So, the presentations of your projects begins tomorrow in class. We’ve already lined up the schedule (it’s on the schedule page). I assume everybody knows which day they’re on.
However, if you happen to feel like you were ready sooner than you expected, there’s at least one extra spot tomorrow available, so if you’d like to go tomorrow instead of when you were scheduled (presuming you weren’t scheduled tomorrow anyway), let me know, it should be fine.
We’re bearing down on the end of the semester, and coming alarmingly close to when the time will come when presentations are supposed to happen. That will be the last 3 classes of the semester: Tue Apr 20, Tue Apr 27, Thu Apr 29. Each class is 80 minutes long, and we need to get up to 6 people in each day. A bit of quick math says: presentations need to be about 12 minutes long from start to finish.
That’s not very long. Really. It might sound like it, but it really isn’t.
Here’s how the presentations should go. Presume that nobody has read anything specific to your topic (though you can refer to things we’ve talked about in class), and introduce the basic thing you’re looking at. Who are your subjects? What is the question? How are you trying to answer the question? What will the answer to the question tell us more broadly? What have you found to be known about this topic already? What have you found so far? What new questions does it raise? All this should fit into something like 8 minutes, 10 max, so that there’s at least a little bit of a chance for people to ask things. I will be merciless when it comes to time limits.
Also, this is not intended to be a “defense” of your research project, it’s just sharing it with the rest of us. We’re all friends here. Present your project in the way you’d like to see your classmates present their projects. (I will be evaluating your presentation, but not particularly severely, the bulk of the project grade goes with the writeup.)
On Tuesday I want to start firming up the schedule. Please note: Not everyone can go on the last day. It is quite possible that people who get scheduled for the first day (a week from Tuesday, on April 20) will not be completely done with the data collection or analysis. That’s ok, just tell us what you have so far. Still, the best would be for people who have actually gotten their data collected and have looked at it a bit by then to be the ones who go then. So, if you are close and anticipate being at that point, please consider volunteering for the first day. (Going first means you can relax, too, and enjoy the rest of the presentations more!)
I’ll take volunteers for April 20 or April 27 over email starting now, and I’ll fill in the schedule here as I get volunteers. No volunteers for April 29 now, we’ll fight that out in class on Tuesday.
On the question of technology and visual aids: A short handout would be useful, probably. I will print them if you send it to me by about an hour before the class. You can also use the projector with or without the sound. You may have noticed that I have a Mac (with current versions of PowerPoint and Keynote), and the best presentation option would be for me to present it off my computer rather than run the risk of technological delays. To that end, I’d like to have presentations emailed to me by about an hour prior to the class it is needed in, so I can be sure they’re ready and work. If there’s a reason why presenting from my laptop isn’t optimal (and it might not be, sometimes things don’t translate perfectly from Windows), it’s fine to do it from your own, we’ll probably just do yours last. Also, feel free not to project anything as well.
Just a quick note of clarification on the “data collection update” that is supposed to be due tomorrow: it’s not necessary that you’ve collected all your data by then, just let me know what the current status of your project is. I’m hoping that many of you are at least close to starting collecting data, although I know that I have also been behind on getting comments back to some of you. The semester is racing by, however. So, just let me know where you are, that’s the main thing.
If you want a bit more detailed information about what I’m planning for the Topics: Universals of Language course next semester (it is now better worked-out than it was when I mentioned it in class), there is a site set up for it here:
Fall 2010 CAS LX 500 Topics in Linguistics: Universals of Language
The site will look somewhat familiar, but the content is different.
If you are doing a project for which it would be useful to see bilingual data, you might take a look at what is in TalkBank. It’s operated much like the CHILDES database, except not so child-centric. There is some bilingual acquisition data in CHILDES itself, but it’s worth taking a look at TalkBank too. For the most part, whatever techniques you would have used on CHILDES will also work on TalkBank.
The videos we looked at today of children asking wh-questions came from the Macquarie University Centre for Cognitive Science Child Language Video Archive.
I’m not sure if this was mentioned in class, but Prof. Noam Chomsky is coming to campus to speak tonight, about issues concerning Palestine.
To reiterate, this isn’t a Linguistics talk, it’s a talk about politics, but it is a chance to see Prof. Chomsky speak if you haven’t. Needless to say, politics being what it is, I can’t guarantee you’ll agree on his take on everything. But whether you do or don’t, it’s still interesting to hear him speak.
There are details on the BU Calendar, and a Facebook event set up for the talk.
Tuesday March 2, 7:00pm to 9:00pm
CGS Auditorium (Jacob Sleeper auditorium)
871 Commonwealth Ave
In the CHILDES lab, you’re looking for non-subject wh-questions mostly, which means you need to be able to distinguish those wh-phrases that are subjects and those that are not.
For a verb like “eat” it’s pretty straightforward. The subject does the eating, the object gets eaten.
When the verb is “to be” however, it becomes much less clear. In the lab writeup, I suggested that “what’s that?” should count as a case where the wh-word is not a subject. Here’s my thinking on that.
The easiest way to think about this I believe is to try “unrolling” the question into a statement with a word like “something” or “someone” in it. So, for example: “That is something—what?” This is the form I had in mind when I said that “what” here is not a subject, but an object (and “that” is the subject). That’s because the other option, “Something is that—what?” sounds pretty off to me. To the extent that “to be” means something like “equals” there is still room for debate, but here I think the contrast is pretty clear between “That is something” and “Something is that.”
With “to be” it is generally possible to invert things in either order, but I find that one of them sounds kind of straightforward and natural, and the other sounds like poetry or something, stylized. Still English, but not the basic form.
Another example, then, would be “Which one [is] on my red [box]?” Is “Which one” a subject here? What I would compare is “Something is on my red box—which one?” and “On my red box is something—which one?” I find the first of these much more natural. (You also have to assume that it’s clear what “which one” is supposed to mean in the context, but abstracting away from that, the order “This is on my red box” is much more natural than “On my red box is this.”) So, since the first of those was more natural, and in that one “something” is the subject, I would say that “Which one” in this case is a subject. Meaning that this is a subject wh-question, and actually not one that we want to include in our computations, since we’re looking for non-subject-wh-questions.
Another question I was asked concerns the interpretation of an utterance like “I want to get . get milk in it”.
There are two things here: First, at least when I looked at it, I took that to be a kind of disfluency, so I didn’t really treat this as two distinct instances of “get”. Rather, I interpreted this as basically just the sentence “I want to get milk in it.”
Second, is there a null subject? An overt subject? For this, I think the answer is: omit it from the computation. Clearly the verb “get” here does not have an overt subject. But, on the other hand, neither does it have one for adults. The sentence “I want to get milk in it.” is something that would be grammatical in an adult’s English as well, so it isn’t really a case of an ungrammatical null subject. (For an adult, this is one of those places where the subject is PRO, so it means something like “I want me to get milk in it.”) So, it’s misleading to count it as a null subject when what we’re looking at is the question of how many non-adult-like null subjects we find the child using, but it’s also not right to call it an overt subject.
The same thing, by the way, should hold of imperatives: “Get milk in it!” for example. Because here the distinction between null and overt subject is different (adults can, indeed must, have a null subject in imperatives), considering imperatives in the analysis would confuse the general point we’re trying to get at by looking at these utterances.
I’ve had a couple of questions about what to do with “What my got?” in the search for null subjects. My answer to this is: I would count this as an example of an overt subject. The fact that the pronoun is the wrong one doesn’t matter for the purpose of differentiating overt vs. missing subjects.