Homework 1 notes

I’ve been asked about the expected depth of the answers for the first homework. For example, in the first task, where it asks for you to “provide further examples that support the generalization” (that a reflexive pronoun must be coreferential with another expression in the sentence), really all I was expecting here was just a couple of sentences or non-sentences. You don’t really need to restate the generalization in different words or describe anything, the examples are fine.

One thing that I would say, though, is that considering this generalization is a statement like “A must have property B” (in order to be grammatical), it’s only kind of weak support to show that strings of words that meet the criterion result in grammatical sentences. Since these sentences are only supposed to be “additional support,” it’s ok, I guess – but if you were making the whole argument yourself you need to show not only that the sentence is grammatical when the criterion is met, but that the “sentence” is ungrammatical when the criterion is not met.

Of course, with Task 1 you have be a little bit careful, because it’s pretty easy to show that the generalization you’re providing further examples in support of is not actually correct. So, the task here is to come up with a couple of sentences that are good with reflexives that are coreferential with something else in the sentences, and a couple that are bad and don’t have reflexives that are coreferential with anything in the sentence. And then almost immediately in the homework we look at examples that are not correctly predicted by the “first attempt” generalization.

I guess the main note here is just that if it’s asking for a couple of examples, the task is really just to get some practice coming up with your own data to check the predictions of a generalization, it doesn’t need to really contain much (or any) prose unless it’s explicitly asked for in the problem statement.