By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed this, there is a brief section of the textbook that talks about some of the concepts of functions and λ notation and so forth, that we talked about yesterday in class. We’ll go into it in some more detail in the coming classes, but in case you wanted a reminder or an explanation in slightly different words, there is some of that in section 3.6 (that is, the end of chapter 3).
BULA talk: Harlan Lane
Harlan Lane
(Matthews Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University)
will be speaking on Wednesday, September 27th
at 5 PM
http://www.psych.neu.edu/people/faculty/lane.html
“Deaf Ethnicity and the Failure of Medical Ethics”
Place: Stone Science Center (675 Comm. Ave.) B50
ASL/English interpreters will be present.
Abstract: This address is concerned with the language minority in North America called the Deaf-World and the larger society that engulfs it. I aim to show that this minority has the properties of an ethnic group, and that an unsuitable construction of the Deaf-World as a disability group has led to programs of the majority that discourage Deaf children from acquiring the language and culture of the Deaf-World and that aim to reduce the number of Deaf births—programs that are unethical from an ethnic group perspective. Four reasons not to construe the Deaf-World as a disability group are advanced: Deaf people themselves do not believe they have a disability; the disability construction brings with it needless medical and surgical risks for the Deaf child; it also endangers the future of the Deaf-World; finally, the disability construction brings bad solutions to real problems because it is predicated on a misunderstanding.
Friday office hours will probably change
As the semester gets underway, I’m discovering that I may not have picked the best times for my office hours, particularly on Friday. I will probably be switching them to Wednesday, which is also the day before homeworks will generally be due. I think that’s going to end up being a better time both for my own schedule and for the purpose of answering questions any of you might have on the homework assignments. Anyway, this is advance warning of the probable change, and I’ll post what I actually change them to once I’ve sorted out a couple of other scheduling things. I do anticipate that, starting in a week, I will have office hours on Wednesday and not on subsequent Fridays, however.
BUCLD 31
The annual Boston University Conference on Language Development will arrive in the George Sherman Union the weekend of November 3-5. Check their web page for the schedule and details.
BUCLD 31 pre-registration
If you register before October 20, the cost of registering for the BUCLD is a little bit cheaper, so if you know you’re going to go, it’s worth registering early. Also note that doing a certain amount of volunteer work for the conference can get you in for free, more details will be announced about that in class.
HW1: Part 3 is completely botched
It seems I spent a bit too much time drawing cats and mats and a bit too little time proofreading on Homework 1. I was just trying to write up a key, and it turns out that Part 3 is wrong in a startlingly large number of ways.
My suggestion: burn the copy of Homework 1 that I handed out (but only someplace safe), and download Homework 1 version 2.0 from the website.
If you choose to soldier on with the one I handed out, here are the things that need to be changed:
→Reverse the meanings of p and q.
Part 3: For convenience, let’s label the sentences The door is open as p and The cat is on the mat as q. Using these labels, sentence (c) could be restated as “p and q.”
→Change ¬p to ¬q.
In logic, we use the symbol ¬ to mean “it is not the case that.” Thus, sentence (e) could be restated (using the labels above and the symbol) as “¬q.” Similarly, the symbol ∧ corresponds to “and” (it looks a little bit like an “a”) and ∨ corresponds to “or” (it’s not “and”). The “if…then” relation (implication) is represented by →, so sentence (d) can be written as “p→q“.
→Change “sentence (b)” to “the sentence The door is not open“.
Question 3.3: Restate the sentence The door is not open under the line in symbols.
Great start to the semester! I guess it drives home the importance of reading the blog, but still I will try to proofread future homeworks a bit better.
For Thursday: read ch 1
In case it wasn’t super-clear, here’s your task for Thursday explicitly: read the first chapter of the Portner textbook, and it would be good to have read it before class just so you can have whatever questions you might have ready to ask.
HW0: Questionnaire
I have traditionally given out paper questionnaires on the first day of class, but this year I will try it this way. Your first homework assignment is to email me the answers to the following questions, especially if you haven’t been in a class of mine before. You can just copy and paste it from here into your email program and fill in the blanks, that’s fine. Send the email to hagstrom@bu.edu. (If your email program is fancy enough, simply clicking on the email link will compose the basic email for you.)
Name:
Year:
Major/school:
Course status:
Language you spoke at home as a young child:
Languages you speak, level of fluency:
Background in Linguistics (previous courses, etc.):
Alternate email address:
Anything else:
By “course status”, I mean whether you’re enrolled or sitting in on the class (so, of course, if you are sitting in on the class, fill one of these out too).
LX502 begins
This is not much of an event. I expect to post better events as they are announced.
Welcome to Fall 2006
This is the first trivial post on the blog for CAS LX 502 (Semantics) for Fall 2006. I will be posting announcements, corrections, various things here over the course of the semester.
Although it is not a full-fledged “forum”, it is possible to post comments, which I encourage you to do.1
1At least unless you’re marketing fantastic stock buying opportunities or pills for physical enhancement—if that’s the case, no comments please. I will keep an eye on the comments here and try to clean them out whenever they get spammed, as they invariably do, but you might still wind up running into an unsolicited comment here and there.