinkled my tiny little brain.

In the first world map, the size of each country is scaled according to the number of languages that are native to that country:

In the second map, the countries are scaled according to the number of languages represented in the CHILDES database, which is a repository of child language data:

Spot the difference?

We know a lot about how English-, French-, and Spanish- speaking children learn language; we have a lot of recordings, a lot of documentation of children’s speech in these countries.

But these languages are pretty freaking typologically similar, meaning they have lots of similar sounds and grammatical structures and even actual vocabulary in common. So what do we know about how children learn tonal languages, or languages with clicks? How do children learn languages with word order that isn’t subject-verb-object, or languages that stack prefixes and suffixes and infixes like Lego? Do all children tell stories in the same way?

We just don’t have the documentation for any of this. When linguists go out into the field to document a language, they’re just not recording children.

This is a massive oversight, say Kelly and Wigglesworth. Let’s start recording this data along with adult language use. Record it for your own project or at least record it for someone else to use later on.

So I’m sitting there in this lecture thinking, you know what speech pathologists are really well-trained at?

(Now might be a good time to mention, I’m trained as a speech pathologist and worked in the profession for four years.)

And look, there are lots of linguistic-y things we’re not great at, but you know what speechies are really good at?

Eliciting language data from children.

So what could a speechie with a linguistics qualification (or a linguist with a speech pathology qualification) achieve?

Give me a plane ticket, a recording device, and some bubble mix*; I think I’ve got a postdoc for life.

(*The joke, by the way, is that speech pathologists love bubbles as a language elicitation tool. Felt I probably needed to explain that in-joke.

Kelly, B., & Wigglesworth, G. (2016). Making Acquisition Data Part of Fieldwork. CoEDL Summer School: Melbourne.

Day 2, CoEDL Summer School. "You could be dead!"

Remember day one, when we ate lunch in the great hall and made new friends and our classes were filled with puzzles and possibility?

Welcome to day two.

• “Imagine what could happen in four to eight seconds. Everything. You could be dead!” - on the temporal lag of fMRI data (which measures blood flow in the brain) compared to EEG data (which measures electrical activity in the cortex)

• How do you make a room full of linguists laugh? Show them a video tracking the eye- movements of someone reading a series of unambiguous German sentences with an ambiguous sentence thrown in at the end. Classic!

• (It actually is laugh-out-loud funny. The eye-tracking dot skips across the page from word to word, line to line, like a rabbit bounding through the undergrowth. Happy little eye-movement! Look at it go! But suddenly - disaster! The reader is unable to disambiguate the final sentence, and the eye-tracking dot goes over those lines again and again and again, back and forth, unable to move on, getting more and more bewildered, frightened, scared. You start cheering it on. You can do it little eye-movement! I believe in you! It’s hilarious. I wish I had the video.)

• How do you silence a room of typologists? Ask them “what is a subject?”

• How do you silence a room of phonologists? Ask them “what is a syllable?”

• Three hour phonology lectures on a sunny Friday afternoon are like a boxing match. (Probably.) You can’t lose your concentration; can’t lose your confidence. The stories I could tell. If you get knocked out you better get up again right away. The minute you start to doubt yourself, it’s all over. Mind over matter. Hang in there. Go zen. Never mind the blood, the tears. You can do this. You are the walrus. You are the left-headed foot. You are the VC syllable. You crawl out of the lecture, bruised and battered. You survived this time. You’re alive. Celebrate.

Day 1, CoEDL Summer School. "That's like a crazy amount of exuberance."

Yesterday was the last day of Nanowrimo 2016.

For those uninitiated few, ‘Nanowrimo’ stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’, an (international) event where aspiring writers challenge themselves to complete the first draft of a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

Nanowrimo isn't a “competition” - you don’t “win anything”, no one “cares”. You just pursue quantity over quality like crazy in the hope of achieving some mythical fame and glory.

Nanowrimo has been the best preparation I could have ever had for thinking about writing a thesis. (Because you can’t write a good thesis without writing a bad one first.)

This November is only the second time I’ve missed Nanowrimo in 12 years, but already I can feel myself starting to favour quality over quantity again, the temptation to not write anything unless it’s “perfect”.

But they say if you fall off the horse on one side, get back on and fall off the other side. So I’m in Melbourne for the next nine days attending the CoEDL (Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language - I pronounce it like 'curdle') Summer School and the ALAA (Applied Linguistics Association of Australia) and ALS (Australian Linguistic Society) conferences; and for the next nine days I’m going to write one shitty blog post a day.

It’ll be a like a Dear Diary blog but so, so much worse.

Now, because I’ve just spent all this space writing about writing, the rest of my Day One Shitty Blog Post is going to be a highlight reel of dot points. (And because I’m lazy, all my other Shitty Blog Posts will probably be in dot points as well, fair warning)

So without further ado:

Day One: CoEDL Summer School, The Highlights:

