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how to make your hair itch
Oct. 20th, 2002 10:46 pmTry to think of a paper topic for Introduction to Linguistic Typology.
It's not that I can't write papers. I write quite well, actually, thanks. But I was never called upon to do any original research as an undergraduate -- never, more accurately, called upon to conceive any original topic for a paper in linguistics. I have, therefore, no sense of scale here: I don't know what's an appropriate topic, first of all, because I don't know What's Already Been Done, and secondly, I don't know what's reasonable to think a person can cover in fifteen or twenty or thirty pages. (Guideline: 15 pages; more if the paper is a collaborative effort; written by a grad student; to be used in more than one course; etc. -- I plan to write alone, but I am a grad student and I'd dearly love to get double mileage out of this thing.)
Googling takes care of the first issue, I think. I think. I've googled "ditransitives" and "(old) english (in)direct object" and "dative case" and various combinations of these, and it doesn't look to me like anyone's exhausted the possibilities for what I'd like to write about, which is (in a nutshell) this:
Does the sentence I showed him the money have two direct objects, or one direct object and one indirect object? ( No, wait, there's more. )
It's not that I can't write papers. I write quite well, actually, thanks. But I was never called upon to do any original research as an undergraduate -- never, more accurately, called upon to conceive any original topic for a paper in linguistics. I have, therefore, no sense of scale here: I don't know what's an appropriate topic, first of all, because I don't know What's Already Been Done, and secondly, I don't know what's reasonable to think a person can cover in fifteen or twenty or thirty pages. (Guideline: 15 pages; more if the paper is a collaborative effort; written by a grad student; to be used in more than one course; etc. -- I plan to write alone, but I am a grad student and I'd dearly love to get double mileage out of this thing.)
Googling takes care of the first issue, I think. I think. I've googled "ditransitives" and "(old) english (in)direct object" and "dative case" and various combinations of these, and it doesn't look to me like anyone's exhausted the possibilities for what I'd like to write about, which is (in a nutshell) this:
Does the sentence I showed him the money have two direct objects, or one direct object and one indirect object? ( No, wait, there's more. )
