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a breakthrough!
you may not know this about me, but i am a champion procrastinator. i tend to put off doing things that i don't feel like i'm prepared to do as well as i think they should be done. in the world of schoolwork, especially, i shy away from beginning things i don't know i'm going to be able to finish. "well, that's not healthy," you say. believe me, i know.
this paper i've been working on -- i've been feeling like it's winning. what i want to do is, i want to take a look at Old English (OE) verbs with two nominal complements (i.e. objects, more or less) and see if their, the complements', behavior can tell us anything about the complements of ditransitive verbs in Modern English. my hope is to be able to demonstrate that the relational grammarians ("the indirect object becomes the direct object") and Comrie ("there is no such thing as an indirect object") and even possibly Dryer ("this would all be easier if we thought of it in terms of primary and secondary objects") are off their nut and the issue is really just that the OE case system was robust where the Modern English case system is impoverished. ideally, then, i'd be able to say the following:
In what survives of Old English prose, there are X verbs with two complements. Of these, a have at least one complement in the accusative case; b have the non-accusative complement in the dative case; chave the non-accusative complement in the genitive case; and so forth. The dative complement appears with a preposition Y percent of the time (where, one hopes, Y=0, or at least, it correlates with some other observable factor, like proximity to the verb or whatever).
etc., etc. the trouble is this: there's a lot of Old English prose. i don't read OE well enough to go through and pick out all the ditransitive verbs and their complements and analyze their complements for case in the time I have (= until next friday at 9:00 am, which wouldn't have been enough even if i'd been at it for the past two or three weeks like I've been supposed to). there's a comprehensive OE corpus online, but not a comprehensive translation. the library here is painfully short of OE dictionaries, and the one volume that would be particularly useful to me is checked out and my request for recall has (so far) not met with a response. all in all, i've been getting more and more frustrated and more and more panicked, which in my world maps to more and more likely to be doing something else.
but i can't do something else. this paper is going to count for 30% of my grade in each of two courses (out of only three this semester). in the one course, i expect i'm pulling an A, but just. in the other, i honestly have no idea. my undergraduate GPA was a large part of what kept me out of the PhD programs i applied to this year; i know this is true, because i asked and they told me. it wasn't the occasional C that hurt me -- it was the B-heaviness of it when they were looking for a lot more A's. if i want to go on for a PhD after this (and i don't know if i do, as it happens, but i'd like to be in a position to make the choice), my MA has to be solid, which means this paper basically has to kick ass.
but i'm such a raging completist that i've been thinking, Argh, I can't get the data, how am I going to write the damn thing?
breakthrough follows: this corpus has the texts divided into Early, Late, and Indeterminate, and Anglian and Saxon. so. i shall choose six (or possibly a couple more; Late Saxon has a lot of stuff in it) texts as representative of the regions and time periods, and talk about the ditransitive verbs in them. that much translation, etc., i can handle. HA! i will not be defeated by this stupid paper. i will emerge victorious! just watch me.
this paper i've been working on -- i've been feeling like it's winning. what i want to do is, i want to take a look at Old English (OE) verbs with two nominal complements (i.e. objects, more or less) and see if their, the complements', behavior can tell us anything about the complements of ditransitive verbs in Modern English. my hope is to be able to demonstrate that the relational grammarians ("the indirect object becomes the direct object") and Comrie ("there is no such thing as an indirect object") and even possibly Dryer ("this would all be easier if we thought of it in terms of primary and secondary objects") are off their nut and the issue is really just that the OE case system was robust where the Modern English case system is impoverished. ideally, then, i'd be able to say the following:
In what survives of Old English prose, there are X verbs with two complements. Of these, a have at least one complement in the accusative case; b have the non-accusative complement in the dative case; chave the non-accusative complement in the genitive case; and so forth. The dative complement appears with a preposition Y percent of the time (where, one hopes, Y=0, or at least, it correlates with some other observable factor, like proximity to the verb or whatever).
etc., etc. the trouble is this: there's a lot of Old English prose. i don't read OE well enough to go through and pick out all the ditransitive verbs and their complements and analyze their complements for case in the time I have (= until next friday at 9:00 am, which wouldn't have been enough even if i'd been at it for the past two or three weeks like I've been supposed to). there's a comprehensive OE corpus online, but not a comprehensive translation. the library here is painfully short of OE dictionaries, and the one volume that would be particularly useful to me is checked out and my request for recall has (so far) not met with a response. all in all, i've been getting more and more frustrated and more and more panicked, which in my world maps to more and more likely to be doing something else.
but i can't do something else. this paper is going to count for 30% of my grade in each of two courses (out of only three this semester). in the one course, i expect i'm pulling an A, but just. in the other, i honestly have no idea. my undergraduate GPA was a large part of what kept me out of the PhD programs i applied to this year; i know this is true, because i asked and they told me. it wasn't the occasional C that hurt me -- it was the B-heaviness of it when they were looking for a lot more A's. if i want to go on for a PhD after this (and i don't know if i do, as it happens, but i'd like to be in a position to make the choice), my MA has to be solid, which means this paper basically has to kick ass.
but i'm such a raging completist that i've been thinking, Argh, I can't get the data, how am I going to write the damn thing?
breakthrough follows: this corpus has the texts divided into Early, Late, and Indeterminate, and Anglian and Saxon. so. i shall choose six (or possibly a couple more; Late Saxon has a lot of stuff in it) texts as representative of the regions and time periods, and talk about the ditransitive verbs in them. that much translation, etc., i can handle. HA! i will not be defeated by this stupid paper. i will emerge victorious! just watch me.
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