Different kinds of research projects

It may seem that I have vanished from the face of the earth; it has been a while since I last wrote. Following up on my previous entry I can say that I have changed the rules again. Exercise and eating have both been eliminated as something to focus on because I only want to focus on completing my thesis. Stricter planning and taking days off of work have enabled me to write and hand in a satisfactory chapter, which will be followed by another chapter at the end of next week. Within a month I will be done (God willing).
 
I had my brother’s girlfriend have a look at my metaphor identification procedure – she also is student of English, but on the other Amsterdam University, which takes a very different approach to linguistics and linguistics teaching – and it turned out, as expected, that we disagreed on many instances of possible metaphor. We entered into a highly enthusiastic academic debate about very interesting theoretical assumptions. My brother, who should be used to such ‘boring’ discussions (he has a PhD in History), did in fact find this actually boring, but we loved it. Of course, we had to break it up at some point due to time constraints and we had to avoid taking the argument too far. We can be very principled about certain semantic theoretical properties of words and defend our positions heatedly.
 
Irina also was a victim in that she had to test my method. The patience she has is amazing. I gave her 6 sentences in which she had to identify the metaphors on a word by word basis and she indeed took the time to look up every single word in the Macmillan dictionary. In the end we spent more than 2 hours discussing.
 
Jelena was my last victim. I asked her to identify the metaphors for some Dutch sentences and she really seemed to get into it. It can be fun you know.
 
I was a subject in Jelena’s research project yesterday. She is looking at differences in the use of the English language between Dutch and Chinese students, who come from 2 cultures that cannot be further apart (on some researcher’s index of cultural characteristics). I had to sit behind (or is it in front of) a computer and answer some questions using the library’s website. While looking up a book’s title, for example, I had to ‘talk aloud’ and say what I was thinking and doing. All this was recorded. It is amazing how broad a topic like English linguistics is. I didn’t know anything about the kind of research that she is doing. What you learn at this university is heavily dependent on the kind of courses you take, which differ on a year-to-year basis.
 
Today I was asked by some girls to help her with her thesis research. At first I declined, but later on she asked again, and I couldn’t refuse anymore. I had to read a text and afterwards answer two short questions testing whether I had understood the text. Also, I was given two sentences and decide which one I had come across in an earlier read text. In total there were 17 short texts to read. You weren’t allowed to turn back to a text once you had read it once. In the end it turned out that the focus of this project was on words like because and that is why. Of course we didn’t discuss the actual goal of this project, but it seemed interesting. By helping them I also may win an Ipod.