Almost exactly a year after I arrived here in Brighton, I turned in my dissertation, on time, complete, and with a good chance of getting a high grade. It was quite an ordeal, and I'm glad it's over now, though it was mostly a fun project. Here are some stats, for those who like stats:
Words in main text (excluding example sentences with like): 17,574
Number of example sentences: 93 (some repeated)
Pages of main text: 68
Pages of cited sources: 5
Number of figures: 4 (one table, one organization chart, two bar graphs)
Number of appendices: 3
Pages of appendices: 43
So this thing ended up being 121 pages in total, once the title page, table of contents, etc. were added. Neato.
My research question was about the pragmatic and social features of nonstandard like, as in "That's like, really weird," and what about this word has made its interpretation and classification so difficult for researchers in the past--i.e., why are there so many different theories floating around. I ended up expanding the number of uses attributed to the word, forming a coherent classification system that explains the links among all the different uses, and found several factors that contribute to the problems in analyzing it. My dissertation supervisor thinks that my ideas are original enough to be published, so he wants to work with me on altering the final paper into something suitable for linguistics journals. That would mean taking out most of my literature review, in which I summarize and criticize past studies, and focusing more on my own theories, with probably quite a lot of editing down. So I think that might be next on my card.
Before starting that project, though, I'm going to catch up on my sleep, catch up on my blog entries (I have quite a backlog), and take a short trip up north a bit to the Peak District with Ed. It's good to no longer have any major obligations for a while.
