Hi everyone. Ok, here’s the deal with the extra credit homework (trees are easy to draw).

The entire homework is relatively elaborate and it’s a bit more “thinky” than pretty much any of the homeworks so far. It’s not so much to practice doing things, but to think your way through the problem. You’ll notice that the instructions are practically a small paper, and you have to read it pretty thoroughly. So, I expect it will take you a while to do the whole thing.

There’s a sense in which it would be sad to do just part of it, because the aim of the project is to come up with a tree for Trees are easy to draw, but this involves seeing why it is difficult and dealing with the problems that arise. So, the extra credit homework takes you through step by step, trying to bring the problems up and having you identify them. So, if you stop partway through, you won’t have whatever satisfaction there might be in getting to the actual answer.

However, time is also finite, and so I do want to make it possible to do as much as you have time for (or as much as you can before getting stuck, if you do) and still get credit for having done so when you turn it in. So, what I will do is this:

Points from the extra credit assignment (there are 43) will augment your second-lowest homework score, and can augment your third-lowest homework score by up to 8. My rationale for this is that the idea is that this is supposed to be a replacement for the second-lowest score, but I want it to be possible to do less than the whole thing. What this does mean, however, is that if your second- and third-lowest scores are 30s, then you only need to collect 10 points from this extra credit homework before you hit the ceiling, with both of those two counting as 35s. You have more to gain from this if you have a couple of relatively low scores among your homework scores.

Also, as promised before, if you did the BUCLD writeups, this redundantly covers the second-lowest homework score, so if you wrote up two talks well, there are only 8 points available from this extra credit assignment to apply to the third-lowest homework score.

It’s a bit complex, but at least now I hope it is well-defined. For any homework that I still have left to grade, I’ll try to get the points up on the Blackboard site very soon.

If you’re interested in this level of detail, here’s how I will break down the points:

Task 1: [4] Constituency tests
Task 2: [2] Short answer about constituency
Task 3: [6] Finish tree for it is easy for me to draw trees
Task 4: [1] Draw case assignment arrows
Task 5: [2] Short answer about idioms
Task 6: [5] Shortish answer about binding
Task 7: [4] Short answer identifying a wh-island violation
Task 8: [3] Draw tree for John’s book
Task 9: [1] Draw case arrow
Task 10: [3] Draw tree for book’s SELF
Task 11: [1] Identify unchecked feature that crashes one derivation
Task 12: [3] Shortish answer about wh-islands
Task 13: [8] Draw the tree for trees are easy to draw

Good luck with studying and with finals.