in which fox hates 51.45' N

Went to be 1-ish.  Woke up 4:45 when it was light outside.  A month to go before the days start getting shorter again.  (For some reason it didn't bother me in Edinburgh, but now I suspect I'd kill myself if I lived any further north than this.)  Couldn't get back to sleep for the longest time -- I put on a sleep mask and just lay there.  Finally dozed off and had weird dreams until about noon.

Rar.

i can't remember the threshold for distinction.

What will be marked for my degree is, as I've said before, my thesis, the combination of three problem sets and a syntax paper, and three exams.  There's a standard you have to reach in order to pass, obviously, and I don't know specifically what that is, but I'm not so worried; and there's a separate standard for achieving distinction, which involves some number of papers being above a certain mark at the same time as none are below a different mark.  I do not know what these marks are.

But I have back two of my essays from the mock Paper A.  One has a 60% and one has a 63%, which, before anybody flips out, I urge you to bear in mind is more like /80 in each case, this being Britain.  The comments on both essays are fair to encouraging, although not falling over themselves with praise.  Let us review:

( Give an analysis, using Gricean conversational maxims, of the steps the reader must implicitly go through in order to make sense of the following: 'Would you mind not doing that, please?' )

( comments on this: )

( Explain the difference between the meanings of the following pairs of sentences: )

( comments on this: )

Good times!



* This is actually not quite right, but I don't appear to have lost points for misquoting the maxims.  They are actually:

Quality:  Truth
-- speaker must not lie or in fact even say sth he is not confident is true
Quantity:  Information
-- speaker must be (only) as informative as necessary (i.e. I got that one right [g])
Relation:  Relevance
-- speaker must be relevant (got that one right too)
Manner:  Clarity
-- speaker must be concise, unambiguous, orderly, and otherwise easy to understand.

The idea is that listeners should assume that speakers are following these maxims, absent evidence that they're not.  This is called the Cooperative Principle.  Of course it's bunk; speakers flout the maxims all the time, and listeners damn well know it.  Importantly, though, flouting a maxim is deliberately violating it, so it's understood between the speaker and the listener that the maxim has just been violated; it's when listeners assume speakers are adhering to the maxims but speakers violate them inadvertently that you run into a mess.

** Nothing like mixing metaphors, eh?  ;-)

*** That's impossible to deny; in my defense, I don't think that's what the question asked.  I suppose what this means is that on the day when I go to take the real exam, I'll have to go through the steps I've just described to try to work out what the question actually means, even if I think it's perfectly clear.  I shall, that is, have to assume that the examiners have unintentionally violated one or more maxims of the cooperative principle.

**** He put a note next to the relevant paragraph, actually:  the direct hitting of the head of the nail is "However, the reading in (2) implies very strongly that John's calling Bill a liberal democrat was not, in itself, an insult."

oh, do shut up --

The priests and congregation of the church with which my college shares a building are wandering around the quad singing hymns.  I wasn't aware it was Smells and Bells today -- anyone know what the occasion is?

I bet it was their fault the fire alarm went off ten minutes ago, too.