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.