#syntactic movement

[literaryvein-reblogs]

hello, i was wondering if you could help me with describing hands? one of my characters is using sign language to communicate, and while the facial expressions are fine it's the hands i struggle with. thank you for your hard work!!

Describing Sign Language in Writing

Sign language - a nonverbal communication method that relies on physical movement instead of spoken words.

The figure shows the well-defined structure that distinguishes sign languages from simple gestural communication or mime, imbuing them with the complexity and depth characteristics of the spoken language.

Sign languages, distinct from the many communication methods employed by humans, exhibit expressions of complex linguistic systems rooted in visual-manual modality.

Rather than merely gestures, these languages are structured and intricate, evolving in response to cultural and societal influence.

At the core of sign language lies manual articulation complemented by non-manual elements (such as facial expressions and body posture).

This combination yields a rich communication tapestry in which each sign or gesture has a specific meaning organized by syntactic and morphological rules.

Visual-spatial language uses visible cues from the hands, eyes, facial expressions, and movements to convey meaning.

Although sign language is primarily used by individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, it is also used by many hearing people.

Like spoken languages, sign languages have their own grammar and structural rules and have evolved.

However, there is no universal sign language, and different countries have unique versions of sign languages specific to their regions and cultures. Example: the ASL differs from Auslan in Australia and the BSL in the United Kingdom. A person fluent in ASL may need to understand a local version of sign language in Sydney, Australia, instead of different dialects or accents in spoken languages.

There are more than 300 different sign languages in the world, spoken by more than 72 million deaf or hard-of-hearing people worldwide.

Each individual gesture is called a sign. Each sign has 3 distinct parts:

the handshape,

the position of the hands, and

the movement of the hands.

PHONOLOGY. At the heart of all languages, spoken or signed, lies the study of phonology. This discipline investigates the systematic arrangement of sounds in spoken languages and the corresponding organization of meaningful units in sign languages. In the case of sign languages, these units are not acoustic but instead composed of distinct hand shapes, locations, movements, and facial expressions. These elements work harmoniously to serve as essential structures for the sign-language framework.

Handshape: This refers to the specific shape of the hands when producing a sign. Different hand shapes can change the meaning of a sign, as different vowels or consonants can change the meaning of a word in spoken language.

Orientation: This involves the direction the palms or fingers face during the sign. The orientation can be towards or away from the signer, up, down, or to the side, and like a hand shape, it can significantly alter the meaning of a sign.

Location: This refers to the location in the signing space where a sign is produced, such as in front of the face, on the body, or in the neutral space in front of the signer. Location helps differentiate signs that might otherwise be similar in hand shape, orientation, and movement.

Movement: Sign languages use various movements, including direction, path, and manner (smooth, fast, or slow). Movement is crucial for expressing different concepts and can change the tense or aspects of verbs, among other things.

Facial Expressions: In sign languages, facial expressions are not just emotional indicators but are integral to grammar and lexicon, conveying distinctions in meaning, mood, tense, and sentence type (e.g., declarative, interrogative).

Understanding the phonology of sign languages is similar to acquiring the alphabet of a spoken language. The distinct characteristics of these elemental units lay the foundation for forming more complex structures and meanings.

CLASSIFIERS (CL) in sign language are a group of hand shapes used to represent general categories of objects, people, places, or concepts, as well as their orientation, movement, and relationship to one another within the spatial context of the signer’s narrative.

These handshapes are not standalone signs but are employed within the structure of signed sentences to provide descriptive or locative information that complements the narrative.

Classifiers allow signers to convey complex visual-spatial information efficiently and vividly, making them essential to sign language’s grammatical structure and expressive power.

Object Classifiers: represent objects or people with various shapes and sizes. For example, a flat hand may represent a flat surface or vehicle, whereas an upright index finger can denote a person standing.

Locative Classifiers: describe the location of objects or the spatial relationships between them. They can indicate where something is situated or how items are arranged relative to each other.

Plural Classifiers: used to depict groups of objects or people and their distribution in space. These classifiers can show the arrangement of objects, such as items lined up in a row or randomly scattered.

Element Classifiers: convey information about natural elements or substances such as water, fire, smoke, and wind, illustrating the movement or texture of these elements.

Body Classifiers: represent parts of the body or whole-body actions. They can show how a body part moves or is positioned in space.

Movement Classifiers: illustrate how an object or person moves within a space, including the direction, manner, and speed of movement.

Instrument Classifiers: show how an object is manipulated or used, often indicating the type of grip or action performed with tools or utensils.

Size and Shape Specifiers: provide specific details about the size, shape, or orientation of objects, enhancing descriptive accuracy and visual clarity in narratives.

Examples

A Quiet Place. The depiction of sign language—specifically, ASL—was heavily researched. They cast a deaf actress to play Regan for the express reason that she could help tutor the cast so they feel fluent. Individual characters also have their own "accent": Lee signs in a stern manner, Evelyn is elegant, Marcus is laconic, and Regan is sassy.

In Dune, multiple characters use hand signals to give orders to their subordinates. In fact, there are entire sign languages developed separately by both the Atreides and the Harkonnens, as well as even more subtle ones developed by the Bene Gesserit, that allow them to communicate irrelevant information verbally and important stuff with their hands, making sure that even if they are overheard, the enemy won't learn anything.

Beauty and the Beast (1987 series) has a deaf character who had grown up in the tunnels in "An Impossible Silence" and "Sticks and Stones" who communicated through ASL. The second episode was groundbreaking in that there were several scenes where deaf characters communicated in on-screen silence, with no voiceover or even background music, something the deaf actors involved fought hard for, not wanting someone else's voice to overshadow their own "voices".

The Shape of Water: Elisa is mute, and thus uses real-life American Sign Language to communicate. She also teaches the fish person how to sign, since he can't physically talk either.

Koko the Gorilla: Sign language is a powerful way for people of all hearing abilities to communicate. It can even be used to communicate with gorillas. In the 1970s, language researcher Dr. Penny Patterson began working with Koko, a western lowland gorilla, teaching her sign language. Research has shown that gorillas (and other large apes) have language skills similar to those of small children, and throughout her life, Koko learned more than 1,000 different signs. Koko was able to have entire conversations in sign language, as well as play word games and make up her own signs.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Thank you for your kind words, really love doing these! Studying how other media accurately depict these hand movements could also be helpful. More examples and information in the sources linked above. Also have these previous posts:

Writing Notes: Deaf Characters & Sign(ed) Languages

Hearing Loss in Children

[the-californicationist]

he lets you watch

When you overhear Captain Price watching porn in his office, you decide to turn his fantasies into a reality.

Link to AO3

MDNI/18+

TW: femdom, gagging, one slap

You were working late. Again. It was the most frustrating part of any operation: recon review. All the footage collected from all the soldiers’ body cams had to be reviewed and documented. Any dialogue? Syntactically tagged. Any shots fired? Counted. Any kills? Confirmed. You were glad to help the team, but this stage of discovery was dreadfully boring. 

Even worse, your new-found crush on your captain was driving you insane. To be honest, you’d had your eye on him for a while. There was something about a man in charge, but it was when this last set of footage came through that you really went off the deep end. 

Price had gone with Gaz into a warehouse that was suspected of housing enemy munitions, and the captain had uncovered crates and crates of target-marking spray paint. Huge canisters that attached to the bottoms of planes were all stuck in little rows, lined up and ready to use. 

Unfortunately for the captain, one of the canisters was propped open on the top of its box, and when he lifted the lid, he got covered in red dye. You watched it explode, covering the camera, and then when it reconnected, there he was. Shirtless. Down to his boxer briefs. Wiping red dye off of himself with his clothes. Gaz had brought a full kit, so Price was changing out, hoping to stay covert and camouflaged in the clean gear. Couldn’t well be a glowing red dot while trying to escape enemy territory. 

His chest was broad and full of dense, dark hair, laying flat like soft fur, untrimmed and natural. His beard was streaked red, and half his face was painted, making him look like an ancient Celt, ready for brutal highland battles and bedding willing lassies. He was frustrated by his accident, so all of his movements were sharp and aggressive, his muscles raging and wrestling against his skin. Then, he moved closer to the camera, and the bulge in his underwear became glaringly apparent. 

Hung. Thick. Not so long that it was out of place, but heavy. His cock was imposing, and when he readjusted himself, you could see how dense the muscle really was. You couldn’t help but pause the film, staring, in glorious 4k. You nearly had to wipe the drool from your mouth. 

Price looked so confident here. He was always self-assured, but sometimes, when you spoke with him, there was something that he was holding back. Some shyness perhaps, maybe just a reserved nature, but not here. Not in his livid rage, he was like a wounded beast - angry and virile. Full of righteous energy. It made you imagine making him come undone in other ways, in the ways a woman was meant to make a beast like that come apart at the seams. Ripping the constricting threads and freeing the hulking creature looming within. 

Now, he was sitting in his office, right next to yours, and he’d started watching footage of his own. Or, at least, you thought that he was watching the cams…until you heard a woman’s salacious moan penetrate the thin wall between you. 

Your eyes grew wide, and your breath caught in your chest. You sat in the silence of your office, hearing your heart pound in your ears. You waited to hear it again, just to be sure.

Then, a very quiet, 

“You wanna come?”

