That that
After a marathon phone conversation with Nathan tonight, I find myself more and more aware of language and thought and discourse and and and…Aaauuuugh *brain implodes*
I’m also hyper-aware of my use of that now. Yay being a linguist and being surrounded/bombarded by data all the time.
I told Stefan about how much I’ve been thinking about the phonetics-phonology interface, and he asked if I’d had any dreams about it. Upon my reply (negatory; dreaming about lambdas and S-expressions and donkeys and in German all seems to be reasonable, but I still can’t fathom the idea of dreaming about phonetics-phonology), he responded “Well, you’re not thinking about it enough, then”. Touché. Of course, I’ll bet that part of my lack of dreaming about that stems from my lack of sleep.
Also–it’s Friday?! When the hell did that happen? Nathan told me he was going to LA this weekend, and I thought today was Monday so when he said that he had to pack for his trip, I got totally confuzzled.
Lastly: this NP-S relative clause stuff is exciting. Talking about it with Nath just made me even more excited about working on this. I like talking about linguistics/philosophy; I feel like I get a better grip on these things when I talk/write about them, when the language makes (somewhat more) manifest all the ideas floating around in and out of my head. I get this Zen-like feeling of engagement and understanding when talking about semantics that I don’t quite have access to outside of talking to someone.
emma :: Feb.09.2007 :: misc, semantics, philosophy, linguistics :: 2 Comments »
I’m not sure if your title is specifically in reference to the phenomenon, but I was surprised the other day to learn that Mark Liberman hadn’t been aware of the term ‘cannibalism’ for the tendency to avoid things like the successive that in the sentence ‘I didn’t know it was that that you’d lost.’
The title was just my sleepless brain’s inability to come up with anything clever. Reduplication is always then the default :-P