Metaphors for Life

Friends take a while to get it when I say things like, "I hope it will rain on the weekend, so I can go to the park!" But you see when you're an on-call photo pilot, you have to work on the sunny days. Today it's raining, but fortunately not a thunderstorm, so I'm at the amusement park with an eleven year old. Eleven year olds are about the best companions for amusement parks because they are big enough to go on all the rides and I've never found an adult who wants to go on the water flume ride thirty times in succession. I recently discovered that most parents consider taking their kids to the amusement park a chore. If this one works out, I think I'll get a season's pass and take all my friends' well-behaved kids, one a week all summer. Also rainy days are the best, because there are no lines. No lines at all, no one waiting, so we've been riding around and around on the water flume without getting off. The ride attendants don't care, less work for them. It's raining anyway, so we're not going to get any less wet if we get off. And water coasters are fun.

I've been around this same ride enough times to get philosophical. We went on wheeled roller coasters first, with the eleven year old bravely marching up to each one without giving himself any time to chicken out. Some things in life are quite as committed as getting on a roller coaster. You make your decision, you get strapped in, and then you're there, despite the fact that you may not enjoy the whole ride. His eyes were screwed tightly shut all the way through the roller coaster that went upside-down, and he was hanging on for dear life on the steepest one. Mind you, so was I. It really feels like you're going to fall out!

Going round and round on the water coaster he gradually comes to terms with the feeling of the big drop and when we finally get off, he wants to go back on the other roller coasters. They're still scary, but he's conquered them. And then we spend the rest of the day on the bumper cars. I adore bumper cars. If I win the lottery I am so getting my own bumper car arena, and you can all come over and we can smash into one another over and over again. On the way home it's all I can do to remember not to slam into the other traffic. I also remember to use the gear shift and not the steering wheel to engage reverse.

I find a place that repairs cameras, because even though I know my little camera is probably toast, I'd rather hear it from an expert than throw it out not knowing. I even pay a $25 diagnostic fee, to be credited to the repair cost if I give the go ahead, but forfeit if I decide not to have it repaired. I press a little, "do you think you'll be able to fix it?" but the technician impassively says he doesn't know until they examine it.

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Ever post something and imagine someone might be reading it, but know it's very unlikely? That was me, sending best wishes to South Sudan a few days ago. How about this, reader ScurvyDog who blogs at Tales from the Clouds was in South Sudan on its first Independence Day, celebrating along with the nationals. I never get over the astonishing breadth of the readership here.

Topics, in Linguistics and Otherwise

I'm back to my fourth year topics class, the one in English about focus projection, not the Mandarin one. We're talking about focus still. I think focus is the entire focus of this course and I'm increasingly certain that a fourth year topics course, and probably most third and fourth year courses outside the rigid core curriculum in this discipline are nothing more than the professor taking advantage of a captive audience for his or her theories, rough drafts of papers, and favourite past publications. I don't think this professor has cited any paper yet that he didn't coauthor.

He says things like "Cleft clauses bring two implicatures: exostential and exhaustive," and I mentally scurry around like I'm doing a crossword puzzle, trying to fill in the meanings of the words such that they match up and make sense with the other things he is saying. Judging by context, cleft clauses are those in which the normal English word order is twisted around in order to change the focus. The exostential implicature means that you have to have established some external background knowledge before you can plunge into a sentence like, "It's John that Mary likes." And the exhaustive implicature is that John is the only one. To me, you could follow up on "It's John that Mary likes" with "And she also likes Randy, and Andrew, and Zach, and that guy who was flying the Beaver on Saturday, and I heard that guy from Weasel River was at her place on Friday," but perhaps that just means I've spent too much time in small northern communities. The professor did note that this implicature is not true in all languages.

He then tells us that "Into the room walked Bill," presumably also a cleft clause, can answer the question, "Who walked into the room?" but not "What did Bill do?" For me, "Into the room walked Bill would be a very marked answer to either question and would only be valid as a somewhat showy description of a game show, or as an answer to "What happened next?" This is a post-verbal subject and gives the subject a presentational focus which is a good name for it, as you can imagine Vanna White gesturing towards Bill as he arrives. A sign that this is a special focus for presenting someone, it is almost impossible to get a pronoun into that position. You could say, "Standing over the body was HIM!" but only if the last word was accompanied by vigourous pointing and probably a dramatic camera angle and music cue.

We're working towards establishing two different types of focus which in English are made by the same constructions, but in other languages may not be. So now we go to some examples in Hungarian. Ninety-nine percent of you will probably be really glad that I didn't copy them down, nor pay rapt enough attention to rave on about them. For those of you who were hoping to learn about its focus strategies, I'm truly sorry.

I did rediscover that the middle of an afternoon class is an excellent opportunity to focus on what you'd rather be doing. And seeing as right now in my life that's actually more important than Hungarian having deaccenting and stress, I might as well ignore the fact that Hungarian stress falls on the leftmost element of the stress clause, and ponder what it is that I really want to be doing.

• I like the morning exercise of getting on my bicycle and coming to school. I should make that a regular thing, even if I don't go to school.
• I like learning things, and human contact.
• I'd rather learn most of them at a faster pace, skip to the next thing as soon as I grasp a concept, and have the opportunity to immediately find out more in depth if I like it.
• I'd rather be improving some of the languages that I sort of know (Hungarian not among them).
• It would be amusing to write a novel at the university, alternating between a quiet corner of one of the libraries and the back of dull classes.
• I'd rather be improving my knowledge of aviation, both useful and trivial.
• I like attention

As far as linguistics is concerned, I am interested in:

• writing systems
• deliberate language change or retention such as politically motivated dialectical divergence, or legislated prescriptivism
• factors contributing to language survival in the face of non-recognition/persecution
• anthropological linguistics especially with respect to population movement from Asia to and through the Americas

While I'm not completely uninterested in the different ways Hungarian establishes discourse new versus contrastive focus, it's not my first choice.

Adjuncts, according to the professor--I think we're back to English now--can attach to anything, but are sensitive to what they attach to. Suck it up, adjuncts. You can't always get what you want. And we finish the class with a recursive infinite tree. I swear these things are following me.