May Helena Plumb

@mayhplumb.bsky.social

1747 Followers 333 Following

needlecrafter, dancer, baker, Mainer, she/her PhD in Linguistics, now doing non-ac qual research

Two crocheted stuffed animals. One resembles Totoro from the Miyazaki movie, who looks like a giant grey egg with bunny ears, a big white belly, and very wide eyes. The other resembles Grogu from the Star Wars show The Mandalorian, who looks like a smaller version of Yoda, a little green guy with giant ears sticking out the sides of his head, wrapped in an oversized brown cloak. The two are sitting cozy next to each other in front of a window, with a snowy winter scene outside.
A pack of paper napkins in a shop. They are black with metallic gold text, block capital letters reading "Were you about to rawdog my table?" The are made by Pretty Alright Goods
L2's methodology for Texas: Texas voters do not register by party. However, when those voters participate in a partisan primary, that ballot choice is recorded and reported on the state voter file. In the absence of stronger indications (e.g. partisan political contributions or identification due to the holding of partisan public office) the most recent even-year partisan primary ballot is used. Texas reports participation in presidential preference primaries in which large percentages vote, particularly in the Republican races. In the absence of any even-year partisan primary participation, the most recent odd-year local partisan primary is used. This information is supplemented through the use of modeling analytics. Likely race in major urban areas plays a major role in that modeling.
Little Alex Horne's foot is wearing a classic plastic shoe and a teal sock with stripey blocks of black, minty green, and cantaloupe orange. (Fatiha El-Ghorri is partially visible walking in the background)
Claim: “They [China] never paid 10 cents to any other president, and yet they paid hundreds of billions.” Washington Post Fact-Check: This is false. Tariffs have been collected on Chinese goods since the early days of the republic. President George Washington signed the Tariff Act of 1789, when trade between China and the United States was already established. Tariffs on China generated at least $8 billion every year since 2009.
split seam up the side of my black & argyle sweater
My slipper (leather with fuzzy insides) has a hole along the edge
In September 2023, a staff assistant for the Center for Environment, Energy, and Infrastructure—part of USAID’s Bureau for Development, Democracy, and Innovation—purchased a subscription to E&E for $20,000. According to E&E, prices for its professional subscription packages typically start in the upper four-figure range and vary based on how many users have access to a subscription. Another subscription to E&E was purchased in September 2024 for $24,000 by the Center for Climate Positive Development—an office within USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security.
A pile of cookies. They have a spiral of gochujang caramel which bakes to a deep, gorgeous red and bleeds slightly into the cookie. The effect looks a little bit like a flat cinnamon roll.
A survey design alignment chart. For each alignment, examples are given using silly questions about tomatoes. Lawful Good = Every question is a 10-point agreement scale Neutral Good = Just Best Practices Chaotic Good = Every question is free response Lawful Neutral = All scales in alphabetical order True Neutral = 3-point Likert scales with no labels Chaotic Neutral = Roll a d6 to find out how many options, choose randomly from a 7-point Likert scale Lawful Evil = Bad binning Neutral Evil = Cherry picking data Chaotic Evil = Asking GenAI leading questions
Today's Spelling Bee puzzle says that "tepache" isn't in the word list
A flight via American Airlines from Austin to Philadelphia. It costs $251.
An older man and a young child (both faces obscured) stomp the soil around a newly planted tree
A Oaxacan courtyard - it's brightly colored with yellow walls and red trim. Large patio stones, a small fountain, abundant plants in the walls make it an idyllic natural space. In the center, a laptop and notebook sit on bright yellow patio furniture
this ad for a trendy energy drink uses the catch phrase "Death to brain fog" and claims to provide Energy, Immunity, Focus, and No Jitters
a lowercase c (which looks more like a lowercase e) followed by a squiggle with two peaks
Two Crested Auklets standing on a mossy rock. They are slate grey sea birds with bright orange beaks, stark white eyes, and small but dramatic curling crests of feathers just as the base on their beak. Their wide, white eyes give them an incredibe goofy expression. Their necks are wide, blending seamlessly into their heads, and just a bit longer than you expect them to be. Photo credit to Nick Pecker on Shutterstock.
A near-total solar eclipse, visible through clouds
Three very simple, sketchy drawings of cats, with the caption "TAM cats / categories". A happy cat is labeled "im-purr-fective" (imperfective + purr). An angry cat is labeled "aor-hiss-t" (aorist + hiss). A grooming cat is labeled "te-lick" (telic + lick).
