Freedom from fear

I have been working slowly but steadily on the thesis for hours and hours now, and I am experiencing no fear.  The material that I am turning out is subpar at best, but it can be improved.  I've got months to do it, and a wonderful and brilliant advisor who can tell me exactly where I am being foolish (which at this point is nearly everywhere).

The pace of this work is really incredibly slow, despite the fact that literally my only distraction is writing on this blog.  I am not a fast writer, and a huge amount of my time is going to be taken up with writing in the coming months.  Fortunately, the time I spend writing is inversely proportional to the time I spend fretting.

I also have hit upon the realisation that I have a huge amount of reading to do.  This is wonderful.  I am good at reading, or at least pretty okay at it.  Now that the framework of my thesis is sketched out, every new article I read has the potential to yield a new insight which I can make immediate concrete use of.  Basically, this sounds awesome to me.  I'm not sure whether it will be awesome, but I bet all you readers will find out eventually.

A life-changing realisation

I have just had a very productive three hours, and I feel wide awake and alert.  Today, I woke up at 1 pm after a little less than 7.5 hours of sleep, feeling wide awake and alert.  I have been considering the past year or so of my life, and I realise that I can only be productive when everyone else is asleep.  Furthermore, my body's natural wake-up time is 1 pm.

I hate waking up late, and I hate missing breakfast, and I hate staying up late.  And I really hate missing breakfast.  I consider waking up early to be a moral good, and I view those who wake up late as degenerates.  For some reason, my brain chemistry has decreed that I should be a degenerate.  I cannot fight this any longer; I will now listen to my inner alarm clock, no matter how stupid it is.

Another wasted day-time

It turns out that I really can't work on this thesis before about 11:30 at night.  I have no speculations on why this should be, but it seems to hold true.

If I were allowed to become nocturnal, I would be pretty productive on my thesis, I sense.  Unfortunately, I have Russian class at 10/11 throughout reading period, so I won't be allowed to sleep 5:00-1:00.

Anyway, here's what my thesis looks like right now.

My advisor has given up

I promised my advisor that I would send her a draft of my first couple thesis chapters on Friday.  I just sent it in.  I checked my inbox, and she hadn't even sent me an email to inquire about the whereabouts of the draft.  She has given up trying to get me to do any work.  This is bad.

A cool fact about Polish

In Polish, relative clauses with resumption are archaic.  My informant constantly protests that she "would never talk that way."  Also, clitic pronouns are losing their clitic-like properties and falling together with the tonic series.  Are these facts related?  The possibility is tantalising.

Random thoughts

In the Ellen Prince 1990 paper, she gives a lot of examples that she or someone else has observed in speech.  When she cites these examples, she writes "(AK: Dave Jones)."  What could this AK possibly stand for?

I just realised that I was padding my pitifully short document with blank lines.  I'm removing them.

Two things

I remembered that the article I wanted to look at for the where complementiser is Diessel 2001.

I have spent all night watching television.  There is so much background material for the thesis that I do not understand well enough to explain coherently.  I know I have read it in different articles, but I have not kept good notes, and I need to re-read a lot of papers.  If I had started this project a week ago, I would be fine.  If I had spent the past few weeks clarifying these issues with my advisor, I would be fine.  But I didn't.  The background chapter, like my handouts, like my thesis prospectus, is going to be an embarrassment.

I was going to go to sleep now, but now that I've written this post, I am inspired to begin working.  Sleep is just another strategy for avoiding work.

Doing the Thesis, Day 1

Hello all! Hello none! I've started this thesis blog, in order to persuade myself to possibly work on the thing. I have suffered from a crippling writer's block since approximately March 2008, and I (obviously) can't figure out how to cure it. I thought that perhaps writing about the thesis might be easier than actually writing the thesis. And since I know that there's at least one person in the world who is interested to know what's going on with me, I figured I would make this writing public.

My thesis is about resumptive pronouns, which are pronouns that turn up where you wouldn't expect them. Look at the subtitle of the blog. You would expect to see The Blog that's Awesome, but instead there is an extraneous it. When you think about it, there's no reason that that it should be so odd. After all, what is the thing that we know about the blog? It's awesome! However, there are some positions where languages in general prefer to have nothing rather than something. We have a pretty good grasp of the reason for this. My thesis explores why, sometimes, this preference is reversed.

As of to-day, I have missed two separate deadlines for turning in the first couple chapters of my thesis to my incredibly wonderful adviser, Masha Polinsky. She has been unbelievably supportive over my months of unproductivity, but by this point she is getting worried/exasperated. I have nothing to turn in to her, so my task for to-night is to finish something that I can turn in without hanging my head in shame. Honestly, I'm not optimistic.

The issue with the first couple of chapters is that they are a mixture of boring and terrifying. They are mostly meant to present all the data I have collected since I began working on resumptive pronouns, and do not have to offer much analysis. Unfortunately, they do have to present this data in some sort of coherent fashion, and this has always been my weak point. I actually have been doing a lot of thinking about the interesting parts of my thesis, and have even been making some progress writing them. They are not due on Monday. The boring parts are due on Monday.

As an example of interesting thinking I have been doing on my thesis, I present some musings on the English relative complementiser where. In English, when I write a relative clause, it usually contains a form of who, which, or that. Voici:

I like the man that I saw yesterday.

I like the man who(m) I saw yesterday.

I like the room which I saw yesterday.

However, there is a black sheep in the family of relativisers (that is, elements which introduce relative clauses): where. A sentence like

*I like the man where I just met yesterday.

is clearly unacceptable. Yet one feels that one could improve it by adding a pronoun:

*I like the man where I just met him yesterday.

Even the improved sentence, though, is quite clearly ungrammatical. If you think about it long enough, you'll begin to question why you even thought that adding that pronoun would improve things in the first place. It seems that where just somehow demands the extra pronoun, which is in fact a resumptive pronoun, that is, what my thesis is about. I have been thinking for a long time about why the complementiser where in English is never grammatical. Finally, today, it hit me that it is sometimes grammatical. Consider the following:

Embezzlement is just one of those crimes where even though everybody knows it's wrong, you still have have to try it at least once.

For me, at least, the above sentence is perfectly good colloquial English, and contains two resumptive pronouns. Without them, it would be a disaster:

*Embezzlement is just one of those crimes where even though everybody knows is wrong, you still have to try at least once.

I'd really like to spend some time right now exploring this insight, but I have to write my boring chapter. I actually want to look up an article that I vaguely remember that might be related to the insight, but since I don't take good notes, I don't remember how to find it. Eventually I will, but it will take some hunting. That is another reason why I've started the blog: I need a central place to keep the things that I need to remember. Unfortunately for you, my readers, this will make the blog nightmarishly boring (I'm fairly sure). Fortunately for you, you can stop reading if you get bored. In fact, you probably already have.

Anyway, here's the current draft of my thesis.