My paper

I'll just have to publish the paper in serial format by cut and paste, I guess:

0. Introduction

This study attempts to describe the syntax of a small subset of adverbial participles. Although the category of adverbial (also called circumstantial) participles is universally recognized, grammarians differ as to how to correctly identify and categorize them in the New Testament corpora. Part one of this study will use insights from generative grammar to suggest a precise syntactic definition of this construction. Part two will summarize the syntactic tendencies of the participles studied with reference to word order, verbal aspect, and relations between events.

Intrigued? I thought you might be.

Rejuvenating American Literature

Well, Brandon wants to read my contribution to American Lit. Here it is, in desperate need of revision (which has only partially begun). Adverbial Participles Subordinate to a Finite Imperfective Verb in the Pauline Corpus

Update: I don't know how to upload a document to my blog, as you may have guessed if you tried to click the link. I'm open for suggestions.

Beautiful Tufts

Just so everyone can get the visual:

Thanks anonymous [Danger?] for the pic.

This one's for Danger

From Lileks:

"Our personal car choices, of course, are beyond reproach. But it would be interesting to see if our friends and families would choose for us the car we wish to drive. I used to drive a Ford Probe, for example. I thought it gave me a certain dangerous Sonny Crockett bad-boy hip dark reputation. My wife later told me that she married me in spite of the car, which she associated with men whose gold medallions rested on a fluffy tuft of exposed chest hair. "

Prescriptive Pronunciation

Last night I was goofing off and watched the interview between Stephen Colbert and Christiane Amanpour on Comedy Central's website. It wasn't as funny as I hoped it would be, but I was amused by one exchange: Colbert keeps pronouncing the names of a certain pair of adjoining countries "eye-rack" and "eye-ran." Amanpour repeatedly corrects him, coaching him to say "ee-rahk" and "ee-rahn." (IPA version--Colbert says /aj.r@k/ and /aj.r@n/, Amanpour says /i.rak/ and /i.ran/). After saying them back and forth for awhile, Colbert simply says he can't hear the difference.

Now, I've entered into this debate before, at least once with Special K, as I remember. Personally, I find it a bit silly that people try to correct adults' pronunciation at all, especially when they're pronouncing a transliterated name of a foreign country. It's true that Amanpour's pronunciation is closer to the native one, although it would be possible to critique /i.rak/ as not being close enough yet. My impression is it that the "q" signifies a uvular stop--it sounds like a "k" but is made further back in the throat.

It's worth remembering that "Iraq" is an Arabic word that has been borrowed into English (and many other languages as well). When words are transferred from one language with its unique set of sounds and rules to another, pronunciation changes. When a speaker of English says "Iraq," why should we expect him/her to say the word according to the sound rules of Arabic and not according to English?

What people like Colbert are doing (unconsciously) when they pronounce /aj.r@k/ is treating the word as if it was part of the ancient heritage of English words rather than a recent borrowing. Imagine if the words Iraq and Iran had existed, with those spellings, in English, in about 1000. They would have been pronounced a la Amanpour; however, like all other English words, they would have been caught up in the Great Vowel Shift and moved to Colbert's pronunciation!

Now, neither Colbert nor Amanpour probably know or care that these words came into English after the Great Vowel Shift, but my point is that they don't need to. Speakers of a language don't have to know anything about the history of the language to speak it correctly. They don't even have to consciously know anything about the rules of the language! Colbert's pronunciation is perfectly good English, a pronunciation accepted by millions of English speakers, and that's good enough for me.

Minnesota, Hail to Thee

My home state may be the next to be celebrated in Sufjan Steven's series, according to some anonymous writer on Wikipedia. It hardly seems possible that an artist would devote fifty years of his life to a project like this, especially now that he's receiving national attention.

Sufjan Stevens

My sister-in-law gave me "Illinoise" for my birthday. If there's anything that will give me an attachment to this wretched state, it's this album. You can listen to some songs on a myspace site maintained by a fan. Chad Zigweed was the first person to tell me about Sufjan; sorry it took me so long to follow up on your recomendation!

Mama Bear is posting!

So you should check out her blog.

Bicycle repair

It's not any fun to have a bike you can't ride. I was sick of envying the little kids across the parking lot riding around on their trikes and training wheels, so I pulled my bike out of the storage area and replaced the inner tubes. They've been flat since I moved the bike from Minneapolis nigh on two years ago. I tried to patch the tubes last summer, but they just laughed at me. "Fool! Do you think you can stop us with a $1.99 bottle of rubber cement!" So new inner tubes for me. I actually bought the new tubes last summer too, but I ran out of time to actually put them in. I think the thought of taking off the rear wheel was too daunting--I hate messing with the chain. It's not that I mind getting full of grease--it just takes me a lot of time and frustration to get it back where it's supposed to go.

My cheap Target bike (cost me $20 after the clearance markdown and my discount!) has some cheap nuts (file under "Sounds Dirty But Isn't). Next time I'm in a hardware store I'll have to pick up some that don't melt in the sun. But I was able to ride it around today.

In case anyone reading this knows anything about bikes, should I be worried that I put the tires on backward? The arrows in the tread now point to the back of the bike rather than the front.