You let out the breath you’d been holding. It wooshed from you like a wave crashing against miles and miles of sand. 

Something snapped, some darkness possessed you. You found yourself standing, walking toward the door to his office. It was so late, everyone else had turned in. Just you and him in the west hall of the base awake. He never slept, it seemed. A night owl like you. 

You opened his door without knocking. You’d never done that before, and objectively, it was a truly insane choice. 

In your mind, his hand had lingered when he took his cup of coffee from your hands. In your imagination, he’d cocked a sly smile when you made a joke, just between you and him. You thought you’d seen him checking out your ass in the gym. But, you didn’t have any real proof. 

Popping open his door was the equivalent of pulling the trigger on a bazooka. 

He stood, caught like a fox in a snare, his chair clattering as you came into the room and shut the door behind you quickly. 

“Sergeant, uh,” he recovered, “What happened?”

“Captain.” 

It was a full sentence. And, it was all you had. You were finished. 

The video was still playing. The lurid slapping of skin on skin. Her over-acted moans, his ritual panting. Every few seconds, you counted three, there was another soft,

“You like that, daddy?”

You smiled. He turned red, just like he’d been painted again. 

“Sergeant, I was just…”

He paused the movie. Then, with his body, with the hand roughly rubbing down his face, with the palm tightly covering his mouth, he said a million other words. He was still pink with shame, and then he laughed,

“Yeah, no. I was ‘bout to have a wank. Not sure why I was trying to make you believe otherwise, love. Sorry. It’s too loud?”

You smiled wider. His genuine honesty was so smooth and effortless. A thief caught with his hands in the cookie jar, begging you to punish him for it. 

“No,” you shook your head, “Just wanted to see what you were watching.”

He didn’t register what you said at first, still staring down at his boots. Then, realization washed over him and he looked up at you, eyes shining, brows arched.

“Oh? That so?”

You nodded,

“Let me see what’s got you up so late.”

The captain rubbed a big, calloused hand across his mouth, smoothing his beard, a bit nervous. Then, he pulled a chair around and motioned for you to sit beside him. You sat. He sat. He hit play. 

A woman was straddling a man, both of them hairless and slick like brand new Barbie dolls, spray-tan orange and bleach-blond hair. Americans. She was riding his larger than average dick slowly, deliberately slow, edging him with her pussy. She had a hand around his throat, grasping his jaw tightly, pushing his head back. He was tied to the chair, straining against it, clearly desperate as he writhed beneath her, fighting his restraints. 

“Please, baby. Please, let me come?” He begged. 

“You wanna come, daddy?” She teased. 

“Yeah, can I come?” He begged. 

“Ah-ah! I don’t think so…” She teased. 

Begging. Teasing. Begging. Teasing. A vicious, uncontrollable cycle of cruelty on her part, always pulling the proverbial carrot farther and farther from his snapping jaws. 

You turned to Price who was watching, rapt. He noticed you staring at him. Before he turned to face you, he smiled, sighing,

“Sometimes, when you’re the one barking orders all day, it’d be nice to turn your head off and follow someone else’s for a change.”

“You could follow my orders,” some psychotic part of you spoke. 

He gripped the side of the chair, his once-relaxed hands now making the cheap aluminum frame creak and pop. 

“What’d you say, Sergeant?”

“You heard me, Captain,” you didn’t know if you should call an exorcist or what. Who was this version of yourself and how quickly was she going to get you court martialed?

“You think you can order me around?”

You leaned in, close enough to smell the tobacco on his breath, Cuban cigars leaving earthy notes of vanilla and licorice behind. You whispered,

“I know I can.”

He breathed out, his exhale caressing your lips, threatening to kiss you. 

You didn’t move. Not a muscle. You locked eyes with him, 

“Sit on your hands, Captain.”

“Sergeant,” he tried to kiss you, but you pulled away quickly. 

Part of your body screamed at you, wondering why you’d avoid his advances, but your mind knew what he wanted. He needed to lose control. For a man like Price to lose it, it must be taken from him. Forcibly. 

“I said sit... on... them,” you sneered, making yourself larger by standing over him, placing your hands on his thighs to press into his skin. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he laughed, patronizing and light-hearted. It made you want to break him of that habit. Of thinking you were just his sergeant. Just the girl who brought him coffee. Just his gym buddy. 

He still hadn’t complied, chuckling to himself. Out of no where, you straight up fucking slapped him. Hard. Right across the jaw. Grabbing him by the collar,

“Sit on your fucking hands, soldier. That’s an order,” you barked. 

He sat on his hands, staring at you like you had doused yourself in gasoline and caught yourself on fire, in awe.

You pushed his chair back until you had room to move in front of him, and you began peeling off your clothes, one by one. Your shirt, your cargos, your bra, your panties; they all ended up on the floor, leaving you naked and touching yourself lazily, letting your hands wander. 

He moved to lift his hands off his seat, wanting to touch, so you backed away from him. It was a warning: move and this ends. Follow my orders, and I’ll stay. He settled back down. 

“You know, I should punish you for slapping me, Sergeant. That’s insubordination,” he chided, trying to regain control of the situation. 

You took your panties off the ground and found the wet stain he’d caused, showing it to him coyly, like you’d picked up a pretty shell from the beach. It gleamed in the light of his desk lamp. Then, you walked over to him, swaying your hips, and bent down as if to kiss him. 

As he opened his mouth to kiss you back, you pushed your panties into it, past his teeth, clutching at his jaw with the other hand as roughly as you could, knowing you couldn’t hurt him. You shushed his surprised noises, putting a finger to his lip,

“Shh, Captain. That’s enough. You’re not in charge anymore, are you?”

He furrowed his brow as if he would fight back, as if he would remove his hands and teach you a lesson. Then, as he tasted you on his tongue, he realized that you were offering prizes for obedience. He would reap the rewards, if he was willing to play along. His face softened, and he shook his head no. 

“Good boy,” you whispered. 

You kissed his mouth, awkwardly, since it was full of your wet panties, there was little he could do except experience your kisses. He reacted as if he wanted to kiss you back, and as you moved to kiss his jawline, he moaned. 

Price’s moans were rumbling and deep, long and low like a bull elephant’s roar. You wanted to drag that noise out of him again. Your hand found his belt buckle, and you rugged at it, willing it to loosen. As you kissed his neck, you drug down his zipper and freed his cock from the fabric. 

The captain was not soft. If anything, he was harder than he should’ve been for a little teasing and some neck kisses. You decided to use that to his disadvantage,

“My, my, my. Someone’s eager…”

You tugged up and down with length in a long, languid massage, feeling how his foreskin slipped over the head and down the shaft, smooth and supple. He was hairy around the root of his cock, just as you’d hoped, and after seeing the video of him covered in paint, you wished you could strip him down and run your fingernails through his chest hair, delicately scratching his skin and peaked nipples. 

For now, you spit on his cockhead, using it as lube as you rubbed him. He threw his head back in ecstasy. You removed your hand. He snapped back to attention, staring at you a bit desperate for relief. 

You giggled, 

“Is this for me, or for her?”

Pointing over your shoulder, you motioned to the paused video. You took your hand away, feigning hurt feelings.

His body arched toward you, missing your touch, and he shook his head, trying to say something. 

“For her? How disappointing,” you pouted, playing with the head of his cock with one finger, drawing circles around the edge. 

Price was saying something muffled through the fabric of your panties, shaking his head, scooting his chair closer with a quick thrust of his hips, making his cock flag from the jolting movement. 

“You know,” you whispered, drawing him in with your quiet tone, “if this was for me, I’d really be looking forward to feeling it inside of me.”

“Mmm. Mm, mm!” He tried to correct you, his shoulders straining as he pulled them forward, struggling against his self-imposed restraint. 

“Oh?” You caressed his face, rubbing your hand through his soft beard, feeling the stubble on his chin, “It is for me after all?”

“Mm hm,” he nodded, leaning his cheek into your palm, eyes hooded with relief. 

You could tell he was enjoying the game. You were enjoying it, too. You could feel how wet you were, watching him gaze at your shining folds hungry. Impatient. 

“In that case…” you straddled him, planting your knees on either side of his hips, trapping his cock between you both. His body felt warm, and his breathing was labored. 

You rubbed your wetness up and down his shaft, spreading yourself along his length, making wet little sounds as you smeared him until he was slippery. 

Carefully, you moved his head into your eager pussy, your walls pounding for him like a heartbeat. Then, you held his throat with your hand, forcing him to look at you. 

“You don’t get to come until I tell you to. Do you understand, soldier?”

“Mm, hm,” he nodded, rolling in the ecstasy of your tight cunt. 

“Good, boy.”

[physalian]

Humanizing Your Characters (And Why You Should)

To humanize a character is not to contort an irredeemable villain into the warped funhouse mirror reflection of a hero in the last 30 seconds to gain “narrative subversion” points. To humanize is not to give said villain a tragic backstory that validates every bad choice they make in attempt to provide nuance where it does not deserve to be.

To humanize a character, villain or otherwise, is to make them flawed. Scuff them up, give them narrative birthmarks and scars and imperfections. Whether it’s your hero, their love interest, the comic relief, the mentor, the villain, the rival, these little narrative details serve to make all your literary babies better.

Why should you humanize your characters?

