Thankfully, I didn't give a "real" presentation just yet, but only a poster presentation. Even so, I had to quickly introduce the topic of my poster in two minutes, and by the end of those longest minutes in my life so far, I could barely get the words out of my mouth.
But it wasn't critical, as I could explain everything without stress afterwards during the poster session to anyone who was interested. Quite a few of the people there were, probably because they couldn't hear anything from my stuttery introduction. But I don't really care. I'll just practise more for an actual presentation in August in München.
Maybe I should take lessons in producing speech properly, as one Scottish woman thought I absolutely should in order to survive in this world. Or not.
The conference was held in an old auditorium where they used to cut bodies open to show medical students what people look like inside. Fascinating. I've always wondered how doctors can understand anything of what they see inside a human's body. To my eyes, the viscera are just a bunch of some red stuff all jumbled up together.
The makeup of the auditorium wasn't too ergonomic, though. If you sat in the front row, your neck would be really stiff because of having to look so high up on the projection screen. And if all the listeners where sitting in the highermost rows, the speaker would get their neck stiff from having to look upwards so much.
I was quite nervous the first day, and drinking a glass of wine into an empty stomach in the evening didn't help my mood much. But by the third day, I was already trying to chat up other people. I congratulated myself on that.
The first day was very computational, and I couldn't really make sense of anything because of my non-existent background in statistics. However, I think I understand better now why many linguists these days have endorsed number crunching.
I suppose I was preinclined to think it's all rubbish to play around with numbers too much, in a way distancing yourself from actual manifestations of language use. I had let myself be influenced by other, more experienced people who didn't see much use in statistics. One more reason why you should look up to your elders and betters, but always take their advice and opinions with a grain of salt.
It really isn't about distancing yourself from language. I think it's just about linguists wanting to gain more credibility for their field of research, a problem I suppose any subject in humanities must face. In a twisted way I'm even looking forward to learning more about statistics. This from a girl who wanted to escape mathematics forever by studying language.
(Don’t laugh. It’s hard to come up with pictures that are actually related to the topic. I'm doing my best to make this post more reader-friendly.)
The second day was more about syntax, which is a field I'm sort of working in myself. Alas, I was still tired from sleeping only 5 hours on two previous nights, so I can't recall much from those presentations. To my relief and joy, the conference organizers emailed today to announce that they're going to put up the presentation slides online for everybody's viewing pleasure. Plus a plethora of somewhat amusing photos.
On the third day, there were some presentations about cross-linguistic typology. It's immensely intriguing from a theoretical point of view, and kudos to all who are courageous enough to try and create some rhyme or reason into such an endeavour.
It all made my own research project seem so small and insignificant. At the moment, I'm fervently trying to develop the topic so that it would seem more worthwhile. One of the linguists at the conference even plain laughed out loud at my poster and then walked away. So officially of course I'm proud of and confident in the importance of my topic, just in case I ever run into more people of his kind.
It didn't really help though to hear from my French friend what his doctoral thesis will be about. I often think he's a jackass (and he doesn't mind me saying so), being French and all that, but he's also a bit of a genius. It boggles my mind how different it is to study history in France. Let alone English. Yes, they do study English over there.
(Picture 1: www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/tapahtumat/qitl)
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