Homework 1 comments

I have had a couple of people ask about details about what I was expecting in the first homework assignment.

First of all, as a reminder: The structures that you learned in Intro are not irrelevant in principle, but it is not directly related to what we are doing in this homework assignment.

In the first problem about the categories: There are little wrinkles in a couple of them that make them interesting to think about. Some of the answers are not entirely obvious, and even might be up for debate. Think about what kinds of things could go in place of the words you are wondering about, try the tests that were outlined on the handout.

The second question about finding the pattern is a bit easy to overthink. What I was looking for there is really just a description of what you see in those sentences. The description should basically predict those sentences, and not others. So “These are sentences of English” is not a good description of the pattern, because there are many sentences of English that are not in that list. Maybe a good way to start with that one is to observe that “Bart laughed” is a sentence, and then that you can make any new sentence from any existing sentence by following a particular “recipe.” If you explain the recipe, that’s basically what I had in mind. It’s not supposed to be a hard problem and the pattern is obvious, but it’s practice in seeing a pattern and describing it precisely.

In the rest of the homework, what we are doing is playing around with the formalism, the way we write rules, the way rules predict possible sentences, and the way in which rules and trees correspond. So: If your rules don’t contain a VP, then your trees should not either; if your rules don’t contain a V’, then your trees should not either. Some nodes will have three, or four daughters. Trees like this would have gotten you points taken off in Intro, because your rules had VPs and V’s, but here, they don’t. (Soon, we’ll look at the evidence that tells us they should be there, though, and we’ll put them in.)

I think that’s it for now, but I hope that both helps and reassures a little bit.