To do this means to write in details beyond those that service the plot, or the themes, or the motifs, morals, foreshadowing, or story. These might be (and usually are) entirely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. So, if I wrote lengthy diatribes on pacing and why every detail must matter, and character descriptions and thematic importance, why am I now suggesting go free-for-all on the fluff?

Just like real people have quirks and tics and beliefs and pet peeves that serve our no greater purpose, so should fictional people. Your average reader doesn’t have the foggiest idea what literary devices are beyond metaphor, simile foreshadowing, and anecdote, but they can tell when the author is using motif and theme and all the syntactical marvels because it reads that much richer, even if they can’t pinpoint why.

And, for shipping fodder, these tiny little details are what help your audience fall in love with the character. It doesn’t even have to be in a book – Taylor Swift (whether you like her or not) never fills her music with sexual innuendo or going clubbing. She tells stories filled with human details like dancing in the refrigerator light. People can simultaneously relate to these very specific and vivid experiences, and say “not that exactly, but man this reminds me of…” and that’s (part of) the reason her music is so popular.

What kinds of narratives need these details?

All of them. Visual media, audio, written, stage play. Now, to what degree and excess you apply these details depends on your tone, intended audience, and writing style. If your style of writing is introspection heavy, noir character drama, you might go pretty heavy on the character design.

But even if you’re writing a kids book with a scant few paragraphs of setting descriptors and internal narration, or you’re drawing a comic book – if you have characters you want people to care about, do this.

Animators, particularly, are very adept at humanizing non-human characters, because, unlike live acting, every single stroke of the pen is there with intent. They use their own reflections for facial references, record their own movements to draw a dance, and insert little bits of themselves into signature character poses so you know that *that* animator did this one.

How to humanize your characters.

I’m going to break this down into a couple sections: Costume/wardrobe, personality, beliefs/behavior/superstitions, haptics/proxemics/kinesics, and voice. They will all overlap and the sheer variety and possibilities are way too broad for me to capture every facet.

Costumes and Wardrobe

In the film Fellowship of the Ring, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where, after Boromir is slain by the Uruk-Hai, Aragorn takes Boromir’s Gondorian vambraces to wear in his honor, and in honor of their shared country. He wears them the rest of the trilogy. The editing pays no extra attention to them beyond a split second of Aragorn tightening the straps, it never lingers on them, never reminds you that they’re there, but they kept it in nonetheless. His actor also included a hunting bow that didn't exist in the book because he's a roamer, a ranger, and needs to be able to feed himself, along with a couple other survival tools.

Aragorn wears plenty of other symbolic bits of costume – the light of the Evenstar we see constantly from Arwen, the Lothlorien green cloaks shared by the entire Fellowship, his re-forged sword and eventual full Gondorian regalia, but all those are Epic Movie Moments that serve a thematic purpose.

Taking the vambraces is just a small, otherwise insignificant character moment, a choice made for no other reason than that’s what this character would do. That’s what makes him human, not an archetype.

When you’re writing these details and can’t rely on sneaking them into films, you have to work a little harder to remind your audience that they exist, but not too often. A detail shifts from “human” to “plot point” when it starts to serve a purpose to the themes and story.

Inconsequentiality might be how a character ties, or doesn’t tie their shoelaces, because they just can’t be bothered so they remain permanent knots and tripping hazards. It might be a throw-away line about how they refuse to wear shorts and strictly stick to long pants because they don’t like showing off their legs. It might be perpetually greasy hair from constantly running their fingers through it with stress, or self-soothing. A necklace they fidget with, or a ring, a belt they never bother to replace even though they should, a pair of lucky socks.

Resist the urge to make it more meaningful than “this is just how they are”. If I’m using the untied shoelaces example – in Spiderverse, this became a part of the story’s themes, motifs, and foreshadowing, and doesn’t count. Which isn’t bad! It’s just not what I’m talking about.

Personality

In How to Train Your Dragon, Toothless does not speak. All his personality comes from how he moves, the noises he makes, and the expressions on his face. There’s moments, like in the finale, when his prosthetic has burned off and Hiccup tells him to hold on for a little bit longer, and you can clearly see on his face that he’s deeply uncertain about his ability to do so. It’s almost off the screen, another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Or the beat of hesitation before he lets Hiccup touch him in the Forbidden Friendship scene. Or the irritated noise he makes when he’s impatiently waiting for Hiccup to stop chatting with his dad because they have a giant dragon to murder. Or when he slaps Hiccup with his ear fin for flying them into a rock spire.

None of those details *needed* to exist to endear you to his character or to serve the scenes they’re in. The scenes would carry on just fine without them. He’s a fictional dragon, yes, but these details make him real.

Other personality tics you could include might be a character who gets frustrated with tedious things very quickly and starts making little inteligible curses under their breath. Or how they giggle when they’re excited and start bouncing on their toes. Maybe they have a tic where they snap their fingers when they’re concentrating, trying to will an idea into existence. Or they stick their tongue out while they work and get embarrassed when another character calls them on it. They roll around in their sleep, steal blankets, drool, leave dishes in the sink or are neurotic with how things must be organized. They have one CD in their car, and actually use that CD player instead of the phone jack or Bluetooth. They sing in the shower, while they cook, or while they do homework, no matter how grating their voice.

They like the smell of new shoes or Sharpies. They hate the texture of suede or velvet or sticky residues. They never pick their socks up. They hate the overhead light in their room and use 50 lamps instead. They hate turning into oncoming traffic or don’t trust their backup camera. They collect Funko Pops and insist there’s always room for more.

And about a million others.

Beliefs, Behaviors, and Superstitions

*If you happen to be writing a story where superstitions have merit, maybe skip this one.* Usually, inevitably, these evolve into character centerpieces and I can’t actually think of one off the top of my head that doesn’t become this beyond the ones we all know. A few comedic examples do come to mind:

The Magic Conch in “Club Spongebob” and the sea-bear-proof dirt circle in “The Camping Episode”

Dean Winchester’s fear and panic-driven actions in “Yellow Fever” and “Sam, Interrupted”

The references to the trolls that steal left-foot socks in How to Train Your Dragon

I’m not a fan of wasting time writing a religious character doing their religious thing when Plot Is Happening, but smaller things are what I’m talking about. Like them wearing a cross/rosary and touching it when they’re nervous. Having a specific off-beat prayer, saying, or expression because they don’t believe in cursing.

The classic ones like black cats, ladders, broken mirrors, salt, sidewalk cracks can all be funny. Athletes have plenty, too, and some of them, particularly in baseball culture, are a bit ridiculous. Not washing socks or uniforms, having a team idol they donate Double Bubble to and also rub their toes. A specific workout routine, diet, team morale dance.

Other things, too. A character who’s afraid to go back downstairs once the lights are off, or fear the basement or the backyard shed. Or they’re really put-off by this old family photo for no reason other than how glassy their eyes look and it’s creepy. They like crystals, dreamcatchers, star signs, tarot, or they absolutely do not under any circumstances.

They believe in all the tried and true ways of predicting the weather like a grizzled old sailor. They believe in ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, skinwalkers, doppelgangers, fairies. They talk to the cat statue in their kitchen and named it Fudge Pop. They whisper to the spirit that possessed the fridge so it stops making all that racket, and half the time, it works every time. They wear yellow for good luck or carry a rabbit’s foot. They’re not religious at all but still throw prayers out to whoever’s listening because, you know, just in case. They sit by their window sill and talk to the moon and the stars and pretend like they’re in a music video when they’re driving through the city in the rain.

Haptics, Proxemics, and Kinesics

These are, for all you non-communication and psych majors out there, touch and physical contact, how they move, and how they move around other people.

Behold, your shipping fodder.

Two shining examples of proxemics in action are the famous “close talker” episode of Seinfeld (of which every communication major has been subjected to) and Castiel’s not understanding of personal space (and human chronemic habits) in Supernatural.

These are how a character walks, if they’re flat-footed, clumsy, or tip-toers. If they make a racket or constantly spook the other characters. If they fidget or can’t sit still in a seat for five seconds, if they like to sit backwards or upside down. How they touch themselves, if they do a lot of self-soothing maneuvers (hugging themselves, rubbing their arms, touching their face, drawing their knees up, holding their neck, etc) or if they don’t do any self-soothing at all.

This is how they shake hands, if they dance while they cook or work. It’s how much space they let themselves take up, if they man-spread or keep their limbs in closer. How close they stand to others or how far. If they let themselves be touched at all, or if they always have their skin covered. If they always have their back to a wall,  or are always making sure they know where the nearest exit is. If they make grand gestures when they talk and give directions. If they flinch from pats on the back or raised hands. If they lean away from loud voices or project their own. If they use their height to their advantage when arguing, puff their chest, square their shoulders, put their hands on their hips, or point fingers in accusation.

If they touch other characters as they pass by. If they’re huggers or victims of falling asleep on or near their comrades. If they must sleep facing the door, or with something solid behind them. If they can sleep in the middle of a party wholly uncaring. If they sleepwalk, sleeptalk, migrate across the bed to cuddle whoever’s nearest with no idea they’re doing it.

If they like to be held or like to hold others. If they hate being picked up and slung around or are touch-starved for it. If they like their space and stick to it or are more than happy to share.

Do they walk with grace, head held high and back straight? Or are they hunched over, head hung, watching their feet? Are they meanderers or speed-walkers? Do they cross their arms in front or lace their hands behind them? Do they bow to authority or meet that gaze head on?

