At long last, you can now retrieve the practice midterm. Once you’ve sat down to run through it (best to do this in a realistic amount of time, to see how it goes), you can check your answers against the key.

Bring questions you have to class on Tuesday (or email them to me).

The actual midterm should be approximately as difficult as the practice midterm, and cover much of the same material. It will be organized pretty much the same way.

The practice midterm is still not ready, but the key to that partial/fragment midterm I gave out is posted.

The semantic type of quickly wasn’t really a very appropriate thing to ask about, because when we discussed adverbs, we were talking about it in a different way, so there are a couple of possibilities.

By the way, lest you think that the midterm is going to be all and only about semantic types, I did just want to reassure you that I plan to make it a bit more representative than that. The reason the fragment looks the way it does is mainly that the questions that are on it were the ones that I found easy to write, and then I ran out of time. I do plan to have some questions on semantic types, and generally I plan to have questions that are more about understanding how the system works and what it is doing than about things like whether you have memorized how to write the meaning of every—in fact, I intend for it not to require much memorization, I’ll try to provide the pieces that you need on the test itself.

Anyway, this is just a note to tide you over until I get the practice midterm done, so you aren’t bitterly muttering to yourself about how the stuff on the midterm seems to have very little to do with what we actually focused on in class.

The practice midterm, and answers to the little fragment I provided, are still coming. I was hoping to have it by this morning, but my schedule has been completely packed since I left class on Thursday, so I’m only just now able to really start in on it. Stay tuned, sorry for the delay.

If you were considering taking Sociolinguistics next semester (CAS AN 521), some good news on the schedule: The time has been changed to M4-7 — so it is no longer going to be on Tuesday, and will no longer conflict with, for example, Syntax II (CAS LX 523). Take a note of this if you were thinking of taking it, the change should be reflected on the Student Link soon.

I thought I was having a particularly spam-free semester. If you’ve tried to post a comment, you might have noticed it just plain didn’t work. Now it does. Sorry about that!

This has nothing to do with semantics, really, but in case you missed this information as you were applying functions to arguments: if you are a US citizen and plan to vote in November but are not yet registered to do so, the deadline is imminent for your registration to be processed in time. In Massachusetts, the deadline is October 18, but if you plan to vote (perhaps absentee) in another state, some deadlines are very fast approaching or even here. This US Election Assistance Commission site has specifics on each state. For MA, you can request a registration form from the Elections Division, although there is also a national voter registration form at the EAC that works in almost every state (including MA).

For reference, 10/8 (Sunday) is 30 days out, 10/18 is 20 days out. The following states have deadlines that are probably no longer possible to meet, being Tuesday (10/10) or sooner—if you were planning to vote there and are not yet registered, you may wish to register in MA instead: AK, AZ, AR, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IL, IN, KY, LA, MI, MS, MO, MT, NV, NM, OH, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, and WY.