Opportunities for "extra credit"

There are a couple of occasions during the semester where it is possible to improve the "homework" part of your grade with the help of certain extra credit projects. They are (or will be) reported below.

BUCLD writeups

Each year, Boston Unviersity hosts the Boston University Conference on Language Development, the major conference for language development worldwide. This year it runs from Friday October 31st through Sunday November 2nd. At this point in the semester, you will probably have enough background to understand at least some of the syntax-related talks given at the conference.

Here is a list of syntax-related talks I took from the schedule (download requires homework username and password).

The details: Write about a page (single spaced) about each of two different talks (preferably syntax-related). To the extent that you understood it, comment on what data were involved, what arguments were used, what conclusions were drawn. Add comments about things you didn't understand, or wonder about. (Don't just copy down what's on the handout without understanding it, though.)

Trees are easy to draw

The other alternative for extra credit is to do the following problem, which is centered around working out the structure for the sentence Trees are easy to draw. It turns out that there are some serious complexities to this sentence, and the problem itself takes you through many areas of syntax on the way to the ultimate conclusion about this sentence. It's more or less a paper (there's a lot of text to read), with some blank spaces for you to fill in things.

If you don't have time to do all of it, it's fine to hand in part of it. Because it is so comprehensive, it will also make a pretty good review exercise, so it might be worth thinking about even if you already did the BUCLD writeups.

The link to the PDF file is: Trees are easy to draw (v1.1).