I have heard that Prince Zuko, in Last Airbender, is usually drawn sleeping with his bad ear down when he doesn’t feel safe, like on his warship or anywhere in the Fire Nation, or on the road. He’s drawn on his other side once he joins the Gaang. In Dead Man’s Chest, just before Davy Jones drives the Flying Dutchman under the waves, two tentacles curl up and around the brim of his hat to keep it from blowing off in the water.

When they fight, do they attack first, or defend first? Do they touch other characters’ hair? Share makeup, share clothes? Touch their faces with boops or bonks or nuzzles and eskimo kisses? Do they crack their knuckles and necks and knees?

Do they stare in baffled curiosity at all the other characters wholly comfortable in each other's spaces because they can’t, won’t, or don’t see the point in all this nonsense? Do they say they’re happy on the outside, but are betrayed by their body language?

Voice

Whether or not to write an accent is entirely up to you. Books like Their Eyes Were Watching God writes dialogue in a vernacular specific to its characters. Westerners and southerners tend to be written with the southern drawl or dialect, ripe with stereotypical contractions. Be advised, however, that in attempt to write an accent to give your character depth, you could be instead turning off your audience who doesn’t have energy to decipher what they’re saying, or you went and wrote a racist stereotype.

Voice isn’t just accent and dialect, nor is it how it sounds, which falls more solidly under useful character descriptions. Voice for the sake of humanizing your characters concerns how they talk, how they convey their thoughts, and how they become distinct from other characters in dialogue and narration.

If you’re writing a narrative that hops heads and don’t want to include a big banner to indicate who’s talking at any given time, this is where voice matters. It is, I think, the least appreciated of all the possible traits to pay attention to.

First person narrators have the most flexibility here because the audience is zero degrees removed from their first-hand experiences. Their personality comes through sharply in how they describe things and what they pay attention to.

But it’s also in what similes and metaphors they use. I read a book that had an average (allegedly straight) male narrator going off and describing colors with types of flowers, some I had to look up because I just don’t know those off the top of my head. My immediate thought was either this character is a poorly written gay, or he’s a florist. Neither (allegedly), the writer was just being too specific.

Do they have crutch words they use? like, um, actually, so…, uh

Or repeat exclamations specific to them? yikes, yowzers, jeepers, jinkies, zoinks, balls, beans, d’oh!

Or idioms they’re fond of? Like a bat out of hell. Snowball’s chance.

Do they stutter when they’re nervous? Do they lose their train of thought and bounce around, losing other characters in the process? Do they have a non-Christian god they pray to and say something other than “thank God”? Are they from another country, culture, time period, realm, or planet with their own gods, beliefs, and idioms?

When they describe settings, how flowery is the language? Would this grizzled war hero use flowery language? How would he or she describe the color pink, versus a PTA mom? Do they use only a generic “blue, green, red” or do they really pay attention with “aquamarine, teal, emerald, viridian, vermillion, rose, ruby”?

How do this character’s hobbies affect how well they can describe dance moves, painting styles, car models, music genres?

This mostly matters when you’re head-hopping and the voice of the narrator serves to be more distinct, otherwise, what’s the point of head-hopping? Just use third-person omniscient.

If you really want to go wild, give a specific narrator unique syntax. Maybe one character is the ghost of Oscar Wild with never-ending run-on sentences. Just be sure to not go too overboard and compromise the integrity of your story.

In the book A Lesson Before Dying, a somewhat illiterate, underprivileged and undereducated minor has been given a mentor, a teacher, before they face the death penalty. At the end of the book, you read all of the letters they wrote to their teacher. There’s misspellings everywhere, almost no punctuation, and long, rambling sentences.

It’s heartbreaking. The subject matter is heavy and horrible, yes, but it’s the choice to write with such poor English that has a much bigger impact than perfect MLA format.

How to implement these details

Most of these, in the written medium, need only show up once or twice before your audience notices and wonders why they’re there. Most fall squarely under character design, which falls under exposition, and should follow all the exposition guidelines.

These details exist to be random and fluffy, but they can’t exist randomly within the narrative. If you want to have your character be superstitious, pick a relevant time to include that superstition.

Others, like ongoing speech habits or movements, still don’t overuse, especially if they’re unique. A character might like to sit backwards in a chair, but if you mention that they’re doing it every single time they sit down, your audience will wonder what’s so important and if the character is unwell.

And, of course, you can let these traits become thematically important, like a superstition being central to their personality or backstory or motivation. These all serve the same purpose of making your character feel like a real person instead of just a “character”.

Just think about tossing in a few random details every now and then and see what happens. One tiny sentence can take a background character and make them candidates for the eventual fandom’s fan favorite. Details like these turn your work from “This a story, and these are the characters who tell it” into “these are my characters, and this is their story.”

[xuexishijian]

句法学 - Syntax

词类 cílèi / 词性 cíxìng - Parts of speech

名词 míngcí - Noun

动词 dòngcí - Verb

形容词 xíngróngcí - Adjective

副词 fùcí / 状语 zhuàngyǔ - Adverb

前置词 qiánzhìcí / 介词 jiècí - Preposition

后置词 hòuzhìcí - Postposition

连词 liáncí - Conjunction

代词 dàicí - Pronoun

限定词 xiàndìngcí - Determiner

句法功能 jùfǎ gōngnéng - Syntactic function

主语 zhǔyǔ - Subject

谓语 wèiyǔ - Predicate

宾语 bīnyǔ - Object

语序 yǔxù - Word order

格 gé - Case

主格 zhǔgé - Nominative

宾格 bīngé - Accusative

与格 yǔgé - Dative

属格 shǔgé - Genitive

具格 jùgé - Instrumental

题元角色 tíyuán juésè - Theta roles （语义角色，语义关系，主题关系）

施事 shīshì - Agent

受事 shòushì / 客事 kèshì - Patient

主事 zhǔshì - Theme

感事 gǎnshì / 经验者 jīngyànzhě - Experiencer

益事 yìshì - Beneficiary

领事 lǐngshì - Recipient

终点 zhōndiǎn - Goal

工具 gōngjù - Instrument

Syntactic structure

中心语 zhōngxīnyǔ - Head

附加语 fùjiāyǔ - Adjunct

标定语 biāodìngyǔ - Specifier

论元 lùnyuán - Argument

补足语 bǔzúyǔ - Complement

短语 duǎnyǔ / 词组 cízǔ - Phrase

句子 jùzi - Sentence

分句 fēnjù - Clause

从句 cóngjù - Subordinate clause

(句子)成分 (jùzi) chéngfen - Constituent

Theoretical terms

管辖 guǎnxiá - Govern

约束 yuēshù - Bind

移位 yíwèi - Movement

语迹 yǔjì - Trace

���贝 kǎobèi - Copy (n.)

提升 tíshēng - Raising

控制 kòngzhì - Control

合并 hébìng - Merge

辖域 xiáyù - Scope

一致 yīzhì - Agreement

特征 tèzhēng - Feature

投射 tóushè - Project (v.)

扩充的投射原则 kuòchōngde tóushè yuánzé - Extended projection principle

语段 yǔduàn - Phase

语段不可渗透性条件 yǔduàn bùkě shèntòuxìng tiáojiàn - Phase impenetrability condition (PIC)

句法树 jùfǎ shù - Syntax trees

节点 jiédiǎn - Node

姐妹节点 jiěmèi jiédiǎn - Sister nodes

母节点 mǔ jiédiǎn - Mother node

女节点 nǚ jiédiǎn - Daughter node

终端节点 zhōngduān jiédiǎn - Terminal node

支配 zhīpèi - Dominate

Theoretical frameworks

生成语法 shēngchéng yǔfǎ - Generative grammar

X' 理论 lǐlùn - X-bar theory （also X次理论）

管辖与约束理论 gǔanxiá yǔ yuēshù lǐlùn - Government & binding

词汇功能语法 cíhuì gōngnéng yǔfǎ - Lexical functional grammar

依存语法 yīcún yǔfǎ - Dependency grammar

[sidsledge]

Lewis Nixon as a poetry movement: The objectivists.

so, I thought it'd be nice if I did a little analysis of Lew's character through different periods of poetry— to be more precise, modernist poetry (late 19th century-mid 20th century). Nix was a socialite and Yale student, so he probably went on to study the classics and more cemented poetry movements like Renaissance poetry and (maybe) the English romantics. however, considering the nature of his character (and I am talking about the HBO dramatized version, not the real-life Lewis Nixon), I think he'd be more interested and moved by the contemporary poets of his time (early 20th century). this is especially because of their disruptive philosophy regarding poetry: the avant-garde movements of the time (which included poetry, but also extended to theater, film, and plastic art) were many, incredibly present in the politics of the period, and brought a new perspective to the study of poetry that remained throughout the century.

the objectivists, which were not exactly a 'movement' and more of a small group of like-minded individuals, believed in the sincerity and objectification of poetry: they treated the poem as an object and had an intelligent approach to their writings, greatly inspired by the previous Imaginist movement and the history contained within their poetry.

the core group of objectivist poets consisted of Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, William Carlos Williams, and George Oppen. they were most present during the 1930s.

