Syntax I

I’ve finally completed the complex extra credit assignment that I was trying to have ready for Tuesday (you can download the PDF file).

It’s a relatively long excursion into what we need to suppose in order to draw a tree for the sentence Trees are easy to draw. I quite like it, actually—but it’s significantly more challenging (or at least more involved) than any homework assignment so far. It also is quite wide-ranging, making use of topics we’ve covered throughout the semester, from constituency tests up to phases. Honestly, if I’d written it over the summer, it would probably have been a take-home final.

I’m still debating how best to count this, and I’ll announce my decision about it in class on Tuesday. It will probably be worth more than just a single homework score, given how involved it is.

There is no due date on this problem, apart from the end of the semester.

I’ve gotten enough last minute questions on this one that I think I want to give you a little bit longer on this last homework. So, you can hand it in after break, although if you’re happy with it (if you understand it, you’ll probably know, there aren’t really that many “tricks” involved) and want to give it to me today, fine.

I was never planning on assigning a homework over this break anyway, so this won’t put anyone behind, really.

I was, however, planning to release an “extra credit” assignment that you could do, if you so desired. I had what I thought was a pretty nice one worked out concerning the (famous, old, and practically insoluble problem of how to analyze sentences like Trees are easy to draw), but by the time I got it most of the way done, I’d seen a flaw in the approach I was guiding you toward. So, I’ll have to post it later, once the break has begun. There won’t be a deadline for it, except just the end of the semester.

Just a reminder about the final exam date, which is—frighteningly enough—only a month away. It’s on Saturday morning, 12/17. If you have an urgent conflict, please let me know as soon as you can so we can try to arrange something.

I have as of this moment not actually posted the keys to homeworks #7 through #9, but they do exist. I’ve partly been holding back the keys a bit because I’ve allowed people here and there to turn in homework a little bit late, but in the meantime, if you’ve turned in one of these and want me to just email you the key, I’m happy to do so. Just send me a quick note, it’s no problem. I’ll try to get the rest posted on the syllabus site as soon as I can.

Sorry, yet another corrective note: The homework is not due Tuesday, but rather on Thursday, despite what it says on it. I always suspend homework for the BUCLD, and I forgot to alter the due date on the handout.

Spend the weekend at the conference if you can, not on the homework, unless you can do both.

Hi everyone, I just realized that I did a dumb thing—I handed back your homeworks but I forgot to record the grades. If you could bring your homework #7 with you to class, whether you hand in revisions or not, just so I can quickly note down what the score was, that would be great. I’ll announce this on Tuesday, but if you read this first and can bring yours along on Tuesday, even better. Sorry about that!

Just to be a little bit more realistic about this extension (for those who only just heard about it today, but have now started reading the blog), if you get a homework revision to me by noon tomorrow (Friday), that’ll be soon enough. You can leave it with the person in the front office if you wish (I will probably be at the BUCLD for large chunks of the day tomorrow) and they can get it into my mailbox.

And, yes, I know that the grader marked corrections. That’s fine, you can use that information and draw improved trees for practice based on it. Just be sure you understand why what you’re drawing now is more right than what you drew before.

Please also return to me the already-graded homework 7 if you submit revisions.

Because I’ve had (and ok’ed) a number of requests to turn in homework #7 a bit later, I think it’s probably only fair to throw this open to everyone. If you want to revise/re-do anything in the homework you already handed in (or, if you didn’t hand it in), you can give me the replacement parts any time through the end of the day on Thursday. If you take advantage of this, you don’t need to hand in anything twice, I’ll have the one you handed in earlier already, I’ll just take whatever new things I’m given to be superseding whatever I was given earlier.

Don’t forget that there are 7180 minutes between this past Thursday’s class and this coming Tuesday’s class, rather than the usual 7120 minutes. You may feel free to take a break from the homework for an hour starting just after 12:59am tonight, because you’ll get a second chance at that hour immediately after it’s over.

The Boston University Conference on Language Development is almost upon us, so I wanted to outline the extra credit opportunity that is available, and make some suggestions about talks/posters that might relate to things we’ve been talking about in the class.

Extra credit. If you go to the BUCLD (which you can do for free if you volunteer a small amount of your time), write a short (1 page) summary each for two different talks, outlining what you understood the talk to be about (what they proposed, what data they looked at, what conclusions they drew). I’ll take that and substitute it for your second-lowest homework grade (your lowest one will be dropped anyway).

Recommendations. There are a number of talks that relate to the acquisition of syntax, although in several of them, they will be assuming a bit more background knowledge than we’ll have gotten by then. The talks below are the ones that I think are most likely to be both mostly-comprehensible given what we’ve talked about and about syntax. I’ll try to say a couple of words in class about these right before the conference, too (to tell you briefly what “root infinitives” are, what some of the issues are with question formation, passives, phases, SLI, etc.).

Friday, Nov. 4

• 9:30am. Brun, Babyonyshev. Aspectual properties of root infinitive verbs in child Russian
• 10:00am. Rus, Chandra. Child language imperatives: Questioning the “imperative as an RI-analogue” hypothesis
• 11:45am. Viau. Give = CAUSE + HAVE/GO: Evidence for early lexical decomposition of dative verbs in English child corpora

Saturday Nov 5

• 11:15am. Grebenyova. Multiple interrogatives in child language
• 2:30pm. Babyonyshev, Hart, Gigorenko. The acquisition of passives by Russian-speaking children with SLI
• 3:00pm. Perovic, Wexler. New data on passives in Williams syndrome: Evidence for a grammatical delay
• 4:30pm. Gavarró, Torrens. Participle agreement in Catalan and Spanish and some of its implications
• 5:00pm. Hyams, Snyder. Reflexive clitics and the Universal Phase Requirement

Sunday, Nov 6.

• 9:30am. Hirsch, Wexler. By the way, children don’t know “by”
• 11:00am. Schulz. Evidence for wh-scope-marking in advanced Japanese-English interlanguage grammars