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venerdì 19 aprile 2019

Repetita iuvant - Academic Writing Skills

One of the problems we have since the late 20th century is that everything has been said, just not by everyone. That is, gaining new insights is getting harder and harder - too hard for people with an average IQ. So how do we deal with this?
Option A would be to realise we have nothing to add to the already existing information and, as a consequence, to shut up. But this is something we don't want, as we like talking, right?  (Besides we'd have to admit we have but an average IQ, which we don't want either).
Option B - just repeating already existing information - is more convenient, and that's why we constantly do it (for instance, consider this text). But as we repeat existing information, we realise we have nothing to add and maybe should have chosen option A. And for the reason(s) stated above, we don't even want to think of option A. 
Option C - repeating already existing information and selling it as something new - is therefore even more convenient than option B. And how do we sell the information we repeat as something new?
1) We could just choose a different mode of presentation and adapt the information to that mode by either complicating or simplifying it. What has first been published as an article can be republished as a book, written in a more wordy manner, or as a - more concise - poster. And why not make it into a film, or translate it into another language (including statement logic, predicate logic, lambda calculus, or Haskell?)
2) We could also go on the meta level. This is something the Humanities departments at universities like to do.
Catalan writers like the meta level pretty much as well, consider L'Aniversari by Imma Monsó, or Quim Monzó's famous discurs-conte at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007. Also, note how similar both writers' last names are 😀 By the way, if you don't know anything about Catalan literature and are slightly confused  now because I'm throwing names at you that you haven't heard of and are not sure whether you should have heard of them or not - name-dropping is a bluffing technique widely accepted in Humanities, especially literature studies. Last year in my Catalan literature class I handed in a paper that had nearly nothing but names and common places in it, and they gave me 99/100 points for it. - Oh, and did you notice this text obeys the Iconicity Principle (Wiese 1996, 1999)?* What, you don't know what the Iconicity Principle is? Well, I do.  Shame on you, good on me!
a) First someone writes a book about, let's say, Nietzsche. Then someone else writes another book about him. And then comes someone who have nothing to say about Nietzsche himself, and writes a book about these two books about Nietzsche instead, which is what people call reception history, or Rezeptionsgeschichte. Oh, and as in *almost* all natural languages (looking at you, Pirahã), recursion may be applied, e.g. someone might write a reception history of the reception history of Nietzsche's works, or a reception history of the reception history of the reception history of Nietzsche's works, and so on.
b) Another meta-level thing is fighting about terminology, i.e. redefining terms and declaring any use that deviate from the redefined use as offensive. Now we have a tool for analysing the offensiveness of any text.
3) Yet another way of presenting information differently is "reorganising" the pieces of information. There is so much information available for any topic that we cannot include all pieces of information in one text (be it a street sign, a poster, a power-point or LaTeX presentation, an article or a 100-page book). But as we have many pieces of information, there are even more ways of combining them, so why not choose a combination that has not been chosen before (which is not  half as difficult as gaining new information)? Then you can say "Yes, I'm repeating already existing information, but I'm presenting it from a different point of view" (note that you're being really honest with yourself, admitting you are repeating stuff. Good on you!). And if all possible combinations have already been chosen, you can still pick a combination and change the order in which the pieces are combined. 
Fun fact: reorganising information is a performance officially taught and expected in exams at German Gymnasien (secondary schools). Also, in  functionalist translatology  any text is an 'information offer' (Informationsangebot) and translators can freely pick information from the source text and leave other information out according to the wishes of the client.
4) Point 3 might have been summarised under point 1 and point 4 might have been summarised under point 1 as well, but I added them as separate points to complicate the information. 

*Iconicity Principle (Summary): Identity of form implies identity of function; morphological and/or syntactic elements look like what they mean / what their semantic function is. 

domenica 7 aprile 2019

Sprachperformanz unter C-Kommando

Heute Morgen habe ich versucht, Baskisch zu reden und versehentlich anstelle eines baskischen Wortes ein russisches Wort gesagt. "Oh", habe ich mir gedacht, "Russisch interveniert". Der Ausdruck "intervenieren" hat mich dann auf die Syntax gebracht und ich habe den Gedanken weitergesponnen:
Wenn Russisch interveniert, dann C-kommandiert mich Baskisch nicht mehr.

C-Kommando
Ein Knoten α c-kommandiert einen  Knoten β gdw [genau dann, wenn] (a) oder (b) gilt:
a. β ist die Schwester von α
b. β wird von der Schwester von α dominiert.

Also C-kommandiert mich Baskisch sehr wohl:


Valuierung von Merkmalen (z.B. Tempus von T auf klein v) erfolgt unter C-Kommando:

Abgleich (Agree)
In einer Konfiguration X[F:val]...Y[uF:[]], bei der "..." für C-Kommando steht, überprüft und valuiert [F:val] [uF:[]]. Dies resultiert in X[F:val]...Y[uF:val].

Allerdings gibt es eine Lokalitätsbeschränkung  für Agree, die besagt, dass ein Kopf seine Merkmale nur auf dem Kopf seiner Schwester valuieren darf.

Jetzt brauche ich nur noch anzunehmen, dass ich ein Merkmal [ulanguage:[]] trage und der Baskisch-Kopf sein Merkmal [language:Basque] auf mir valuieren möchte, das aber nicht ganz hinbekommt, weil ich nicht der Kopf der Schwester von Baskisch bin, sondern der Kopf der Schwester des Russisch-Kopfes, der das Merkmal [ulanguage:Russian] auf mir valuiert.