#my dissertation

and this (which I specifically more about minority vs social mobility but stills stands as relevant to the conversation)

Just got to finish the chapter about naval pensions and the occupational activity of disabled sailors then the conclusion.

I am in a lot of pain but I did actually sleep last night, only briefly interrupted by my poor Pupper vomming up the grass she ate in the evening so I had to clean it up and reassure her.

The bureaucracy is done. My supervision record is signed off.

My advisor: be more specific!

You know… I actually have never answered this question on here! I think I’ve only ever talked about the two languages that I use as case studies for the book. Prepare yourself for some nerding. *flexes fingers*

Sounds pattern and change in different parts of words and sentences. Like… in English think of the plural ‘s’ at the end of words. This is pronounced differently based on which sound is before it.

cats –> cat[s]  but  dogs –> dog[z]

Feel free to say those aloud and freak out now. I’ll wait. 

It has to do with if your vocal cords are vibrating or not. It’s easier to keep the cords doing the same thing, so a [t] sound doesn’t have vibration. So we keep it that way and pronounce an [s] sound. A [g] sound does have the vibrating so we keep them vibrating and pronounce a [z] sound. 

There’s also differences in what kinds of things you pronounce for different kinds of words, compounds, phrases, sentences. The compound blueberry (the cute little fruit) is pronounced differently than the phrase blue berry (a berry that happens to be blue). You also trail off at the ends of sentences, maybe even sounding kind of gravelly at the end (see every single article about vocal fry). 

This is the kind of thing I like to study. Where do sounds pattern and change with relation to word and sentence structure. (For the linguists in the room… prosodic constituent structure.)

Lots of linguists have lots of ideas of what actually counts as words, phrases, sentences, etc. and so there are lots of theories about how we can predict where sounds will do their thing. (Yes, linguists don’t actually know what a word is. I took a whole class about it.) My dissertation looks at the four current theoretical approaches and tests them to see how they do. I do this by turning to the most complicated languages I could find!

This kind of language is called “polysynthetic” but basically these languages have super duper long words that translate to a whole sentence in English. I work on Kiowa (a Native American language spoken in Oklahoma) and Ojibwe (a Native American language spoken in the Great Lakes region of the US and Canada). For example, there’s a single Kiowa word that translates to “She forcibly sent him to get a rabbit” but it’s all one word!

So languages like these blur the lines between words, phrases, and sentences and pose the hardest test for any theory that wants to try to predict and sounds will interact and change with those kinds of things. And that’s why you have my dissertation. Turns out that NONE of the current theories work. Some of them are super popular. Some of them are really famous. None of them work when you challenge them with languages that are not “main stream” like English or Japanese or whatever. 

The end of my dissertation (which does not really exist quite yet) talks about the changes that are necessary in order to account for languages like Kiowa and Ojibwe with “sentence words” and lays the foundation for my next book - which will be to develop a new linguistic theory that actually works!