As announced in class, homework #8 is just running through a couple of sentences using the system we went over in class (that is, with the modifications to the syntax, to the F function, with full specification of the evaluations at M,w,t,g. You can either use the definition of past tense on the bottom of …
Our own Prof. Jon Barnes is giving a talk tomorrow (Monday) at Northeastern University at 5pm, in 101 Churchill Hall (380 Huntington Ave), sponsored by the Linguistics Club at Northeastern. The talk has no serious prerequisites, and is sure to be interesting. Come if you can!
To make up for my missed office hours on Thursday, I’ll have office hours tomorrow from 12-1pm. As usual, if you want to meet to discuss something but this time doesn’t work for you, just let me know and we can probably schedule a different time.
I mentioned in class that I would make available the overview article on the semantics of questions that I wrote, in case you’re curious to read it. Let me reiterate my caution that it’s not really aimed at a first-semester Semantics class, so after the first couple of sections it will probably be relatively rough …
Sorry for the very late notice but I forgot to announce that I will need to cancel my office hours today. I’ll be around afterwards, maybe 5:30 or so, and then Monday (but not much Friday).
It took me far, far longer to get this ready than I had anticipated it would, but I have now posted the clarifications for homework #7. You can download a new PDF file of it, on which I have marked the changes. Except for the change I made to the sentences about Alaska and Texas, …
I’m going back over homework 7, and I’m discovering a number of things that either weren’t clear or were even backwards. I will post a revision later today, and I’ll outline the changes here on the blog. For the moment, though, there’s not much point in working past Problem 1, because there will be substantial …
I should point out, as I’m looking at this homework I handed out again, that the two sentences in (1) (1a: Texas is bigger than Alaska, 1b: Alaska is smaller than Texas) are both false. Texas is in fact smaller than Alaska, but this need not get in the way of your answering the question. …
The Boston Universityundergraduate Linguistics Association has an event tonight which I’ll try to remember to mention in class as well. They’ll be showing the movie L’enfant sauvage (‘The Wild Child’) at 7pm in the Geddes Language Center. Click here for a trailer from IMDB.
I think the consensus view that I’ve been getting is that the discussion of presuppositions on Tuesday ended up being about as clear as mud. I’m going to take another stab at it in class tomorrow, so if you feel that you don’t fully control the intricacies of presupposition projection, I hope to try to …