their poems were characterized by line breaks that disrupted a normal speech rhythm and had deliberate syntactic fragmentation (something present in 19th century Emily Dickinson's poetry, for example). they weren't inherently absurd (like Dada poetry) and usually touched heavily on political topics, given that most of them were left-wing and/or Marxists. they exploited small and everyday words like 'The', 'Is', and 'A'.

excerpt from Louis Zukofsky's "'A'—22":

why do I think Nix would've enjoyed their poetry? well, for one, I think he would've appreciated the innovation and simple wording used to convey strong emotional points; Nix, unlike characters like Webster, doesn't believe in flowery language and always came across to me as a concise, fast man. he held no love for his years at Yale and always looked at things from a different perspective which, in my opinion, is what made him such a fitting intelligence officer. I think Nix would've been attracted to the objectifying nature of this type of poetry; seeing the poem as a real thing in a way in which it allows us to be sincere with ourselves.

it's worth mentioning that most objectivists came from poverty or marginalized backgrounds, which greatly influenced their writing. naturally, there'd be a real dissonance between Nix and these topics for obvious reasons, but there's no reason to think he'd be put off by them. if anything, I see Nix as a learner, an observer, a very curious man. this is all conjecture of course, but treading into more modern and avant-garde art movements seems like something he'd do in an attempt to distance himself from his structured 'prep school' type of education. while Nix is not precisely a rebel, he's also not one stuck in ancient conventions, and he's not afraid to defy authority (see his reticence regarding sobel and sometimes sink, his approval of Dick's fake patrol, etc). he'll adapt very nicely to social etiquette because that's the environment in which he was raised, sure, but he doesn't really care for it.

excerpt from Carl Rakosi's "In What Sense I Am I", which I think fits Nix’s character rather nicely:

we can see the disjuncture in the way Rakosi presents his sentences, purposefully creating an organized mess of his paragraph to make his poem seem like its building itself off piece by piece; this is just so incredibly Nix in my opinion.

another poem, this time a piece by Lorine Niedecker:

once again, the structure of the poem is loose, and very short. It's concise and to the point; Niedecker's use of "Ah" also showcases the objectivist poetry style, one where everyday expressions and simple sounds take center stage.

to wrap this up, I think Lewis Nixon (as a character!) would be much inclined to a certain type of poetry present mainly in the modernist period of the early 20th century. one that's disruptive, innovative, and contemporary, that isn't afraid to focus on an intelligent use of prose by the poet; this poetry movements (imagism, objectivism, and early confessional poetry) are very tied to their sociopolitical context, and fundamentally change the discipline, which will continue to evolve artistically throughout the rest of the 1900s.

if you'd like me to analyze other BoB (or even the Pacific) characters through poetry and art, please let me know! gotta admit, I wrote this in a frenzy at 3am because I just could not stop thinking about a fictional character's likely poetic inclinations. would appreciate any kind of contribution on this subject too! this is, of course, just my opinion :) feel free to disagree!

[armandaughter]

so it takes 6 complex syntactic movement analysis linguistic tree diagrams to burst into tears ! if anybody was asking

[max1461]

When you want to write a longpost about some interesting aspect of your conworld, like the Hhotakotí revolution, wherein a charismatic young military leader united the Hhotabain for the first time, abolishing the clan system and replacing the traditional positions of clan representatives on local councils with guild representatives, creating an industrial-oligarchic state which would rapidly become a major regional power. But you can't write a longpost about that yet because in order to do that you need to have a good picture of the rhetoric and the writings of the movement, and for that you need to have the details of the traditional clan system and the pitfalls pointed to by its discontents worked out. And the clan system grew naturally as the Hhotakotí spread across the archipelago so you need to have all the early population movements mapped out (for which you need your map, but we'll get to that) and in order to do that you need to decide on a branching for the different dialects of Hhotakotí. Now obviously if you're going to be making decisions about dialect branching you need the basic structure of the grammar down, and the grammar of the protolanguage. But a major part of the grammar that you've been using for years evidently runs up against putative syntactic universal FOFC, which places limits on mixed head-direction structures related to center embedding. And now you've found a possible counterexample in Sumerian, so you want to base your structure on this example, and there's various strange embedding depth constraints you have to account for as a result, but also you have no idea about the diachronics of the Sumerian case obviously. So you have to look into the grammar of some other proposed counterexamples, which mostly come from Australia. Now this is promising because case stacking is an areal feature in both Australia and the Caucasus region, which is probably why these weird center embedding phenomena show up in Sumerian, so you hope that the relevant syntactic structures might be similar enough to be useful. But combing through grammars like this is a lot of work and you have homework all the time so you can't do it right now. And also to place the protolanguage geographically you need your fucking map, which has been lost for 8 years now even though you KNOW it's in a box in your parents' basement somewhere. So you can't write the longpost yet. Anyone else have experience with this?

[nihongoseito]

a brief-ish breakdown of くれる and もらう!

hi all! it’s been a minute since i last wrote a grammar post, but this particular topic has been popping up a lot for me lately so i thought i’d write my own explanation. the difference between these two used to confuse me a lot (and, let’s be real, sometimes もらう is still so confusing lol), but i think it can actually be explained fairly simply. so let’s get to it!!

types of differences between words: grammar vs. semantics

“wait, wait, what??” i hear you say. yes, it’s true—as a linguist i am incapable of explaining a grammar item without also explaining a little bit about human grammar itself. whoops 😉

so, as i’ve implied in the title, words can differ in multiple ways; for くれる and もらう, we’re interested in their grammatical (or “syntactic”) difference as well as their semantic difference. grammar, as i’m sure you know, refers to the structure of language, including word order, word movement, and stuff like that. in this case (くれる/もらう), we’re going to be mainly concerned with particles, an integral part of japanese syntax. so keep that in mind.

semantics, on the other hand, is something you might not be as familiar with (or at least not outside the phrase “just semantics”). semantics basically refers to the meaning of a word or phrase, notably without social context. to give an american english example, the words “you guys” and “y’all” are semantically identical because they both denote the exact same thing: a group of multiple people whom the speaker is addressing. however, any native english speaker can tell you that people do not really use “you guys” and “y’all” interchangeably, largely for social reasons (e.g., where you’re from, your gender identity, etc.).

so, to summarize: grammatical differences are differences in structure, while semantic differences are differences in meaning (without social context). now let’s move on to くれる and もらう!

くれる grammar basics

you might know already that くれる is the japanese “giving” verb. more specifically, it’s the giving verb whose subject isn’t the speaker:

❌ 私が弟にプレゼントをくれた。*

⭕️ 兄が私にプレゼントをくれた。 = my older brother gave me a present.

from these examples, we can deduce two facts about the grammar of くれる:

the giver is marked with が, meaning the giver is the subject.

the recipient is marked with に, meaning the recipient is the indirect object.

these rules apply to くれる used as a solo verb and as an auxiliary (as in 〜てくれる). this grammatical construction is pretty familiar to english speakers, who can say things like “my brother gave a present to me,” mirroring the 兄が私に structure in japanese. english-speakers also might feel like the giver has a more “active” role in the scene, which lends itself well to the giver being the subject.

*in this case, if you were going to use a giving/receiving verb, you would use あげる.

もらう grammar basics

in japanese, もらう is the “receiving” verb, and in fact the only* receiving verb: there is no out-group/in-group distinction here like there is with くれる. let’s look at some examples:

❓ 私に弟がプレゼントをもらった。 = ?my little brother got a present from me.

⭕️ 私が兄にプレゼントをもらった。 = i got a present from my older brother.

the first example, marked with ❓, is not technically grammatically incorrect (as far as i know), but it is sort of awkward, just like in english. the second example, on the other hand, shows us exactly what we need to know about the grammar of もらう:

the giver is marked with に**, meaning the giver belongs to a prepositional phrase.

the recipient is marked with が, meaning the recipient is the subject.

are you seeing an important difference between もらう and くれる? you probably noticed: while the subject of a くれる phrase is the giver, the subject of a もらう phrase is the recipient. this makes it really obvious that くれる is about someone giving something to someone else, while もらう is about someone receiving something from someone else.

as with くれる, the above rules apply to もらう as a solo verb and the 〜てもらう auxiliary construction.

*in this post, i’m ignoring 敬語, so technically there are indeed other receiving verbs (like いただく), but only as far as formalities go.

**the giver in a もらう sentence can technically also be marked with から, but i don’t feel like that’s very common to see.

the semantics of くれる and もらう

let’s compare the two correct examples from the above sections:

兄が私にプレゼントをくれた。 = my older brother gave me a present.

