Can you spray for trolls?

[icarus]

Can you spray for trolls? Because I've an infestation in Primer to the Dark Arts at the moment, crawling in the margins, chewing quote marks and shitting sawdust.

Oh. Look, now it's replying under the new pseudonym "repentantTroll."

That's an oxymoron, isn't it? *is not fooled.* *deletes review notifications unread*


ETA: Ooo. Good news - my Linguistics instructor is insane. She's crammed an enormous amount of material in just a few short weeks. And it's 200 and 300-level material crammed into the same damned class.

She also makes broad judgements about how language should and should not be used, proclamations that I can't say I believe. It's good to know that echo questions are considered weak questions, but to my mind that doesn't mean I should never use them. While there transformations make for cluttered diagrams, I think they're very useful for say, a Percy voice. Because the alternatives provided are stiff, formal and dead.

There. I said it. I think my teacher's brilliant, but I don't necessarily agree. The written word is first and foremost a reflection of the spoken. /blasphemy

Comments

[abigail89.livejournal.com]

It must be troll season. My good pal, thetreacletart has one chewing her arse up at the mo. Says her vocabulary is repetitive and her style choppy.
Oh, yeah, and Severus and Remus are OOC.

As her beta reader, I'm highly offended. Only I get to say that to her right before I make her rewrite and polish her brilliance.

So sorry people are being such pigs to you, too. *hugs*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the same breed. Cold weather drives them indoors?

Mine tells me my one-person Dark Arts class is implausible and she found a simile she doesn't like (which naturally condemns my writing as a whole). Frankly, I'd prefer that she at least use punctuation and capitalize. I also note she's read 10 chapters so far. Yeah, hates it, I can tell.

thetreacletart writes brilliant, powerful and insightful stories. Sheesh. Once these things start gnawing at the woodwork....

Icarus

[cheshyre]

If you do find some kind of troll-repellant (to deal with repellant trolls), can you let me in on the secret? It seems to be silly/stupid season this week.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I understand moderators are pretty good at eliminating them. The kids are probably hitting their angst level around mid-terms and taking it out on the poor writers....

Icarus

[kijikun.livejournal.com]

Bad trolls! No cookies.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

If I poison the cookies...

Icarus

[mad_maudlin]

"Echo questions?" Do you mean tag questions? Like, "It's hot, isn't it?"

Has the woman read Deborah Tannen?

::fumes::

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Yep.

I think something would be lost if we removed the echo question from: "We shouldn't do this, should we?"

:D

I've been doubting my writing and my instincts, until someone spoke up after class with a thoughtful, "Hmm. I think simplicity is important."

Icarus

[mad_maudlin]

Ask you teacher what she thinks of Deborah Tannen sometime. The answer will either be amusing or cause me to foam at the mouth.

Tannen is a feminist and one of the leading sociolinguists of the age. She's done a lot of studies on power and language, and one her findings is that tag questions usually have two functions: to ask a question more politely or to prompt your conversation partner to keep going. It's only in the West--mainly America--where the linguistically uninformed (and, apparently, your professor) stigmatize tag questions as "weak" or signs of uncertainty. Women are more likely to use tag questions than men in conversation, but then again, we're socialized to use language differently on a pretty basic level.

[absurdwords.livejournal.com]

She also makes broad judgements about how language should and should not be used, proclamations that I can't say I believe. It's good to know that echo questions are considered weak questions, but to my mind that doesn't mean I should never use them. While there transformations make for cluttered diagrams, I think they're very useful for say, a Percy voice. Because the alternatives provided are stiff, formal and dead.

Gah. Prescriptive linguistics. I hate it when instructors say such nonsense. For me, linguistics is about the study of language, of how it's usage. If language users use echo question, she can't just dismiss that as incorrect.

There. I said it. I think my teacher's brilliant, but I don't necessarily agree. The written word is first and foremost a reflection of the spoken. /blasphemy

Not all linguists would call this blasphemy. There are theoretical frameworks that only consider spoken language legitimate evidence.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

There are theoretical frameworks that only consider spoken language legitimate evidence.

Oh, fascinating. Yeah, see that makes more sense because written language is simply spoken in symbolic form. When you're learning a vastly different language, you discover that there are variances between the pronunciation described in the letters, and the actual pronunciation you hear. What you hear is what you imitate. The person who relies on the written version for pronunciation sounds to native speakers like one of those really bad "Mr Roboto" speech programs from the late 80's.

It's clear to me her approach is too rigid. I think this is partially a function of the languages she's studied: Old English is strictly theoretical, we don't really know how it sounded we can only guess. And French... my experience with French is that it's often taught is a very dogmatic fashion, with tremendous emphasis on correct pronunciation (since an incorrect pronunciation offends).

It also depends on how someone has learned a foreign language, whether it was through formal study, or language acquisition, where you're thrown in with a foreign culture and have to pick it up by ear. If your theoretical framework for "languages" (rather than your native tongue) is based on learning from the written form, of course you'll gravitate to the written as superior.

Icarus

[absurdwords.livejournal.com]

It's clear to me her approach is too rigid. I think this is partially a function of the languages she's studied: Old English is strictly theoretical, we don't really know how it sounded we can only guess. And French... my experience with French is that it's often taught is a very dogmatic fashion, with tremendous emphasis on correct pronunciation (since an incorrect pronunciation offends).

I think you're right about this. I read English and German linguistics. Both are foreign langugaes to me. Nevertheless, even our English and German proficiency lecturers were always adjusting the stuff they taught to actual language usage. They regularly updated their textbooks. I think that even prescriptive linguistics should take actual language usage into account.