First Lecture

This year I'm making the most of being home for a whole 12 months by doing lots of teaching as well as lots of writing. Last week I was fortunate enough to give a lecture in the subject that I'm tutoring for! The subject is all about linguistic diversity, and it's designed for students who are at the end of their undergraduate course.

The class I had to take was on cross-linguistic variation in event description. I was lucky enough to be able to base it on two of my favourite areas of research - evidentiality and gesture. I used lots of real examples and all of my favourite examples. I was amazed at how quickly an hour of talking could go! Hopefully the students also found it relatively painless...

A grammatical category with attitude!

I have been trying to intersperse my frantic writing attempts with more reading to make me feel a little bit methodologically informed. I found Bybee and Fleischman's "Modality in grammar and discourse" (1995) sitting on one of my office-buddy's bookshelves (where I do my best book browsing...).

I figured it would probably be worth reading, given that my topic is supposed to be the use of grammatical modal categories as used in discourse. While reading the introduction I got the same feeling I normally get while reading about modality; a sinking that sits somewhere in the base of my skull and pit of my stomach at the same time. The final paragraph, however, filled me with such delight I will copy it verbatim:

"So, here goes, readers. We hope you enjoy the papers. And don't be put off by the realization that mood is a grammatical category with an attitude! We'll get it straightened out on of these day."

Indeed!