I clearly remember the day in typology that we learned about a morphosyntactic process called causatives. My professor, "Dumbeldore," told us a story about an elderly couple that lived in her building. The wife had problems swallowing pills and one day, her husband suggested cutting a grape open and placing the pill inside the grape. The wife thought this was a great idea and did as suggested. She swallowed the grape and choked on it, which caused her to die. This was a terrible story! Usually Dumbeldore told us nice stories. In fact, I have a section of my notes from every class with her with the heading "Reading Rainbow Moments." In general, her stories made me feel warm and fuzzy and they encouraged me to continue taking her classes. But the grape story was an oddball that came in a semester full of awkward moments.
Other favorite moments from that semester included the undergrad that played video games on his Gameboy during class, the random remark about Samoans, the Chinese student who wore the SARS safety mask and said "interchanjuroo" (which, about 10 minutes later, the whole class realized he was trying to say 'interchangeable'), the classmate that mostly spoke using ingressives, the other classmate that was suddenly gone because she had a baby (how the rest of us failed to notice she was 9 months pregnant still baffles me)... it was a weird semester... One day, the Gameboy classmate took a break from playing Tetrus in his mind and spoke up. It was the only time he spoke the entire semester and he said, "You can't say 'he dies.' Well... you could, but no one ever says that in English." This led my Harry Potter cohort and I to google "he dies" and receive more than 3 billion hits. It turns out that you can say "he dies" in English AND people do say this.
How is this related to Geraldine? What about my office mate? What's my point? Keep reading...
My term paper from that class ended up being Geraldine's protoform. I didn't know it at the time, but that paper would become my dissertation. Thus, every memory from that class is not only incredibly entertaining, it has also played an important part in my decision to become a linguist.
My Harry Potter doppelganger office mate, "Kelly", and I have shared an office since that semester started. We attended nearly every graduate class together, applied for a PhD program together, have made sacrifices for the sake of the other's degree progress, and have fought, laughed and cried through it all. We have a Harry Potter - Hermione Granger relationship ("Ron" dropped out of graduate school after our typology class ended, but he still works on the 7th floor of our building). We have many things in common, including our food allergies. Kelly's food allergies are much more life threatening than mine, and for years he has been training me on what to do should a food emergency ever occur. Yesterday, that moment came to fruition, and I share in the culpability of that allergic reaction.
Kelly and I haven't been in the office at the same time for more than 5 minutes all semester. Yesterday, we decided to take advantage in our overlapping freetime and decided to share a snack in the student union. Upon finding popcorn shrimp, a hot snack that we could both eat without dying, I jumped at the chance to buy it. Kelly insisted on buying it and we both walked to a table to begin eating the fatty, delicious snack (actually, he walked, I skipped like a 7 year old). As I ate a salad, Kelly began updating me on his life when suddenly, he spit food out of his mouth and said "This doesn't taste right!" He ripped open a shrimp to discover it wasn't shrimp at all... it was (dun dun duuuuuun)...chicken! In disbelief, I ripped open five more shrimps that also ended up being chicken. Kelly whipped out a container of pills and started swallowing them, pulled out an epi pen, and we started making plans for the emergency room. After 10 minutes, Kelly decided he didn't need to go to the hospital, but I insisted on covering his evening class for him. I taught about writing systems for 30 minutes while Kelly sat in the hall, because I had to give him a ride home. I poked my head out of the room every 2 minutes to make sure he was still alive and conscious and continued to confuse his students.
Everything turned out alright (phew!) but I can't help but wonder how languages with causatives would describe this story. Did I cause Kelly to have an allergic reaction? I was the one that selected the tray of "shrimp". Is there a different morpheme to describe the causality of my action in comparison to the shrimp's quality of really being chicken?
Despite the adrenaline rush I had yesterday dealing with the rash decision to eat in the union, I am content knowing that I have a less disturbing story to tell future students while introducing causatives than Dumbeldore's grape story.
Glad "Kelly" is OK!! Must have been a scare!
ReplyDeleteAt "Kelly's" cousins wedding, I told K (by accident) that chicken was fish... needless to say, we rushed back to the hotel room, K threw it up (gross, but necessary) and took a million pills. Thank God I didn't have to use the epi-pen on K, because I am not sure I would have been able to do that. This, of course, was not the only time K had an allergy scare; it was also not the only time that it could be considered "my fault," lol.
ReplyDeleteThere have been many times that I thought I would like to stab him in the thigh with that pen... but when it actually happened I wasn't as excited. I'm glad that one can wait for another day. Ugh.
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