On Thursday, I’m planning on essentially “canceling” my office hours, in the sense that I’m planning to spend them in the classroom of my other class (Syntax), answering questions people might have there. If you were planning to come to my office hours on Thursday, let me know, and perhaps we can set up a …
We talked a little bit about the final project on Tuesday. The idea I had originally had was to assign a couple of already stated universals that you could explore using the online database tools, or maybe even try to discover new correlations. My own experimentation with this wound up making it clear to me …
Here’s a quick list of the resources we looked at in class. First was the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS), which we’d also looked at a bit before. This time our look included playing a bit with the Mac application (there are also version for Windows) that can be found here. We also …
I have mentioned a couple of times next semester’s course on “current issues in syntax,” and by now there is a preliminary course blog in place, which has some information about the format, the schedule, and some ideas about what papers we might be looking at. The web address is: http://ling.bu.edu/blogs/lx500b1s11/ Although the pre-registration for …
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We watched the first bit of a video from a Google event in which Noam Chomsky answered some questions, the link to the video is here: YouTube: Authors@Google: Noam Chomsky After the first couple of introductory minutes, the response to the question about changes in the conception of UG follows, which is what we watched. …
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After having fielded quite a number of questions about this homework that I’ve labeled “midterm”, I have come to the conclusion that it really wasn’t very well constructed. I did have some things in mind, but I also was not expecting in principle that everyone would have the same thoughts I did about it. However, …
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Gearing up for the final project, I’ll just point out the existence of the World Atlas of Language Structures online, which gives you access to a lot of cross-linguistic information and allows you to look at how the various features are distributed on a map. We’ll look more at how this can be used, but …
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The Blackboard site for this course is now functional. I couldn’t see a way to make a direct link, but if you go to http://blackboard.bu.edu/ and sign in, I believe the course should show up. As a reminder, the only thing I intend to use the Blackboard site for is a place to keep grades …
I discovered that I have a faculty meeting today when my office hours are supposed to be, so I will need to hold my office hours from 3-4pm instead of the usual time. Since the time I chose for Wednesday office hours is going to be subject to this kind of pre-emption frequently, I’m going …
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In case you hadn’t gotten this announcement another way: On Monday, this semester’s Globally Speaking program begins. This is a series of low-pressure, free (and no-credit) language courses in Arabic, Chinese, Dari/Tajiki, Russian, Hausa, IsiXhosa, Turkish, and Wolof. Reviews from previous semesters have been good, check it out if you are interested. There is even …