"Candidate (20e) wins when DEP is dominated by the others", "LIN ranks higher than MAX, thus the violations that do occur are not fatal" and "This discussion also serves to introduce evidence of a conspiracy between substitution and deletion"... Fragments from a yellow mystery? A sumo match commentary? An article about sexual abuse in the military? Hardly. Just excerpts from a couple of articles i'm reading for my phonology class. I'm expected to produce their abstracts and present them in class.
Apparently, phonologists love to personify their study subjects. Yet, considering that what phonology studies is how different sound features interact in human speech, it is disorienting to think authors would go to the bother of giving human traits to processes that are so inmaterial. Plus, why complicate things with metaphores? Isn't this stuff unintelligible enough already? Granted, drawing comparisons can be helpful sometimes, but in this case i just find them distracting.
"Candidate (20e) ended up leading the mission because of his interpersonal skills. He proved to be the only one able to get the other finalists to act in a coordinated manner, and since such coordination was the only way in which the cruel DEP could be defeated, everybody accepted his dominance. Massing 250 tons and towering over the city's skyscrapers, DEP was created to test that those citizens aspiring to replace the mayor would really risk their life for the welfare of their hometown."
That's more like it! But i'm sure this is not the kind of abstract they are after.
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