To tell your house-sitter that the key will be under the doormat, in Diza you say Zha lady zuby liay. For "under the doormat", "zha lady", the preposition "under" in Diza homophonous with the word for buttock (but fully grammaticalized). The word for both is "zha". Rather than using a copula or "be" verb to describe location, in Diza here you use a positional verb "zuby" which means "be placed" The word for "key" is "liay"
A list of intransitive and transitive verb roots, demonstrating (fossilized) causitivization morphology. For example, the pair 'ndyeby' 'boil' and 'sandyeby' 'boil (something)', where the causative form has the prefix 'sa-' or the pair 'ya' 'melt' and 'zya' 'melt (something)' where the causative form has the prefix 'z-'. Other causativizaiton strategies include stem changes (for example initial /g/ because /l/, or the first segment undergoes fortition)
I googled "tina turner" and Google asks "Did you mean: simply the best"
Is liberalism doomed? Was 1619 or 1776 the true founding of America? Is the traditional university broken beyond repair? Is racism or anti-racism the greater threat to the health of the university? On March 21-22, we plan to have it out. Passionately. Brilliantly. Humorously. Humanely. Respectfully. Vigorously. Civil Discord is a unique collaboration between three academic entities in Austin that share a commitment to free speech, civil discourse, and the urgent necessity of connecting across scholarly, political, partisan, and ideological lines. Through a series of moderated arguments on issues of great public significance, featuring some our nation’s best scholars and writers, we will model the life of the mind in a democracy.
A bunch of index cards strewn across a desk, each with the word for "duck" in a different language written in bright colors. A few show the reverse side of the cards, indicating the language, language family, and geographic area.
my attempt at writing 'duck' in Japanese
my attempt at writing the word for 'duck" in Bengali script
my attempt at writing the Mandarin word for "duck" in hanzi
Two Cayuga ducks. They are brown with gorgeous sapphire blue accents on their wings and blue heads.
A map of power outages in Maine, showing mass outages across the state, with approximately half of all customers out of power (427 thousand out of 852 thousand), as of Tuesday December 19 at 9am.
Spread out on my for is a big piece of silver-black sparkly fabric, along with the cut out pocket and leg pieces of wide-leg pants, and the folded up pants I used as a pattern.
A pecan pie! The crust is a bit pale and the crimping is messy, but it's a pie.
A portion of a notebook with to-do lists, and a portion of a dissertation outline sheet with the large heading We Will Finish The Dissertation in a fancy serif font
I'm brewing a cup of Yorkshire Tea in my wug test mug (the visible side has two drawings of mugs, with the text below "Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two [blank]." Through my office window, you can see a green canopy of trees below and the UT Football stadium in the middle distance.
Two cranberry scones spread heavily with double cream, and a large mug of black tea with milk
Merriam-Webster's definition of "chamois" — three senses 1. either of two small, agile, goatlike bovids (Rupicapra rupicapra and R. pyrenaica) of mountainous regions from southern Europe to the Caucasus that are often hunted for their meat and hide 2. a soft pliant leather prepared from the skin of the chamois or from sheepskin 3. a cotton fabric made in imitation of chamois leather
A close up of a pile of cranberry scones, nicely browned
On March 21, 2023, Joshua Raclaw tweeted: I have some Zoom data where the participants talk about how one of them lives in the woods and they respond by moving their laptop to literally face out the window to show off all the trees while saying “like straight up it’s just” So is the forest a grammatical constituent or
The mug has a center badge that reads "Singular They" with surrounding circle of text reading "Grammatically sound, the best around". Written below singular they is "since 1300", in the same way you might write "established in 1803" on a business sign. The white mug is filled with a variety of colored pens & highlighters. The whole corner of the desk is very colorful, featuring a stack of notebooks in different colors, a bright red stapler, and a small blue notebook.
A brown-grey tabby with a white belly is laying in profile, in perfect "loaf" position with paws tucked.
Do you identify as Black or Indigenous and plan to apply to graduate school in linguistics? Linguistics Grad School Application Support Program for Black and Indigenous Students You will receive feedback on your application materials Please fill out our questionaire, upload your CV and statement of purpose here: (link in post) Deadline: Rolling basis till December 1, 2023
The weather forecast in Austin this week is mostly sunny with a high of 95 and a low of 71 every single day
The slit is inserted as a cut in the fabric rather than on a seam. The top stitching around the edge is very tidy and straight except for where it curves around the top of the slit - there, it's a bit uneven and jagged. The fabric is red with purple-silver glitter hearts (about 2 centimeters across). My hand is visible, and my finger nails are also glittery!
Total cost to buy the doctoral regalia is $1071.95. Total cost to rent is $263.99. Includes gown, hood, tam, and pin set. The gown is the majority of the expense (it costs $709 to buy) but even just the tam costs $110.
OED entry 9a for "buzz" (verb): To telephone or signal (a call or message) by the ‘buzzer’. to buzz off: to ring off on the telephone. Also intransitive of a message: to come in by the ‘buzzer’. Hence (slang) to telephone (a person) Some quotations from the 1910s through 1950s, e.g. from 1929 "I wouldn't have buzzed you so early in the morning except that Ritter just phoned."
