SvartiKotturinn
Since: Sep, 2013
05/10/2016 00:00:00
I’m a linguistics student myself and I’m a bit baffled by your remark about your students. Knowing formal English grammar is far from what linguistics is about, and I’ve yet to hear about a school that taught X-bar theory.
AgProv
Since: Jul, 2011
06/20/2016 00:00:00
Agreed, but it\'s a pain in the arse when you\'re dealing with people who can\'t tell the difference between a noun and an adverb and can\'t define a verb - let alone tell if it\'s transitive or intransitive - because they were never taught this lower down the education ladder. It makes moving on to more complex concepts involving language somewhat trickier!
Leave a Comment:
Hideously close to docudrama
It works because for anyone who's attended a major university - especially if you went on to research or postgraduate study - the settings and the characters are universal.
Especially the characters. They're universal archetypes. EVERY university has them.
My Sheldon Cooper was a postdoctoral maths person at UEA Norwich. To the last tic. "Howard Wolowitz" was a computer scientist. "Penny" managed a bar in the city. She had a thing for guys with brains. "Bernadette" grew certain exotic South American plants in Biology's greenhouses.
The interactions, the struggles of getting funding, making a living, justifying your presence to the relative handful of professors with tenure and security.... and having to work as TA's with undergrad students. In my case, dealing with linguistics undergrads who'd never been taught any formal English grammar, couldn't parse a sentence, and needed remedial teaching to put right things they should have learnt in primary school... no, TBBT becomes fly-on-the-wall documentary after a while. Hideously funny.
And I was a sort of Leonard Hofstadter, since you ask. Just don't ask about me and Penny.