Syntax II

Well, it’s been something of a marathon this semester, but it looks like we made it. Thanks, folks, for a good class, and for putting up with the bumps that there were due to the larger-than-normal class size. You all came through with well-prepared presentations of the papers we were reading, as well as the presentations of your own projects. I was impressed with every one of them, and I do understand that this “learning to swim by being tossed in the lake” approach can be a bit overwhelming, but I definitely got the sense from talking to you and from discussions in class that you did manage to get most of main ideas out of the sometimes challenging readings.

So, congratulations on that.

There’s just one thing left, which is the final paper, which works as discussed in class. I’ll still be answering emails (perhaps faster now that there aren’t further classes to prepare—my other class is now over as well), and I’ll be in my office at least during the following times (but other times as well):

Fri 4/28 1-2pm
Mon 4/30 2-3pm
Tue 5/01 2-3pm
Thu 5/03 2-3pm

As for getting me your paper, you can either drop by and give it to me sometime when I’m in my office, or you can email it to me, or you can leave it for me at the front desk in 718 Comm Ave, and they’ll get it into my mailbox.

Have a good finals period, and then a great summer!

Jeffry Lidz University of Maryland
Economy and the Residue of Overgeneration in Children’s Grammars
Friday, April 14th 2005, 3:30 p.m.
MIT Room 32-141

One of the leading ideas of GB-style syntax was the filter. In that framework, the structure building operations enabled the construction of illegitimate representations which were subsequently filtered out by various principles (e.g, the binding principles, the case filter, the ecp, etc.). In the Minimalist Program, many of these filters have been incorporated into the definitions of the structure building operations, with the result that the set of structures that can be built more closely approximates the set of grammatical structures. The principle of Full Interpretation, however, still acts as a filter. Some representations that can be built by the computational system are filtered out by interface conditions.

In this paper, I examine children’s knowledge of two phenomena that are argued to be subject to Economy, which functions as a filter at the LF interface. In the case of Quantifier Raising, we find that 4-year-olds, unlike adults, allow a quantifier to take scope out of a finite clause, yielding the matrix interpretation of the ACD structure in (1)

    (1)     Kermit said that Goofy read every book that Miss Piggy did
               a) embedded interpretation of missing VP = [read]
               b) matrix interpretation of missing VP = [said that G read]

In the case of reconstruction effects, we find that 4-year-olds, unlike adults, fail to show a principle C effect on moved argument wh-phrases, as in (2a), though they do show principle C effects for moved predicate wh-phrases (2b):

    (2)     a)      Which picture of Miss Cruella did she put up?
            b)      How proud of Mister Monkey was he?

I argue that these effects can be understood as the residue of overgeneration in the structure building mechanism. The relevant structures are generable but are filtered out at the interface (for adults). Children’s difficulties arise in the failure to apply the relevant filtering mechanism.

If you’ve got some time Wednesday afternoon, come hear Prof. Leher Singh talk about infant speech perception. It’s sure to be interesting (even despite not being syntax!)…

Infant speech perception and early language acquisition
Leher Singh
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, BU Sargent College

Are you curious about how infants begin the task of learning a first language? The BU Undergraduate Linguistics Association invites you to a presentation by BU Professor Leher Singh, who will discuss her research on infant speech perception and language acquisition. Join us on Wednesday, Apr. 12 at 5pm in CAS 313. Light refreshments will be served!

Just to give you a tiny bit of advance notice: This weekend (from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening), I’ll be without email access. I’ll try to catch up as well as I can on Sunday evening when I’m back. So, if I’m not answering your email during that time, I’m not ignoring you, I probably just won’t have seen it yet.

Just a quick note: I don’t need questions/comments for next week’s reading, although you are certainly free to come up with some and write them down or email them to me if you wish.

This isn’t really much to do with syntax, but Prof. Bruce Fraser asked me to announce that the Program in Applied Linguistics is sponsoring a talk today at 2pm by Neal Norrick (Saarland University) called “Conflict and humor in conversation”. It is in the School of Education building, room 435.

For an abstract of the talk, you can check the local linguistics events page.

The copy of the Müller (2001) paper I made available earlier is pretty hard to read (that is to say, the characters are kind of fuzzy). If you want a cleaner copy, you can get it from Müller’s own web page. This is the link.

Hi everyone. I’ve finally gotten through a preliminary reading of everyone’s project proposals and I’ll send comments out by tomorrow evening about papers you might look at, or comments about which papers you’ve listed might be most appropriate to look at first, etc. I will try to post all of the papers I have that are relevant to the course readings page in the topics sections at the bottom of the page. This is a fairly major undertaking, it’s taken me longer than I’d hoped to get as far as I have and there’s still a ways to go, but I’ll try to have suggestions to you within a day.

There have been a few reports that the printers in the basement of 111 Cummington are not really up to the task of printing the Frank 2006 paper—it seems to be coming out for some people as either just ugly or else complete gibberish.

If you’re going to print in 111 Cummington, you might instead try to print the version of the paper from Bob Frank’s web page: Here is the link to that version.

Page numbers will of course be different, but I think the content is the same.

It seems that there are some problems with this last homework. Constructed too late at night, I fear. If you’re puzzling over it wondering what I could have meant, you’re probably right to be puzzling. Puzzling is good for you and builds strong character, at least, but I still apologize for the futility aspect this time around.

So, on to the problems.

Question 1 notes that the question in (31) cannot be formed, and asks what question can be formed from the same elementary trees.

That’s nice, except that there isn’t one. There is a structure that you can form, but it’s not really grammatical either. The thing is, (31) isn’t really just a regular Superiority violation, it’s also got the question-embedding verb ask, which means that the embedded clause has to be a question as well.

So, stop hunting. You might instead simply say what structure you can derive from those two trees and speculate about what makes it ungrammatical. That means Question 1 is really the same kind of question as Question 3.

Question 2 has you pretend that there’s a version of English that’s like Romanian, in that it has multiple wh-movement as an option, and then asks about two possible questions you can derive from (34) and (32), neither of which is (31).

But that’s wrong too. If you take (34) as given, one of them sure is (31). And there’s one more besides. And neither of those is like Romanian. The problem: Who and what appear to be in the wrong order in (34) for our purposes.

What I was really trying to do in Question 2 depends on a version of (34) in which the wh-phrases are in the other order at the top of the tree (with who higher than what). So, for question 2, the best thing to do is to consider not (34) but rather (34) with who in the top specifier, and what in the next one down.

Question 3 has not very much to do with TAG, really, you can probably answer this one without much consideration of the TAG system. Think about the differences between interrogative clauses and declarative clauses, mainly, and where wh-words need to be.

Question 4 requires that you have made the suggested switch in the tree in (34), as detailed above in Question 2.

So, that’s the deal with this homework. Since the questions weren’t very coherent, I’m not going to be grading this one very severely, but if you make the changes I suggest above, you may be able to see the things I was trying to point out in this homework.