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how to make your hair itch
Try 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?
This is actually not an obvious question. The sentence (a) I showed the money to him has one of each sort of object, but (b) I showed him the money is ambiguous (according to my googling). The him in (b) is phonetically equivalent to the him in (c) I kicked him, which is indisputably a direct object -- but are they both the same him?
I intend to discuss this in terms of:
-- participant roles (Patient vs. Beneficiary vs. Recipient, and where does Experiencer fit into this?)
-- Case (in Old English, the hims in (b) and (c) would both have taken the dative case, while the him in (c) would, I believe, have taken the accusative case -- although it may take dative, too, which is back to the flippin' Experiencer question again: is that him a P or an E?)
-- contact (how are ditransitives handled in Old Norse? Norman French? Old Irish? these are the three languages with the greatest effect on OE, and may be responsible for the weakening of the case system to the point where a question like this is even possible.)
-- animacy (once I cook up enough examples to see whether there's even a question as to its relevance).
And I'm scared to death.
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?
This is actually not an obvious question. The sentence (a) I showed the money to him has one of each sort of object, but (b) I showed him the money is ambiguous (according to my googling). The him in (b) is phonetically equivalent to the him in (c) I kicked him, which is indisputably a direct object -- but are they both the same him?
I intend to discuss this in terms of:
-- participant roles (Patient vs. Beneficiary vs. Recipient, and where does Experiencer fit into this?)
-- Case (in Old English, the hims in (b) and (c) would both have taken the dative case, while the him in (c) would, I believe, have taken the accusative case -- although it may take dative, too, which is back to the flippin' Experiencer question again: is that him a P or an E?)
-- contact (how are ditransitives handled in Old Norse? Norman French? Old Irish? these are the three languages with the greatest effect on OE, and may be responsible for the weakening of the case system to the point where a question like this is even possible.)
-- animacy (once I cook up enough examples to see whether there's even a question as to its relevance).
And I'm scared to death.
confused
Re: confused
Re: confused
Re: confused
The second thing. I'm starting from the question of how ditransitives work in modern English, and hoping to go back and see how they did work in OE and what could have happened to change this.
Re: confused