I have a thesis topic.
I never thought I’d say those words, but they’re right there, staring me in the face. I guess this means I’m really doing this whole “life” thing.
The basic idea of the thesis can be summed up in the following sample sentences. (For my non-linguist friends, “(*xyz)” means that “xyz” is not allowed to be there. “*(xyz)” means that “xyz” must be there.) The cool part doesn’t come in until a few paragraphs down, so bear with me.
Spanish:
English:
In the Spanish example, the head of the NP is obligatorily null [la _ negra]. Some have called this N-drop. It’s interesting to note that in Spanish you also have (optional) pro-drop (”(yo) quiero algo”). In English, however, (putting aside partitives, mass nouns, and a few special cases, which I’ll have to deal with, e.g. “help the homeless _”), the NP head must be filled, usually with “one”.
Some have theorized that N-drop is allowed in Spanish because the number and gender of that “missing” noun are marked elsewhere, providing some sort of licensing for the adjective. Some have said that’s hogwash. I’ll do some cross-linguistic typological studies to see if all (or at least most (or at least some)) languages that allow N-drop (which happens to be a fair number) also have number and gender (or some other grammatical whosits) around to license that adjective.
Now for the cool part: Everything so far has been preliminary background stuff for examining the L2 implications of this phenomenon (non-Linguists, L2 means “second language”). I’ll get some grammaticality judgements (and maybe elicit some sentences) from college-age native speaker of English learning Spanish, and college-age native speakers of Spanish learning English to see if what they do can shed any light on all that stuff at the beginning of this explanation.
I’m pretty optimistic that it’s going to turn out pretty well. I like my advisor, I like my topic (I think I almost understand everything I said above!), and I’ve enjoyed the (limited) research I’ve started to do thus far.
Here goes nothin’.
Posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 4:48 pm. Categories: Brandeis, Thoughts, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “I’m really doing this. Also, N-drop.”
Kat Says:
April 29th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
I can help you out with the native Spanish speaker stuff, no problem–just let me know what to ask her, and when (she’s in London so sometimes I have to plan a little to get ahold of her). She’s Peruvian and I have another friend who’s Mexican, so I can get you both if that’ll help at all.
Yeah…words cannot express how happy I am that I didn’t write a thesis. But you like your major, so you’ll be fine!
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