got caught in the sticky jelly of my eye,
whizzed in like a kamikaze man.
destroyed with a blink. see a wing
float on the crest of a hot tear,
the ruin you brought here.
20090218
.the.sin.in.syntax.
I attended a linguistics talk today, in a room where the linguistics faculty numbered the linguistics students (even including me). Or maybe it was about equal. Maybe even greater, because it'd be nice to think that we're all still learning.
Judith Tonhauser and Cynthia Clopper - whose exact academic titles escape me at the moment, but rest assured that they are highly esteemed and qualified - were giving a talk on their field work on the Guaraní language of Paraguay. Most notably, Judith (it's not as if I'm reducing the women to their given names; we like to be on a first name basis in the department) had spent a few years working on a thesis in Paraguay dealing with the supposed nominal tense markers (in actuality, she concluded in her research that they are actually aspect markers). Following that, she wanted to find out if there was phonetic/prosodic marking for conveying contrastive semantic meaning. Being a semanticist-syntactician by trade, she enlisted the aid of Cynthia, who proceeded to fly down to Asunción.
What does that all mean?
Essentially, Guaraní has morphological markers that can be added to nouns that give them temporal meaning, in the same way that tense can be attached to a verb (i.e. "-ed") to place it temporally. The distinction between tense and aspect lies in some murky waters, but essentially, it comes down to felicity, in that one can say "Fernando was a teacher and is now a teacher." (tense), but cannot say "Fernando is a former teacher and is now a teacher." (where "former" is serving as our temporal nominal aspect marker). Using this test was how Judith determined that the markers were aspect markers and not tense markers.
And maybe that doesn't really clarify things. Linguistics can be a bit of a headfuck, and so as Julie said to me tonight, let's put the 'fun' back in phonetics and lift the theory off the paper a bit.
(On a side note, we decided that I like to put the 'sin' in syntax. And we won't speak about semantics...)
A translation of the sentence, "Fernando is selling a cow." might be rendered into something along the lines of "Fernando is selling future-meat." Unfortunately, I don't have the glosses to give you a true sense of what's going on, but let's say that "cow" is hypothetically translated into a word "FPXK". In that case, let's further assume that "-DZ" is our future aspect marker. What Fernando is selling then, is "meat", translated not as a third morpheme, but as "FPXK-DZ".
Starting to get it a bit?
Maybe this is all a bit too technical still.
Can the things that surround us undergo fundamental changes without any action, any 'verb', acting on them? Can a standing tree simply lay fallen in the forest without falling? Does the world even need us?
So maybe on one hand, the self-confident lobbyist of humanity can claim that we people make our worlds occur, that we bring motion and change into the world around us. His more humble brother in the field of quantum physics might nod his head in agreement and add that just our observation of the world causes the static universe to collapse into verbs.
But if we're the verbs, what about the nouns? The cow, the trees, the cups. What do they care? Maybe the speakers of Guaraní know something that we don't:
everything in the world has its own sense of purposeful and purposeless past, present and future, and frankly my dear, it doesn't give a damn if we're here to put it into words or not.
Judith Tonhauser and Cynthia Clopper - whose exact academic titles escape me at the moment, but rest assured that they are highly esteemed and qualified - were giving a talk on their field work on the Guaraní language of Paraguay. Most notably, Judith (it's not as if I'm reducing the women to their given names; we like to be on a first name basis in the department) had spent a few years working on a thesis in Paraguay dealing with the supposed nominal tense markers (in actuality, she concluded in her research that they are actually aspect markers). Following that, she wanted to find out if there was phonetic/prosodic marking for conveying contrastive semantic meaning. Being a semanticist-syntactician by trade, she enlisted the aid of Cynthia, who proceeded to fly down to Asunción.
What does that all mean?
Essentially, Guaraní has morphological markers that can be added to nouns that give them temporal meaning, in the same way that tense can be attached to a verb (i.e. "-ed") to place it temporally. The distinction between tense and aspect lies in some murky waters, but essentially, it comes down to felicity, in that one can say "Fernando was a teacher and is now a teacher." (tense), but cannot say "Fernando is a former teacher and is now a teacher." (where "former" is serving as our temporal nominal aspect marker). Using this test was how Judith determined that the markers were aspect markers and not tense markers.
And maybe that doesn't really clarify things. Linguistics can be a bit of a headfuck, and so as Julie said to me tonight, let's put the 'fun' back in phonetics and lift the theory off the paper a bit.
(On a side note, we decided that I like to put the 'sin' in syntax. And we won't speak about semantics...)
A translation of the sentence, "Fernando is selling a cow." might be rendered into something along the lines of "Fernando is selling future-meat." Unfortunately, I don't have the glosses to give you a true sense of what's going on, but let's say that "cow" is hypothetically translated into a word "FPXK". In that case, let's further assume that "-DZ" is our future aspect marker. What Fernando is selling then, is "meat", translated not as a third morpheme, but as "FPXK-DZ".
Starting to get it a bit?
Maybe this is all a bit too technical still.
Can the things that surround us undergo fundamental changes without any action, any 'verb', acting on them? Can a standing tree simply lay fallen in the forest without falling? Does the world even need us?
So maybe on one hand, the self-confident lobbyist of humanity can claim that we people make our worlds occur, that we bring motion and change into the world around us. His more humble brother in the field of quantum physics might nod his head in agreement and add that just our observation of the world causes the static universe to collapse into verbs.
But if we're the verbs, what about the nouns? The cow, the trees, the cups. What do they care? Maybe the speakers of Guaraní know something that we don't:
everything in the world has its own sense of purposeful and purposeless past, present and future, and frankly my dear, it doesn't give a damn if we're here to put it into words or not.
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