A paragraph of an email from the Linguistic Society of America, the last sentence in the paragraph is highlighted: Adding insult to injury, providing a cup of coffee for 700 people costs $20,000 there, over $28 a cup. The rest of the paragraph reads: Since the pandemic, our meeting planners report that food costs have increased by 30%. Our AV costs increased by 140% between 2016 and 2023. The situation continues to grow worse. AV costs in New York for 2024 are coming in more than twice as high (107% higher) as in Denver in 2023. New York was a notoriously expensive city before the pandemic. At this point, prices are truly extraordinary, and these combine with hotel contract terms that can lock us into high amounts of spending. As just one example, Per the terms of our contract in New York signed a decade ago, we have to spend a minimum of $100,000 on food and beverages.
On my desk is a notebook (with pen & highlighters), a laptop, a cup of black tea (with milk) in a black & gold mug and two cookies on a small Stangl plate
At 4:19am on Sunday, my fitbit had recorded 6,205 steps
A pile of linguistics textbooks: Optimality Theory (Kager) Optimality Theory in Phonology (McCarthy) Doing Optimality Theory (McCarthy) Phonetics (Reetz and Jongman) What is Meaning? (Portner) Semantics in Generative Grammar (Heim and Kratzer) Government and Binding Theory (Haegeman) Syntax (Carnie) Understanding Minimalism (Hornstein et al) The Minimalist Program (Chomsky) Sociolinguistics and Deaf Communitites (Schembri and Lucas) The Linguistics of Sign Languages (Baker et al) Exploring Language Structure (Payne) Describing Morphosyntax (Payne) Research Methods in Linguistics (Podesva and Sharma) Women in the Field (Golde) Understanding Fieldwork (Meakins et al) Essentials of Language Documentation (Gippert et al) An Introduction to Linguistic Typology (Velupillai) Historical Linguistics (Campbell) Historical Linguistics (Crowley and Bowern) Anthropological Linguistics (Foley)
A very large grasshopper, green with yellow accents, sitting on asphault
We describe an asymmetric categorical pattern of onset-coda allophony for English /r/, the post- alveolar rhotic approximant, drawing on published and unpublished information on over 100 child, teenage and adult speakers from prior studies. Around two thirds of the speakers exhibited allophonic variation that was subtle: onset and coda /r/ were typically both bunched (BB), or both tip- raised (RR), with minor within speaker differences. The other third had a more radical categorical allophonic pattern, using both R and B types. Such variable speakers had R onsets and B codas (RB): but the opposite pattern of allophony (BR) was extremely rare. This raises questions as to whether the asymmetry is accidental or motivated by models of syllable structure phonetic implementation. Keywords: rhotics, ultrasound, allophones, phonology, retroflexion.
Pictured from the waist down, I'm modeling the shirt with my hands on my hips, paired with a loose teal top, tucked in. The skirt is full and moderately poofy. The pleats are a bit messy. The length is just above the knee. Daisies grow up from the hem ending about three quarters of the way up the skirt, with other flowers scattered sparsely across the top of the fabric.
A bunch of daisies grow up from the hem of the skirt. Above the daisies, other flowers are sparsely scattered
The front of my shirt is pinned in knife pleats onto a waist band. The fabric is black with scattered flowers
Speaker A asks, "Do you want me to help you tomorrow?" Speaker B responds, "No, Pedro is already coming tomorrow" The "already" meaning comes from the particle "ba", which modifies the Potential-inflected verb "come"
nas 'ereyesterday' nay 'yesterday' andxi 'today' (composed of now + day) zhi 'tomorrow' gutx 'overmorrow'
Two sentences in Diza, glossed in English. Diza is a verb-subject-object language. In the first Diza sentence, Speaker A asks "Has your nibling turned eleven yet?" The "yet" meaning is marked with the particle "ba", which appears before the verb. In the second sentence, Speaker B replies "No, they're not eleven yet, they're still ten." The "not yet" meaning is marked with the particle "gady", which appears before the verb. The "still" meaning is marked by an enclitic "=ru" which attaches to the end of the verb.
Depths of Wikipedia (on Twitter) says "It has officially been 65 years since the Wug Test revealed kids' natural grasp of language rules. Happy wugiversary" Included in the tweet is an image of the famous wug test: A simple cartoon drawing of a bird with the label "This is wug", followed by two little birds with the prompt: "Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two [blank]"
The Zoom waiting room image: white text reading "zoooooom" on a blue background; each of the o's contains an icon representing Zoom features such as team chat, phone, rooms, events
Context: A student is reporting on another student's bad behavior to the teacher. The student says "The kid named Benito, he has fallen asleep in school." The relevant part to the post is "he has fallen asleep", which in Diza is "ba unaz ba'ald lany". Ba is an aspectual particle, glossed simply as BA unaz is the verb "catch" inflected for the Completive aspect ka'ald is a noun, "sleep", which is the subject of the clause and lany is a third person singular pronoun, the object of the clause