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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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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 …
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”. …
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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 …