In response to a question I got over email, let me just give a couple of examples of evaluating Binding Theory satisfaction and violations. For Binding Theory, the thing to keep in mind is that binding only goes one direction, from higher in the tree to lower in the tree. For the most part, things …
Continue reading ‘Some examples of evaluating Binding Theory satisfaction/violations’ »
Monday is a holiday, and then Tuesday is a “Monday.” I don’t generally have office hours on Mondays and I won’t be having office hours on Tuesday as a result (also, I’ll be out of town). Feel free to email me questions you have about the midterm, though, in the meantime. And I’ll try to …
Paper and pencil work fine, but how can you draw your trees electronically? When I’m using Word, I usually do this with the help of Arboreal. This is a $20 font that you can use to draw the tree branches. If you have the font, I have an example document that demonstrates the style I …
Just something like a clarification: You can only Adjoin to something that doesn’t have any Merges left it needs to do. Effectively, this means that you can only Adjoin to XPs. You don’t have to necessarily wait until the very end of the derivation to Adjoin — you just have to do all of the …
Another quick note based on a question I got. Although it is possible to say “John read” (and one can debate whether this implicitly means “John read something” or not), for the purposes of the problem on homework 4, assume that “read” is a regular transitive verb. With an Agent and a Theme. Like “see” …
Just to be clear about the expectations in homework 4: Don’t draw any T nodes. We hadn’t covered T at the point when homework 4 was assigned, and we aren’t quite finished talking about it. You’ll get a chance to draw plenty of T nodes in the future. (I had been relatively explicit about that …
While I’m posting PSAs, here is the web site to visit if you are interested in volunteering to help out with the Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Here’s something that has nothing really to do with features or theta-roles. Maybe in some senses about checking. You may have heard that there’s a presidential election coming up here in the US relatively soon. For those of you who are US citizens, there is a hurdle that I just wanted to remind you of, …
Continue reading ‘PSA: Keep an eye on voter registration deadlines’ »
In part II of homework #3, just to clarify, the sentence you are trying to construct does contain more than just the words called and for. There are five lexical items (five words). Three of those words are pronouns (which means I perhaps should have included something like a [PRN] feature on them as well). …
In the sentences (4a) and (4b) in Part 1 of homework #3, you’re asked to consider the theta-roles of the participants in a scolding. As one of you has pointed out to me in an email, there is a sense in which when, say, John scolds Mary, John is doing something, but Mary is kind …