We wound up talking about various things not really directly related to the reading on VP-internal subjects today, but one thing we did talk about a little is the paper by Han, Lidz, and Musolino on verb raising in Korean.
The paper is:
Han, Chung-hye, Jeffrey Lidz, and Julien Musolino (2007). V-raising and grammar competition in Korean: Evidence from negation and quantifier scope. Linguistic Inquiry 38(1):1–47.
The official word is that BU is closed on Feb 9 due to snow.
The plan for Feb 9 had been to finish up the McCloskey reading, but it now appears that this will need to happen on Feb 14 instead.
That’s the current plan, and we’ll see how that affects things from there on, we were already a bit behind the schedule I’d originally had in mind, so there may be a bit of re-tooling coming up as well.
However: One relevant thing is that there was to be a homework due tomorrow. I don’t think it’s that likely that the snow day will really affect your ability to get it done by tomorrow afternoon, power grid willing at least. But since the main thing is really to have worked on it before we discuss the paper next, it would mostly be just arbitrary for me to insist that I get it by the time class would have started. So, it’ll be due at the beginning of Tuesday instead.
I may organize the next homework and post it here prior to meeting on Tuesday, and if I get ready by Friday I may still set it to be due the following Thursday. So, check back in here Friday afternoon to see if there’s a reading and homework assignment set already.
Without getting into too much text here, here are a couple of links to follow concerning the Everett/Wolfe/Pirahã discussion. You can follow links within for more, there’s plenty more.
One relatively readable and link-laden post is Norbert Hornstein’s entry this past summer on the “Faculty of Language” blog: The sludge at the bottom of the barrel. Within that post you have a link to the Harper’s article by Tom Wolfe as well.
A more colorful response is “E.J. Spode”’s tom wolfe’s reflections on language, which reviews Wolfe’s book.
The most prominent scholarly critique of Everett’s proposal is Nevins, Pesetsky & Rodrigues from Language, 2009.
There’s much more out there, but if you’re curious about the discussions, those are places to start.
We are now underway. Last week Thursday we started in on the handout covering the basic history of the basic model of syntax we will be mostly operating within, and we will continue to do that on Tuesday (tomorrow, as I type this).
The first homework assignment, being the first one, is a little bit vaguely defined. I did say this in class, but I’ll reiterate the vague assignment in print so that it is official. The homework is due on Thursday and consists of two things. The main thing is to read the Chomsky (2013) paper. We are going to go through it closely starting Thursday and probably continuing on to Tuesday, but I want you to have taken a shot at reading it before we discuss it. As we go through it, I’ll try to fill in some of the things that are not obvious, pertaining to, e.g., prior proposals not mentioned in the paper itself but to which the paper is responding or relating. I think I’ll have a relatively good idea of which things are new/foreign territory, but nevertheless, this brings us to the second part of the homework assignment, in which you actually turn something in.
For future papers, I’ll probably try to provide more specific questions for you to answer in light of the reading and/or readings we’d done previously. For this one in particular, I want you to write out a couple of things in one of the following categories:
I expect we’ll get through about half of the paper on Thursday. The more technical parts are in the second half and that’s what we’ll tackle on the next Tuesday. I think it won’t be hard to find confusing things in the second half. What I’d like to get from you, by Thursday, are four questions/comments, two from each half (basically taking page 41 to be the end of the first half). If you have more, that’s fine. Four should be enough to keep the discussion going.
You can just email them to me sometime by the time we start on Thursday, but have them with you on Thursday as well to refer to.
This is the future home of the Advanced Syntax site.