Thank You, Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshperson

Presented by The Third Autonomous Bilborough Linguistics Circle

A linguistics degree can be daunting at the best of times, so there’s no doubt we all owe a sackful of gratitude to the Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshman (or Woman!).^* While you’re sitting there wondering how inflectional and derivational morphemes are to be distinguished, or puzzling over the suggestion that there is an intermediate X-bar level between the terminal, lexical X node and its phrasal maximal projection XP, X being constant for any given distributionally defined functional or content category (whatever that means), it can be really helpful to have the Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshperson offering additional examples (or even better, counter-examples) from languages such as Tagalog and Evenki in that helpfully gushing manner. The enthusiasm alone is a motivational factor, pointing up clearly that whingeing and moaning over a 2,500-word essay on the role of the glottis in speech production is simply unhelpful, but more than that, the knowledge that the Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshperson brings to the tutor group serves to show just what can be achieved by anyone who is already an overachiever.

So, say goodbye to those uncomfortable silences in tutorials when no one seems to know the answer and just wants to get outside and see if there’s free pizza at the student union. The Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshperson will have an answer to all those questions about the accusative in Old English before you’ve understood what the question is. And say goodbye to those long hours of head-scratching in the library at 2 a.m. wondering what the difference between a maxim violation and a flout is; the Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshperson’s infectious, happy-go-lucky, hail fellow well met is almost certainly sitting at the desk next to yours writing a paper on the sophomore morphology set texts. They’ll be happy to help you in their usual bubbly way. Thank you, Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshperson.

Thank You, Overly Enthusiastic Multilingual Freshperson.

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