I’ve decided to have a new series of post on this blog, in part to see if I can get some discipline in my writing: Wednesday Linguistics (somewhat inspired by TG’s Feminism Friday). Why Wednesday? Basically because that happens to be when I last posted something about language. I’d like to use this series to talk about theoretical aspects of language (like here), as a way to reconnect with my academic roots, I guess. But also, and mainly, about more down-to-earth, day-to-day stuff and how linguistics can shed light on how everyday mysteries.

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Still time. Kind of a reverse self portrait: What I saw, at a special time of the year, my birthday. Every year, I take a long walk on that day, to take stock, to think of various things; and well, I like having a ritual (and taking walks). This year, I went to my glass-blowing friend’s place up North (where, as you can see, there is still snow left).

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Looking at the course offering for next year at Concordia, I noticed that the linguistics department there offers its students a course devoted to nothing. That is, empty categories.

Empty categories, is some linguistic circles, are objects that appear in the syntactic (grammatical) structure but have no phonological or morphological form. Which means that they’re in the structure but do not manifest themselves. Basically, they seem to be there just to make the theory fit.

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This month’s theme was time; I thought I’d go a bit relativist and show light travelling from me to the camera, in a blink of its electronic eye.

Just saw The Constant Gardener. Very good movie about the ill-dealings of drug companies, diplomats and politicians. It somehow reminds me of the best 1970’s movies. It has a similar field to those politically charged thrillers.

This is what the author of the book, John LeCarré, notes in the end credits:
“Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world. But I can tell you this, as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with reality, my story was as tame as a holyday postcard.”
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Well, I thought I’d start my contribution to Self Portrait Tuesday with me at the lake. This isn’t, stricto sensu, a self-portrait – in that I am not the one who actually took the picture, but, in a larger sense, it is one as it is me posting a portrait of myself. (What can I say, I’m a linguist, I have to play semantics from time to time…).

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TMCM strikes again: