Once again it is Thor’s Day! Soon Freya will have her day (who said those Norse raiders were weak (week) we got all kinds of grammar from them). I am not burnt out for a change. I’ve gotten used to the pace of things. I got up this morning at six, wrote a six page paper that was due at nine, and have spent the last hour and a half diagramming sentences for transformational grammar and I have twenty five papers that must be graded by me this afternoon.

I only have one week left in my grammar class as the instructor is taking the rest of the term off for the delivery of her third child. I am proud of my recent round of squiggles. One homework assignment usually takes a week or two to get through. As you rethink them they get messy, especially when you work in pen.

I still have to write a major paper on a set of dialect transformations. Since I am probably going home to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving I will be transforming recordings of my mother and father saying, “Oh Yeah? And So! Aye!” into linguist’s scribbling for a grade. I guess I’ll be using a lot of imperative insertions using the IO transformation for the non present speaker or hearer. Yeah, that’s not going to make sense to you. [Open the door!] is [Hearer open the door] for the purposes of transformational grammar.

If language were math… of late we’ve been doing these things that are akin to geometric proofs where we need to decode the underlying meaning of spoken sentences and then show how they got to their spoken form from the rules of transformation that govern sentence subordination, making sure to replace all pronouns so that the meaning is absolutely clear.

This is made complicated by the simple fact the adverbial phases can move pretty much wherever they want to in a sentence and still be grammatically correct. (Example: [Eagerly1] the child-[eagerly2] [eagerly3]-opened the present [eagerly4]). That’s an easy example because eagerly is a single word. Start to work with adverbial phrases in which things can move internally while the whole phrase moves and you start to scratch your head.

So when you get rolling: “The woman is a famous singer to whom Lance in engaged.” Becomes “The woman is a famous singer [Lance is engaged to the woman]”. That’s not so bad. But try “Jan scolded the orator who aroused the crowd that began the riot to which the police responded.” I came up with Jan scolded the orator [the orator aroused the crowd [the crowd began the riot [the police responded to the riot]]] (note that police moved within the phrase because of the WH fronting transformation). Then you diagram it with lots of circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us (sorry that slipped into Alice’s Restaurant). The sad thing is that I think this stuff is really fun.

Anyway, I can see the light at the end of the term’s tunnel. I also go in for my blood work today, which means four months left on the meds. I must get to class, the then the train, and then the drive, and then the clinic, and the grading, and then the three papers that are do tomorrow by five p.m.

The writing in this program is really just endless... several papers a week. Oh well.