私が兄にプレゼントをもらった。 = i got a present from my older brother.

now, imagine a scene on a stage where no words are spoken: someone labeled 兄 mutely hands a wrapped gift box to another person labeled 私, and then the curtain falls. how would you describe that scene you just saw—using the first sentence, with くれる? or using the second sentence, with もらう?

if your answer was “i don’t know,” or maybe “what’s the difference,” then you’ve actually hit upon something really important about くれる and もらう! while certain social implications might be different between the two verbs (e.g., was 私 expecting to get a present?), the semantics of くれる and もらう in this construction are functionally identical. remember, semantics ignores social context, so whatever the particular circumstances of this gift-giving scene, the fact remains that a present changes hands from 兄 to 私, which can be accurately described by either the first example sentence or the second. to put it simply, the constructions XがYにZをくれる and XにYがZをもらう mean the same thing! it’s easy to remember that way, right?

summary!

so, we’ve looked at the grammatical differences and the semantics differences (or lack thereof) between くれる and もらう. here they are:

in くれる sentences, the subject (marked with が) is the giver. in もらう sentences, the subject (marked with が) is the recipient. 

in くれる sentences, に marks the recipient. in もらう sentences, に marks the giver. this means that the grammatical (particle) structure of くれる and もらう sentences is reversed.

the constructions XがYにZをくれる and XにYがZをもらう are semantically identical, i.e., they mean the same thing. this is true of sentences where くれる and もらう stand alone and sentences where they are auxiliaries following the 〜て form of another verb.

and that’s that! obviously there are always exceptions and complications to rules, but i hope that my explanation of these two words has been helpful for you. i spent a long time not understanding how to use もらう since it didn’t really feel like anything we had in english, but once i learned exactly how it was related to くれる, i think started to get the hang of it—and i bet you can too!

as a final note: if people are interested in more posts about もらう (which i have personally found is the trickiest for english speakers), i might have a post about semantic-passive もらう coming down the pipeline, so keep your eyes peeled! またね！！

[sentence-arborist]

Hey, I don't usually ask stuff on tumblr but... What does the "I" in "IP" stand for? (I'm sorry if my sentence is grammatically incorrect as English is not my first language )

So the long and the short of it is that in non-derivational theories it doesn't really stand for anything much anymore - sort of.

Historically, "I" stood for "Inflection", with IP being the Inflectional Phrase. This is because, in certain early movement-based theories of syntax, the inflected part of an inflected verb moved to I.

These days, most mainstream syntactic theories hold by some form of the lexicalist hypothesis* (i.e. syntactic rules can't "see inside" words and operate on their constituent components), so you generally don't posit just the inflection of a verb appearing anywhere alone in the structure. However, the IP is still where "inflected material" tends to appear - in English, it's where inflected auxiliaries go (mostly); in Russian, it's where the main inflected verb goes; in Warlpiri, it's where the inflected auxiliary goes; etc.

TL;DR - it stands for "Inflection", but really means "inflected verbal material".

* The exception here is Distributed Morphology and the various frameworks derived from it, such as LrFG. I personally find these frameworks silly and implausible - there is a reason the field of morphology pretty much entirely ditched morphemes a decade or two ago now - but they do exist and are gaining traction in some parts of the field, so I guess I am obliged by academic integrity to at least mention them.

[ghelgheli]

does anyone know any writing on the relationship between wh-movement (and other syntactic or semantic question-markers) and how obligatory question marks are in text. they are functionally redundant in most cases in english bc of wh-fronting. meanwhile farsi questions that don't use question words are only distinguished from assertions by tone. so you sometimes have to be careful in text—tho ppl will often drop question marks when context can substitute for tone. feels like there must be a quantifiable spectrum?

[linguistlist-blog]

Jobs: West Germanic; Historical Linguistics, Semantics: Postdoctoral Fellowship in formal diachronic semantics/pragmatics, Ghent University

Description: The job involves formal semantic and pragmatic modeling of Information Structure-related phenomena from a diachronic perspective. Information Structure-related phenomena are to be understood broadly, including but not limited to pragmatic reflexes of syntactic movements, semantics&pragmatics of pronouns, determiners, and quantifiers. The selection of phenomena to be investigated depends on the candidate's background and will be discussed and determined during the hiring interview http://dlvr.it/TKN3Ky

[dog-uncrushed]

The potential superiority of man to himself is that which is denominated by the signifier “Phallus”.

Insofar as he lays claim to the Phallus, man asserts that he is more than what he merely is in fact. Phallic man insists: “you forgot to count my appendage”. I am not merely what I am ‘as’ a mosaic of facts. I am also, over and about these mosaic facts, my name, my nominal effect. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, my name is X Y the Nth…”. I am he who is called X, therefore it is not merely I you are dealing with, but X.

The Phallus is this “X factor”. This nominal effect that does not disclose itself. It is the power of a Name as a surface. It is the veil that is powerful insofar as it retains its function as a veil, i.e., of establishing a relative separation between the veiled thing and its spectator. Put otherwise, the Phallus is that which appears as the ‘pure’ surplus or excess produced by language. This surplus gives man an extra dimension: it is his suit of armour, his tinted sunglasses, his lance, crown or fire-arm. It is that which makes man protrude from his environment and thereby renders him irreducible to it.

In this context, we might think of the following claim from George Steiner’s book After Babel: “[Inuit] grammar is appropriate to the Sahara”. This sentence proposes that syntactic structures are relatively independent from their environment. The transportation of a linguistic community from the arctic to the Sahara would come at no syntactic cost. The change of environment only necessitates that the Intuits learn or coin names for all that which is unfamiliar to them. The linguistic enclosure of the Inuits would not fall apart because of this environmental displacement. All that is necessitated is the invention or borrowing of names for the unfamiliar.

Man lives within the medium of language and this medium opens or constitutes a space that insulates the human being from its environment. In this movement, environment is raised to the dignity of place. The human relation to space transcends the merely environmental to become historical. While these are not Derrida’s terms, the following thought is indebted to an insight from his Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: it is the opening of an ahistorical space —— the atemporal, utopian space afforded by distancing of the Phallic function —— that sets history into motion. For without this function, the human animal would be fated to a purely environmental determination. To the forgotten, ahistorical fate of an animal. Yet this distanciation and consequent terraformation means that environments attain a formal equality. From the standpoint of history, no one environment is privileged over another. History can take place anywhere. Mythology and space opera testify to the fact that history (or fiction) can take place even in non-terrestrial or uninhabitable environments.

It is the fact that the human being can come out of the world, that makes history possible. Without this protrusion, this excess or transcendence of fact, there could be no narrative, no architecture, law or deception. For this protrusion is the sign that man is had by something other than the world: that fictive power called language.

[nylanguageworkshop]

Workshop Monday, December 2nd: Craige Roberts, Attitudes de re: Semantics and dynamic pragmatics

Our speaker on Monday, December 2nd will be Craige Roberts, who is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Ohio State . Craige will give a talk called "Attitudes de re: Semantics and dynamic pragmatics"

I argue that de re attitude attributions arise quite regularly as a result of two types of presuppositions associated with utterances wherein an NP which is definite (pronoun, definite or demonstrative description, or proper name) or a specific indefinite occurs in the complement of an attitude predicate or some other doxastic intensional context. The first (cf. Maier 2019) is an anaphoric presupposition triggered by the use of the definite NP (Heim 1982,1983,1992) or specific indefinite (Kratzer 1998). Though the NP remains in situ in the embedded clause, non- local satisfaction of this presupposition results in truth conditional effects akin to those that would result from giving the NP semantic wide scope over the attitude: presuppositionally triggered wide pseudo-scope. In the resulting interpretation, the triggering NP’s contribution to semantic content is simply the res which is the actual denotation of its wider scope antecedent, yielding interpretation de re without syntactically unmotivated NP movement at LF (Keshet & Schwarz 2019) or structured propositions (von Stechow & Cresswell 1982). The second presupposition is a background implication entailed by any de re attitude attribution: Epistemically limited humans can never know a res directly or completely, but only under some limited guise or other. So an agent can only hold an attitude toward a res under some guise reflecting their acquaintance. This captures the acquaintance requirement of Kaplan (1986), but here arises as the reflection of an ontological precondition on the existence of a de re attitude, a non-anaphoric presupposition (Roberts & Simons 2024). Thus, acquaintance under a guise is an entailment of the triggering attitude in conjunction with the wide pseudo-scope of the target NP, arising from our world knowledge of the corresponding type of situation. To model it, there is no need to stipulate silent existential operators or concept generators at LF, avoiding Lederman’s (2021) problems for Percus & Sauerland (2003).

This account is straightforwardly realized using independently motivated tools in a dynamic pragmatics: presuppositionally triggered pseudo-scope for definites (including names), and the notion of presuppositional background content. Drawing on Aloní (2001), the notion of a guise is modeled as an individual concept in a conceptual cover, thereby inheriting her account’s advantages over previous accounts of the de re. In a de re attribution, the nature of the guise under which the agent is acquainted with the res is not semantically specified; the semantic content of the attitude report merely entails that there is some counterpart relation that maps the actual res to entities in the agent’s belief worlds which have the properties predicated of the embedded definite NP. But the nature of the entailed guise is often pragmatically evident from context, or even explicitly given by an appositive (Soames 2002). When this is the case, we can contextually enrich the meaning of the utterance by adding the presumption that the entailed guise of acquaintance is the particular contextually retrieved guise. Unlike with Aloní’s perspective shifting operator ℘ or Stalnaker’s (1979) diagonalization, on the present account we needn’t shift the NP’s semantic interpretation (Gluer & Pagin 2006,2012); context merely pragmatically enriches that interpretation to make the presupposed guise more specific.

All this sheds new light on a number of classic problems pertaining to the de re (Frege 1892; Quine 1956,1961; Geach 1967, etc.). Moreover, with the addition of centered worlds (Lewis 1979), the theory straightforwardly extends to account for de se interpretations, while avoiding problems of the de se, pointed out by Ninan (2016), for the classical doctrine of propositions.