• In a time when I was better and kinder to myself, I only enrolled in summer school units with minimal or no required reading. I was a genius. 
• “Humans like solving problems. If we do not have problems in our everyday life, we create problems.”
• I met a postgrad who is learning Welsh through the online course Say Something In Welsh. This is also how I learnt Welsh, and is how I met the friend with whom I’m staying in Melbourne. Welsh language learners are absolutely the loveliest bunch of people, and Welsh is a global language. Fight me.
• “In German, if you’re a dative object you know something’s going to happen to you, but not as bad as if you’re an accusative-object.”
• Neurotypology: is it possible to categorise languages according to the brain’s physical, actual, neural response to them?
• Some Australian languages have 4 contrasting coronals. That's a lot of contrasting coronals - "a crazy amount of exuberance." What's particularly unusual is that they tend to neutralise those contrasts in word-initial position, where most languages tend not to neutralise contrasts because of the prominence given to consonants in word-initial position. But coronals are weird, and the perceptual cues for their contrast are usually heard in the preceding vowel rather than the consonant itself - so in word-initial position where there is no preceding vowel, the hearer can't reliably hear the contrast. Hence the neutralisation.
• What's even weirder is that I understood that whole part of the lecture and I haven't studied phonetics or phonology in eight years. Full credit to my supervisor for providing me with a solid foundation in both.
• “You can buggerise around with affixes in a way you can’t buggerise around with roots.”
• They say the best part of schools and conferences is the networking opportunities. And I did take the opportunity to network with some wonderfully interesting people today. I also took the opportunity to network with my friend's dog. (I'm in Melbourne now, I can use hipster filters.)
  
  

How I, A Millennial, Afforded A Deposit On My Own Home

On the weekend Bernard Salt published a thing in The Australian suggesting that young people should stop eating smashed avocado with feta on toast and save the money for a deposit on a house instead, and millennials/millennial-allies (millenniallies?) rightly and righteously lost their #smashedavo shit over it.

This relates to my phd adventure in that I am in the somewhat anomalous position of being a post-graduate-student/millennial/single-person-mortgage-haver (I’m getting business cards made), so I thought I would write about how many Vegetarian Big Breakfasts I had to skimp on to get into property.

(Graphic: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2016/oct/18/are-millennials-actually-bad-at-saving-or-are-houses-just-unaffordable)

The answer is, of course, are you even kidding me right now?

This is how I could afford to own my own home.

First of all, I did my masters degree in Adelaide so when I came back to Perth, it made sense for me to live with my parents for a while as I settled in and looked for a job. Four months of job-hunting later I was down to about $7 in savings (actually literally) and then the heavens opened up and I got a call back and a full-time contract. Do you know how many graduates find full-time jobs four months after graduation? 68%.  Good luck, bitches!!

It occurred to me at that point that paying for a mortgage in this city would be about as affordable as paying rent if I could get the money together for a deposit, so after I started work I spent another eight months rent-free at my parents house. They were able to put me up rent-free because they’re middle class homeowners who got free education in the 70s. I paid for my phone bill, I cooked dinner for them occasionally, I bought a secondhand car, I got $320 taken out of my pay every fortnight for my HECS debt (hahahaha nope), and I saved the rest.

Go on, millennials! Live with your parents! But also, grow up! But save money! But don’t be a sponge! Why are you like this? What’s wrong with you?

The next thing that happened is that I was lucky enough to have my contract converted into a permanent position. Banks like you to have a permanent position when you’re applying for a mortgage because it makes you look like you have a stable, reliable income. If you don’t have a permanent position, you need to show several years of contract work. Do you know how many millennials are working in permanent positions? Do you know how many Australians have permanent positions?

Nope.

So I took my savings and my permanent job and my First Home Owners Grant (fun fact! The FHOG has dropped from $7k to $3k since September 2013!) to a mortgage broker and he said I was actually a good candidate for a home loan and he told me how much I could afford and I politely laughed in his face and said I was not going to spend 40% of my post-tax income on a mortgage, thank you. When my parents bought their house in the 80s (back when houses were about as expensive as a nice holiday, I'm assuming) they could only get a loan up to 25% of just my dad’s income, on the assumption that my mum was probably going to get pregnant and have babies and quit work anyway.

Thanks for the financial advice, middle-aged mortgage broker!

The second mortgage broker I saw was a bit more realistic and gave me an upper limit that would be about 30% of my income and I thought that was reasonable and I could work with that. (This turned out to be a Very Good Decision because when I decided to go back to uni I had juuust enough financial flexibility to afford it.)

Look, I don’t want to be vulgar about money by being too specific but I think it’s a bit late in the piece for that - my upper limit for property was $200,000.

Do you know what you can get in Perth for $200k?

Sweet FA.

Actually that’s not entirely true - you can get a kind of nice one bedroom apartment in a kind of nice suburb, which is what I ended up with, and I need to tell you now that I absolutely love my place.

But there's still more to the story. I had what I thought was enough to cover a wee 5% deposit, but then it turned out that at 48m2 my place was too small for a home loan with a 5% deposit and I would have to put down a 10% deposit instead. Did you know that sometimes if you can’t afford a big enough property you need more money to pay for a larger deposit?

Back to my parents. I borrowed like another $8k from them, which again they could afford because they are middle-aged, middle-class home owners. I don’t know what I would have done if they didn’t have that kind of money on hand. Saved for another 6 to 12 months while the price of houses went up around me? Waited until I got married so I could buy property on a dual income? (Don’t even get me started on that one.) Stopped eating smashed avocadoes?

Listen. Home ownership is one of the most stressful things to happen to you because you’re the only one responsible when your hot water tank leaks all over the kitchen and you get council rates on top of your phone bill and electricity bill and water bill and you have a huge hole in the wall from that time you tried to put up a painting and the brickwork was just like, not today! But when you come home to your own place at night and you get to hang wallpaper in the bathroom if you so choose and you can decide not to clean under the sink for a while and no one cares if you own a pet and occasionally you get this tremendous sense of security - it is honestly one of the things I am most grateful for in my life.

Here’s the bottom line. I, a millennial, can afford to own property because I’m middle class and I'm lucky. I got a middle class education and a middle class job that miraculously turned into a permanent position and I sponged off my middle class parents for a year and then borrowed even more money from them and now I live in a tiny box.

But by all means, blame avocado on toast.