Homework 1
23 Jan 2017We 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:
- things you found confusing and want to try to clarify (possibly including unfamiliar terminology)
- things beyond those discussed in the paper itself, such as how a particular idea might extend to another language.
- things that occur to you that seem like supporting (or contradicting) evidence for viewing things the way Chomsky outlines
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.