The workshop will take place on Monday, December 2nd from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

[physalian]

What No One Tells You About Writing #6

This round we’re doing some recent discoveries on my writing journey. Some are less groundbreaking and more “I did not expect this to become an issue” things, which, hey no one told me about them, either.

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

1. Switching tenses between your WIPs is not easy

Up until my upcoming book (Eternal Night of the Northern Sky, go check it out) I wrote exclusively in past-tense with very rare exception save for a fanfic here and there. I cannot remember what compelled me to write ENNS in present tense, but I’d committed and 10k words in, there was no going back to change it.

Committing in the first place made it very frustrating trying to actively remember my English verb tenses and sentence structures (and I am a native English speaker) that just have not come naturally to me in 8 years of writing, but once I got it, I got it.

So while waiting around during the editing process and trying to go back to past-tense for another project, past-tense started to look janky and awkward and my WIPs, too, are now written in present-tense. I am undecided on how to feel about this beyond annoyed that it is a problem.

2. Implied sex scenes have surprising pros and cons

I’m of the belief that sex scenes, like action scenes, should serve a purpose and do a lot of heavy lifting. It’s not just the actual progression of movement between the characters, it’s the exploration of trust and vulnerability, the consummation of a relationship, the growth of these two characters together with a new understanding (if this is meant to be a huge moment and not, like, an establishing one-night stand). Otherwise it becomes gratuitous fluff.

Enter the problem: I cannot write all the character development that occurs during a sex scene, if I cannot also write the sex. All of that newly broken ground on trust and gushy emotions has to come in the buildup before I decide to cut away and in skipping the rest of that scene, I have to essentially freeze the character development until I pick up the narrative again in the aftermath.

So if it’s a moment that’s meant to be the climax of two characters trusting each other, or anything that would require them talking through this important milestone in their relationship, I have to rework everything around the redacted narrative.

Sex scenes are just so unique that way. People can be very sensitive about them, they’re very tricky to get right, very revealing about what the author thinks is sexy and attractive, incredibly important relationship milestones for the characters, and, aside from torture or extremely graphic violence, the only scenes you ‘fade to black’ on and leave it up to wild imagination.

*OP why don’t you just bite the bullet and write the sex? Because I want to be an inclusive author and you’ll enjoy my book even without sex to go write your own, but you might not read it if it’s on the page because of personal taste or triggers or beliefs, okay?

3. Your crutch words will haunt you

Here is a list of 40 of them. I will never be the kind of author that struggles to make my stories longer. To everyone who does, I wish I had your problems—trying to trim the fat off a narrative already running at breakneck speed demands trimming individual words off sentences sometimes. Like crutch words.

These carry over from real-world conversation, words we don’t always realize we’re relying on. My big one is “just”. I had a 125k word manuscript and had over 600 instances of “just” and maybe only a dozen were warranted by the time the ax fell.

Good news is, once you see them and embarrass yourself finding, replacing and/or deleting them, you become very aware of them in your writing. Crutch words are a lot like cursing, which I talked about in Part 5—not including them doesn’t leave a big of a crater in the dialogue as you might think. I still use “just” and “so” but “so” is worked into my writing style as a syntactical element and I tend to leave my “so’s” in place. “Just,” on the other hand, can be cut 99% of the time.

*Disclaimer, those dozen “justs” I ended up keeping in that manuscript were all in dialogue, because while the narrative should be clean of crutch words, personally I think keeping them as your characters’ crutch words can make them feel more human.

4. Breaking up dialogue-heavy scenes with movement can get tedious

This is entirely dependent on writing style. Some books will have entire unbroken paragraphs of dialogue, make a new paragraph, and keep going with the same unbroken dialogue. Some will split a monologue up with character movement or reaction to whatever’s being said. Some authors are very frugal with dialogue tags (to varying levels of success) and some over-describe the movement of their characters or use way too many superfluous tags when “said” is not actually dead, your primary education lied.

Just keep in mind that writing is, well, written. The intonation of words might be completely lost in translation if you slap your reader with a wall of text, especially in an important character moment, and they have a critical misunderstanding in how they’re supposed to perceive the line being delivered.

This is why we use italics for emphasis. We’re still trying to legitimize the interobang (!?) because it’s very useful, and we’re very far from legitimizing Tumblr Speak to convey sarcasm and sincerity. How we convey tone is generally isolated to the generation we grew up in and the technology we had available (like how younger generations interpret ellipses compared to their parents).

There’s that Tumblr post out there that goes: “I never said she stole my money,” and claims that the meaning behind the denial changes wildly depending on which word you stress, seven different ways—and that person is absolutely right.

Every dialogue-heavy scene is a case-by-case basis, and best advice I can give is to have your betas pay extra attention to those scenes, making sure they interpret it right, or even having someone read the dialogue back to you with inflection to make sure you’re tagging and describing it properly.

Too many breaks for narrative and you risk clogging up the scene. Not enough and you lose a lot of the emotion behind their words when you aren’t describing how the speaker is visually reacting to what they’re saying.

5. Truth really is stranger than fiction

Maybe it’s the capitalist hellscape we all find ourselves in, but for example: If you told me someone wrote a book about a submersible, built for tours to the Titanic wreck, and was dubbed “Titan,” run by a company called OceanGate, failed via catastrophic implosion on its descent to the most infamous maritime disaster in history, infamous for its hubris as the “unsinkable ship,” only to find out that the company with “-Gate” in its name circumvented and ignored multiple regulations and expert opinions…. I’d call that the most contrived and lazy attempt at a criticism of human folly I’ve ever seen.

And that sh*t really happened. Titanic is already almost mythical for its hubris. The engineer of that ship stared God in the face and said bet, and lost. Then you have the same damn incident happen a century later, for the same damn reasons.

Truth might not be ‘stranger’ than fiction, perhaps as equally contrived, equally unbelievable, and can reach equal amounts of astounding stupidity. Anyone, anywhere, for the rest of literary history, can no longer say “that deus/diablo ex machina would never happen” because it can. It did.

6. You’ll find inspiration everywhere, but have nowhere to put it

Deciding what kind of story you want to tell takes so many layers, it deserves its own post that has been covered plenty else by other writers over the years but since I write fantasy and sci-fi, my inspiration usually starts with “I want to write a story about X fantasy element” and I go from there. Then the sub-genre, like if it’ll be an adventure, urban fantasy, high fantasy, what time period, etc. Then the theme.

If I’ve got my laptop close, I can polish off a whole first chapter in maybe two hours. And then… it gets dumped into my “stalled projects” folder, to be saved, but moved aside so it doesn’t clutter the workspace of WIPs I’m actually invested in.

Sometimes they’ll get revisited, sometimes my enthusiasm wanes as quickly as it came on. It can get disappointing and discouraging, but if anyone ever met your “I want to be a writer” with skepticism, or you yourself fear that you’ll be a one-trick pony in a creative slump forever: The inspiration probably isn’t the issue, it’s committing to the story you dreamt up.

7. Just because it never gets published, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value

My writing journey began with original works back in middle school, then I gravitated toward fanfic once I discovered it and got a huge confidence boost from all the positive feedback from my readers, then felt restricted by my fandoms and switched back to original works. The very first novel I started out with was my sci-fi WIP, eight years ago, that will likely never see the light of day as it was written. I have two completed books that could be self-published right now.

The problem: Book three, of a planned five, generated a “deleted scenes” pile that quickly outpaced the word count of the actual manuscript because I cannot seamlessly fit every arc of my ensemble cast when and how I want them to happen. And, as previously mentioned, those 8-year-old characters have suffered me using them as writing therapy, and some elements have gotten far darker and more convoluted than I intended, because the worldbuilding pool got way deeper than a book with an ensemble cast can support.

But even if it never gets published, it’s not worthless. Those two books sprinted so I could jog. They were so detailed and so complex and had so many layers that starting over in a different genre with something simpler like ENNS was a breeze. I’d cut my teeth on a narrative that demanded an insane amount of behind-the-scenes production that nothing else would ever be as hard.

Not everyone will have that experience, but if you’ve saved all your old and cringey works from your early days, go back and read them and compare them to where you are now, and hopefully you realize that you’re turning into the author you thought you would be, even if you’re not quite there yet.

Now go write your insane mega-hit waiting to happen.

—

Upcoming blog topics!

Tackling beginnings and endings

Why we should normalize content warnings

Crutch tropes #2 - "we're not so different"

[remembering-the-future]

Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed intellectuals, and the inevitable AI eavesdroppers, thank you for attending today's discourse on the "Tetrahedralization of the Historicized Lipreader: A Technological Paradigm Shift," a topic as pertinent to our future as it is utterly incomprehensible to the general public.

We gather today not merely to discuss, but to dissect, the implications of tetrahedral structures on modern interpretative frameworks, particularly within the domain of technology-enhanced lipreading—a practice which, I must stress, was considered laughable in the days when humans still spoke with their mouths. One might recall the early 21st century—a period when nascent lipreading technologies merely guessed at lip movements, in a pathetically linear fashion, attempting to render speech from rudimentary visual data. Such primitive approaches now appear quaint, akin to trying to decode poetry using only the scrabble tiles available at a kindergarten picnic.

