First, sorry that I haven’t posted as much here as I’d intended to, the backlog is growing. The topic of this post is: what we did at 12:30 this afternoon. The reason for my posting this is just that not everything made it into the handouts, and also, the handouts were several.

For the papers that were referred to, check the readings page. I will just cite them here.

We started out with a regular handout, which mainly described the findings and proposals from Cinque (1999). The handout says “3a” at the top, but the date is right. This outlined the basic phenomenon of adverb ordering requirements using examples from English, and then discussed Cinque’s findings from French and Italian, as well as a sampling from the numerous other languages he investigated.

The handout ended with a couple of brief examples concerning adverbs in Malagasy, which was based on a paper by Rackowski & Travis (2000). At this point, we turned to look at a portion of an older handout from a different class on which I had drawn a tree structure illustrating Rackowski & Travis’ proposal. The version I posted here is trimmed a bit from the version I handed out, and has the correct date and course information at the top now.

We then turned our attention to English, where I was assisted by showing on the screen a homework assignment from a Syntax II class in which we had discussed the adverb ordering facts. Here again, I have fiddled with it a bit to remove some of the things that are irrelevant for our purposes here, but the main content we discussed is there. The upshots of the discussion here were: (a) English is actually quite a bit like Malagasy with respect to the adverb ordering facts, which we might take to mean that Malagasy is not as exotic as we thought, and (b) the analysis from the “olden days” of why the order of adverbs reverses after the verb might well qualify as a simpler way to understand the facts.

On that last point, I shouldn’t leave you with the impression that I’ve dismissed Cinque’s (1999) or Rackowski & Travis’ (2000) analyses as being too complicated—only that if we don’t make the assumptions that they make (specifically, the assumption that adverbs cannot “hang off the right side of the tree”), the effect falls out in a relatively uncomplicated way. There are reasons to suspect that adverbs actually can’t hang off the right side of the tree, and I hope to discuss those a bit more later on in the semester. In that case, the “snowball movements” that Cinque, Rackowski, and Travis propose are actually necessary. But, since we haven’t seen an argument yet for believing that, the simplest analysis we have available is probably one where adverbs can just attach to the tree hanging off either to the right or to the left, with an additional requirement that the order of attachment from the top of the tree to the bottom follows a fairly strictly-defined order.

Welcome to the course blog for the Topics in Linguistics: Language Universals course. This is an evolving place, you should keep track of what happens here. Consult the schedule linked above (do not rely on the printed copy I handed out initially, things will almost certainly change over the course of the semester). You may want to subscribe to the blog with an RSS reader, or else just visit frequently.

I will post announcements, errata, and various things that might be interesting here. Feel free to post comments (though they will usually not appear instantly, I have to approve them first).

There will be a Blackboard site, right now I do not have the link. The Blackboard site will be just a place for you (and me) to keep track of the scores on the homework, etc. I have no other plans for that site, although if you want me to enable anything there, just let me know.

This is the future home of the Topics in Linguistics: Universals of Language site.

The information here is a bit sketchy, but you should be able to get an idea of what kinds of things we’ll cover and what the general structure of the course will be by clicking the “Course information” and “Schedule” links in the header above.

As a matter of historical interest, I did teach a vaguely similar class a long time ago, and you can also look at the (archaic) web page for that course. However, the Fall 2010 course will be different (and better) in a number of respects. We will cover a wider range of things, in a more coherent way, and with fewer things that overlap with topics covered in other courses.