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!
Monday 11/20 office hours 12-1
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.
Hagstrom (2003) “What questions mean”
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 going. It’s not required reading, it’s just available if you wanted something written down over and above the handouts.
I have put the paper with the homeworks (so you need the homework username and password to access it) so I don’t get hunted down by the copyright police.
Hagstrom, Paul (2003). What questions mean. Glot International 7(7/8):188-201.
No office hours today
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).
HW7: Version 1.1 available
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, the changes are all just clarifications. And, primarily it is just a clarification of Question 2—for Task 4 in particular, I have added two entire pages of notes.
It doesn’t seem worth it for me to copy and paste the entirety of those two pages here to the blog, so if you want to see what I’ve added, just take a look at the PDF file. My intent here was really just clarification, but in clarifying it, I made Task 4 of Question 2 quite a bit easier (and I added a couple of hints to other things as well). You could in principle complete the homework in the form I handed it out on Tuesday, but you’ll find it much easier to work from the new version.
It’s pretty much a rule that every semester there’s at least one homework that turns out to be kind of a disaster. Given that there are only going to be two more opportunities for disaster, I feel relatively confident that homework #7 will be the only one.
HW7: Please wait a little bit
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 clarifications, particularly to Problem 2. More soon.
HW7: Alaska and Texas
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.
I could have sworn I typed that right this morning as I was putting the homework together, but somehow it escaped my notice that I’d accidentally reversed them.
BULA event tonight 7pm: L’enfant sauvage
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 don’t understand presuppositions
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 make it a bit clearer. Do not despair.
BUCLD extra credit, due Tue 11/13
I’ve gotten a couple of questions about this so far, so I think I wasn’t completely clear in class. But the extra credit writeups of talks you might have attended at the BUCLD are not due tomorrow, but rather are due a week from tomorrow, on November 13.
The idea is this: Write about a page (if it’s single-spaced, “most of a page” is also ok) about each of up to two talks you went to, addressing what you understood to be the point, the argument, the evidence, and so forth. If you didn’t understand everything, fabulous, write what you think you understood and/or comment on what wasn’t clear. (Don’t just copy bits of the handout, though..)
This will substitute in for (or boost) your second lowest homework grade (the lowest one having been dropped anyway), if you do two (if you do one, it will be somehow pro-rated). Also, if you didn’t go to the conference, you will have another opportunity to get this same extra credit later, as well.