Break-down
After the glowing references, I had a little ego-boost, obviously...
Well, that all came crashing down today when I went to discuss (for the second time) what it is that I want to write my essays on (the 10,000 words that I'm doing on top of normal assessment).
Julie was quite obviously getting a little frustrated at my influx of original ideas that had no grounding in the relevant fields of research (I'm meant to be writing on Universal Grammar - something I'm not particularly fond of and have thus not taken in very well). She said, after I was in her office for about half an hour, "Fon - all you've told me about Universal Grammar is that you don't like it."
So once again, I have reformulated the question, and will stop trying to make universal grammarians come to terms with relativism. I'm writing a 5,000 word essay based on the work of Boroditsky and Kecskes.
The question: "Is it possible to be multilingual (YES!) and what implications does this have on relativism?"
I'll be doing a little bit of exploration of how I can get Kecskes' model of a Common Underlying Concept Base to fit into Lera's account of relativism (which is essentially a Whorfian view).
As for the other 5000 words? Two essays on universal grammar... :(
Not my cup of tea... but as they say: Know thine enemy.
Anyhow - the point of all that was that I suddenly feel as though I've been in university for 2.5 years and I know nothing. Do you all feel that way sometimes?
Well, that all came crashing down today when I went to discuss (for the second time) what it is that I want to write my essays on (the 10,000 words that I'm doing on top of normal assessment).
Julie was quite obviously getting a little frustrated at my influx of original ideas that had no grounding in the relevant fields of research (I'm meant to be writing on Universal Grammar - something I'm not particularly fond of and have thus not taken in very well). She said, after I was in her office for about half an hour, "Fon - all you've told me about Universal Grammar is that you don't like it."
So once again, I have reformulated the question, and will stop trying to make universal grammarians come to terms with relativism. I'm writing a 5,000 word essay based on the work of Boroditsky and Kecskes.
The question: "Is it possible to be multilingual (YES!) and what implications does this have on relativism?"
I'll be doing a little bit of exploration of how I can get Kecskes' model of a Common Underlying Concept Base to fit into Lera's account of relativism (which is essentially a Whorfian view).
As for the other 5000 words? Two essays on universal grammar... :(
Not my cup of tea... but as they say: Know thine enemy.
Anyhow - the point of all that was that I suddenly feel as though I've been in university for 2.5 years and I know nothing. Do you all feel that way sometimes?