Slides from my talk today at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics.

My dissertation focused on the evolution of negation in French, and I’ve continued to study this change. In order to track the way that negation was used, I needed to collect a corpus of texts and annotate them. I developed a MySQL database to store the annotations (and later the texts themselves) and a suite of PHP scripts to annotate the texts and store them in the database.

Just So stories were named by Rudyard Kipling in his book of the same name, which contained stories like “How the Rhinoceros Got his Skin.” In that one, the rhino’s skin starts out tight, but after he takes it off to swim, a man put crumbs in it to take revenge for the rhino eating his cake. When the rhino put his skin back on, it itched so much he loosened it up with all his scratching.

I realized today that I hadn’t yet blogged about my dissertation, the Spread of Change in French Negation . That’s too bad, because I like my dissertation topic. It’s fun, and it’s interesting. You may see here, from time to time, posts about my dissertation research. I’ll try to make them accessible to anyone, not just the specialized audience that I wrote the dissertation for.