The best summer of my life,,, so far?

I would love to say that I kept on top of blogging this summer and that this is just the next in a series of posts about the internship I have completed.

However, as you can see, this is the first post in months so this clearly isn't the case.

I have had the best summer of my life, and I'm not exaggerating.

I've never really enjoyed the summer, but this was absolutely an exception. My internship finished a few weeks ago now and Sheffield has started feeling slightly autumnal. I'm sad to see this summer end.

I've done a crazy amount of quizzing this summer almost accidentally but the major thing that was happening this summer for me was the internship.

So, what exactly have I been up to this summer?

The short answer, we've been looking at children's use of the Spanish pronoun 'se', which performs many grammatical functions relating to the structure of arguments.

For example, in the sentence 'dos elefantes se paseaban', 'se' refers to 'dos elefantes', the external argument, this sentence is glossed below.

Dos elefantes se paseaban

Two elephant.pl 3sg.voice walk.past.pl.

‘Two elephants were walking’

We've focused on two specific kinds of structures in Spanish which use 'se', middles and morphological passives. Morphological passives grammatically emphasise the object and deemphasise the subject (e.g. 'John was seen by Mary').

Middles are similar to passives but do not permit expression of subjects (e.g. 'These books sell easily').

I spent a lot of time initially learning how to search the CHILDES database. This was actually really cool and the searches I was completing felt like coding. I feel like I learned a lot about computers during this project, especially the fact that Mac's are fine until you start trying to do anything remotely complicated 😂

After we had done the searches, I spent time working with Excel spreadsheets and learned how to make a formula generate percentages for me (I'm still riding the high of actually learning how to use Excel formulae). Working with the spreadsheets was very time consuming and at one point I started dreaming about them which was a bit odd. I did really enjoy getting to use my Spanish knowledge to do something linguistic though and I've had the chance to do something that I've not studied as part of my degree. I could have taken a module on first language acquisition last semester but I chose to do a literature module instead. The literature module was great and doing this project has allowed me to cover a small portion of what I could have done had I taken the module.

As well as completing the project itself, I was expected to complete three outputs for the project to hand into the SURE scheme. By November, I will have written a reflective piece and a conference abstract as well as created a poster to disseminate the research.

I submitted the reflective piece and conference abstract earlier this month and am currently chipping away at the poster while I prepare for the new semester. I really enjoyed writing the conference abstract actually, it was definitely difficult to condense what we did into 250 words but it's been really helpful in explaining what I've been doing to people beyond "working with Spanish verbs". It has also been helpful with writing this blog-post!

I'm excited for uni to start up again and am really looking forward to working on my dissertation this year. Around my internship, I've been working my way through a bunch of Marlowe's work in preparation for meeting with my supervisor in the autumn.