feeling better

on friday, i was sitting in the ircs colloquium letting my mind wander (so couldn't concentrate on corpus-based analyses of centering theory...), and had the buddings of an idea for research. so what about languages that allow for the dropping of the subject pronoun (called pro-drop languages)? languages like spanish, that have a rich conjugational system? what are the processing consequences of such languages?

i ran into elsi, and mentioned this idea to her, and she lit up. she had mentioned such things to j.t. earlier in the week, and he had seemed excited. under the assumption that, in pro-dropped sentences the dropped pronoun usually refers to the first-mentioned thing in the previous sentence, what does the presence of a pronoun (in a place where pro-drop is licensed) mean? our hypothesis: it means that the pronoun would refer to the object (or second mention).

another thought: what about the differences in processing between pro-drop languages that are fixed word-order or free word-order? so spanish is a fixed word-order language and russian is a free word-order language. so, when a spanish speaker hears a verb-initial sentence, he knows that the first pronoun has been dropped. on the other hand, when a russian speaker hears a verb-initial sentence, he does not know whether the first pronoun has been dropped or the sentence has been scrambled (or both). so, elsi and i predict more processing difficulty for russian speakers than for spanish speakers in pro-drop sentences.

john came up on friday night for dinner and a movie. we cooked chicken over a bed of pasta, topped with sauce and cheese. served with salad. YUM! after dinner we walked down to west city video, my neighborhood mom&pop video store complete with thick plexiglass separating the employees from the customers (this is west philly, after all). we couldn't decide between great expectations and the talented mr. ripley so we got both. an all gwyneth paltrow evening. i think she's beautiful.

anyway, the talented mr. ripley was good, if very disturbing. tom ripley is one of the creepiest characters i've ever seen portrayed. and the scene where dickie dies is one of the most horrible murder scenes i've ever seen--not the goriest, but perhaps one of the most emotionally violent. great expectations was okay. i haven't read the book, so i don't know how good a job the movie does with the book's story, but the movie was just okay. one thing for sure--they did a fabulous job casting the kids to play the young finn and estella--they really could've been the young ethan hawke (YUM!) and gwyneth paltrow.

by the time we had finished the second movie, it was really late and john was obviously tired (as was i). so i invited him to stay the night, so he wouldn't have to drive the hour+ back to newark. when we're together, there's always a sadness, a bittersweetness. being in each other's embrace feels comfortable, nice. but sad, because the future we once planned for ourselves as a couple is no longer certain. far from certain, in fact.

friday was a big day. i was sitting at ircs typing to one of my students when tom m. came over. we started chatting. for a month or two, i've gotten the vibe from him that he was interested in me. i've always pretended i didn't notice, because, while i like him well enough, i'm not attracted to him at ALL. the conversation went as usual, except this time he ended it with "so you want to have dinner sometime?" i was surprised, and said "sure." ugh. i didn't feel like i could say "no" exactly, because its not like i wouldn't want to have a friendly dinner with him. but i don't want to date him. and i think that he thinks that this is going to be a date. urg. we didn't make firm plans about when, but whenever it is, i'm going to have to make it clear that i'm not interested in him that way. hate that.

i've been doing some sort of exercise 5 days/week lately. tuesdays and fridays julie g-l and i go for a .5 hour run. mondays, wednesdays, and saturdays, jen o. and i go to the gym--.5 hour of cardio and then the weight room. I WANT TO BE THIN, GODDAMMIT!