Today, however, we witness the transcendence of mere "lipreading" into a tetrahedral symphony of historicized data processing. No longer is lipreading an act of simple interpretation; it is, in fact, an archaeological excavation of phonemes, a deep-dive into an individual’s lexicon, syntactical idiosyncrasies, and cultural vernacular—all accomplished via a four-dimensional matrix of vocal spectrograms. This is the tetrahedron of meaning: depth, width, height, and the ineffable curvature of semantic legacy. For the layperson, imagine if every word uttered were enveloped in the ancestral echoes of previous speakers, digitized, and cataloged into a tapestry of spoken historical artifacts.

And here, my friends, is where we historicize. In a brilliant technological irony, the very act of interpreting words has become an homage to their origins, a blend of computational archaeology and futuristic analysis. Our tetrahedral lipreaders do not merely render speech; they reconstruct it, dragging forth every syllable from the primordial soup of human language evolution, layering it with ancestral syntax and dialectal flourishes. Every word uttered—whether "hello" or "antidisestablishmentarianism"—is imbued with the ghostly whispers of its etymological predecessors. Some say that with each articulation, we are but channeling the voices of every ancestor who ever dared to speak. Of course, those who say this are usually historians with a penchant for melodrama, but nonetheless, they are not entirely incorrect.

Finally, let us consider the broader implications of these tetrahedral, historicized lipreaders in our hyper-advanced society. One can scarcely imagine the privacy implications, the linguistic disambiguations, the social ramifications. Will the grand tapestry of human discourse become subject to involuntary, forensic analysis, with each phrase cataloged, cross-referenced, and evaluated for historic authenticity? Shall we soon arrive at a place where our every word is scrutinized by not only context but by the entire lexiconic lineage of humankind? Will lipreading AIs snicker at our linguistic anomalies, quietly judging our choice of diction as "so 2023"?

In conclusion, the evolution of tetrahedral lipreading technologies encapsulates humanity’s deepest desires—to understand, to categorize, and ultimately, to historicize itself. As we continue to apply technology to the seemingly simple act of reading lips, we inch closer to creating a future in which all speech is tethered to its ancestral history, every utterance a testament to the words that preceded it. And, if nothing else, it allows us to imagine a world where even our silence speaks volumes. Thank you.

[govindhtech]

SYCL 2020’s Five New Features For Modern C++ Programmers

SYCL

For accelerator-using C++ programmers, SYCL 2020 is interesting. People enjoyed contributing to the SYCL standard, a book, and the DPC++ open source effort to integrate SYCL into LLVM. The SYCL 2020 standard included some of the favorite new features. These are Intel engineers’ views, not Khronos’.

Khronos allows heterogeneous C++ programming with SYCL. After SYCL 2020 was finalized in late 2020, compiler support increased.

SYCL is argued in several places, including Considering a Heterogeneous Future for C++ and other materials on sycl.tech. How will can allow heterogeneous C++ programming with portability across vendors and architectures? SYCL answers that question.

SYCL 2020 offers interesting new capabilities to be firmly multivendor and multiarchitecture with to community involvement.

The Best Five

A fundamental purpose of SYCL 2020 is to harmonize with ISO C++, which offers two advantages. First, it makes SYCL natural for C++ programmers. Second, it lets SYCL test multivendor, multiarchitecture heterogeneous programming solutions that may influence other C++ libraries and ISO C++.

Changing the base language from C++11 to C++17 allows developers to use class template argument deduction (CTAD) and deduction guides, which necessitated several syntactic changes in SYCL 2020.

Backends allow SYCL to target more hardware by supporting languages/frameworks other than OpenCL.

USM is a pointer-based alternative to SYCL 1.2.1’s buffer/accessor concept.

A “built-in” library in SYCL 2020 accelerates reductions, a frequent programming style.

The group library abstracts cooperative work items, improving application speed and programmer efficiency by aligning with hardware capabilities (independent of vendor).

Atomic references aligned with C++20 std::atomic_ref expand heterogeneous device memory models.

These enhancements make the SYCL ecosystem open, multivendor, and multiarchitecture, allowing C++ writers to fully leverage heterogeneous computing today and in the future.

Backends

With backends, SYCL 2020 allows implementations in languages/frameworks other than OpenCL. Thus, the namespace has been reduced to sycl::, and the SYCL header file has been relocated from to .

These modifications affect SYCL deeply. Although implementations are still free to build atop OpenCL (and many do), generic backends have made SYCL a programming approach that can target more diverse APIs and hardware. SYCL can now “glue” C++ programs to vendor-specific libraries, enabling developers to target several platforms without changing their code.

SYCL 2020 has true openness, cross-architecture, and cross-vendor.

This flexibility allows the open-source DPC++ compiler effort to support NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs by implementing SYCL 2020 in LLVM (clang). SYCL 2020 has true openness, cross-architecture, and cross-vendor.

Unified shared memory

Some devices provide CPU-host memory unified views. This unified shared memory (USM) from SYCL 2020 allows a pointer-based access paradigm instead of the buffer/accessor model from SYCL 1.2.1.

Programming with USM provides two benefits. First, USM provides a single address space across host and device; pointers to USM allocations are consistent and may be provided to kernels as arguments. Porting pointer-based C++ and CUDA programs to SYCL is substantially simplified. Second, USM allows shared allocations to migrate seamlessly between devices, enhancing programmer efficiency and compatibility with C++ containers (e.g., std::vector) and algorithms.

Three USM allocations provide programmers as much or as little data movement control as they want. Device allocations allow programmers full control over application data migration. Host allocations are beneficial when data is seldom utilized and transporting it is not worth the expense or when data exceeds device capacity. Shared allocations are a good compromise that immediately migrate to use, improving performance and efficiency.

Reductions

Other C++ reduction solutions, such as P0075 and the Kokkos and RAJA libraries, influenced SYCL 2020.

The reducer class and reduction function simplify SYCL kernel variable expression using reduction semantics. It also lets implementations use compile-time reduction method specialization for good performance on various manufacturers’ devices.

The famous BabelStream benchmark, published by the University of Bristol, shows how SYCL 2020 reductions increase performance. BabelStream’s basic dot product kernel computes a floating-point total of all kernel work items. The 43-line SYCL 1.2.1 version employs a tree reduction in work-group local memory and asks the user to choose the optimal device work-group size. SYCL 2020 is shorter (20 lines) and more performance portable by leaving algorithm and work-group size to implementation.

Group Library

The work-group abstraction from SYCL 1.2.1 is expanded by a sub-group abstraction and a library of group-based algorithms in SYCL 2020.

Sub_group describes a kernel’s cooperative work pieces running “together,” providing a portable abstraction for various hardware providers. Sub-groups in the DPC++ compiler always map to a key hardware concept SIMD vectorization on Intel architectures, “warps” on NVIDIA architectures, and “wavefronts” on AMD architectures enabling low-level performance optimization for SYCL applications.

In another tight agreement with ISO C++, SYCL 2020 includes group-based algorithms based on C++17: all_of, any_of, none_of, reduce, exclusive_scan, and inclusive_scan. SYCL implementations may use work-group and/or sub-group parallelism to produce finely tailored, cooperative versions of these functions since each algorithm is supported at various scopes.

Atomic references

Atomics improved in C++20 with the ability to encapsulate types in atomic references (std::atomic_ref). This design (sycl::atomic_ref) is extended to enable address spaces and memory scopes in SYCL 2020, creating an atomic reference implementation ready for heterogeneous computing.

SYCL follows ISO C++, and memory scopes were necessary for portable programming without losing speed. Don’t disregard heterogeneous systems’ complicated memory topologies.

Memory models and atomics are complicated, hence SYCL does not need all devices to use the entire C++ memory model to support as many devices as feasible. SYCL offers a wide range of device capabilities, another example of being accessible to all vendors.

Beyond SYCL 2020: Vendor Extensions

SYCL 2020’s capability for multiple backends and hardware has spurred vendor extensions. These extensions allow innovation that provides practical solutions for devices that require it and guides future SYCL standards. Extensions are crucial to standardization, and the DPC++ compiler project’s extensions inspired various elements in this article.

Two new DPC++ compiler features are SYCL 2020 vendor extensions.

Group-local Memory at Kernel Scope

Local accessors in SYCL 1.2.1 allow for group-local memory, which must be specified outside of the kernel and sent as a kernel parameter. This might seem weird for programmers from OpenCL or CUDA, thus has created an extension to specify group-local memory in a kernel function. This improvement makes kernels more self-contained and informs compiler optimizations (where local memory is known at compile-time).

FPGA-Specific Extensions

The DPC++ compiler project supports Intel FPGAs. It seems that the modifications, or something similar, can work with any FPGA suppliers. FPGAs are a significant accelerator sector, and nous believe it pioneering work will shape future SYCL standards along with other vendor extension initiatives.

Have introduced FPGA choices to make buying FPGA hardware or emulation devices easier. The latter allows quick prototyping, which FPGA software writers must consider. FPGA LSU controls allow us to tune load/store operations and request a specific global memory access configuration. Also implemented data placement controls for external memory banks (e.g., DDR channel) to tune FPGA designs via FPGA memory channel. FPGA registers allow major tuning controls for FPGA high-performance pipelining.

Summary

Heterogeneity endures. Many new hardware alternatives focus on performance and performance-per-watt. This trend will need open, multivendor, multiarchitecture programming paradigms like SYCL.

The five new SYCL 2020 features assist provide portability and performance mobility. C++ programmers may maximize heterogeneous computing with SYCL 2020.

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