First week

A whole week of lectures has now passed.  Yet it feels like nothing at all, like I’m still on holiday.  That maybe because I have only 6 hours contact time, which feels like nothing at all.  I’ve been assigned some reading for my Describing Grammar course, which I have started.  However, some of the authors waffle a great deal.  Instead of making the point, giving a simple and straightforward example, then moving on, these authors use several analogies to say the same thing three times over.  This chapter is particularly irritating for its long-winded explanations.  However, I can see plenty of opportunity to apply mathematical concepts to much of the grammatical theory.  As a language system achieves complexity via recursion, this could be modeled using a mixture of set theory and formal mathematical logic.  I should consider it a good exercise, to keep my mathematical skills honed.

I have also had some fascinating linguistic discussions with my course mates, such as I never had when studying maths.  Language seems more open to vocal discourse, particularly at a broad, basic level.  Possible assignment topics mentioned so far have ranged from studying the change of a dialect over time, the etymology of how a loanword became anglicised, to trends in adjective-adjective constructions.  I expect this shall be an interesting course.

 

Signing off,

Erasmus Who?