fox | e-mail to professor-people, in explanation of which i compare research to boyfriends

Dr Supervisor --

What I wanted to ask you about this afternoon, only you ducked out of the seminar even before I did (which was still before it was done), was something I ran across in the reading for last week's morphology tutorial: Stump (2001) says, at the end of a brief discussion of shape alternations, "A thoroughgoing elucidation of the formal characteristics of shape rules awaits further resarch."

I was very excited to read that -- I thought, could it change everything?, and could that be the light-bulb over my head that we were (maybe only half) joking about last time we met at your office (even though it has little, but probably not nothing, to do with Old English and Celtic)? "Awaits further research" seems to me to be a little code message that actually means "Alert, graduate students, one of you can probably get a paper out of this." Do you think there is -- Stump having made the statement in question in 2001, will someone have leapt on the problem in the interim? Is this even a workable topic, and if so, is it a better one than the Old English/Celtic one I still haven't managed to articulate?

I hope this is a good thing. Have cc'd Dr Phonetician on this e-mail, as he was the one Prof Tutor suggested I speak to when I brought it up on Thursday (though Stump presents it as a problem to do with the morphology/syntax interface, so that's a little puzzling to me).

Thanks!

Fox

what we've been talking about, because i do find it interesting, is the influence of the celtic languages on old english (and vice versa). general wisdom has it that there was very little, and the supposed evidence is the relative lack of celtic loan-words in english; but my feeling is that the languages couldn't have existed in that kind of proximity for that kind of time without having some effect on each other, possibly at some sub-lexical level. so.

the trouble is that, although i do find this interesting, i don't have enough old english or gaelic, or any welsh at the moment, so i'm grossly underprepared for this sort of thing. and i don't feel the kind of fire-in-the-belly YES THIS IS THE TOPIC that i understand people feel for their dissertation topics. some people, anyway. see also lightning bolt, love at first sight, Dear Advice Columnist How Do I Know If He's The One?.

but you all saw how excited i got when i read the thing about shape rules last week! that's half the thing that got me in to linguistics in the first place! no matter where else i go, i always come back to morphology and syntax; This Could Be The One!

so, you know, i hope the professors say, parent-like, Oh, good; we didn't want to say anything, because you said you were happy and you ought to be free to live your own life, but we never thought that other topic was any good for you.

e-mail to professor-people, in explanation of which i compare research to boyfriends

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