McCCLU 2009

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I just got an announcement for McCCLU 2009, the McGill Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates. It’s a undergraduate conference, held in March.

If you’re an undergraduate and have any research that you’ve done in Linguistics, definitely consider submitting it to the conference (the abstracts are not due until February) so anything you’re putting together this semester, e.g., for another Linguistics class, could provide material for a talk (the conference itself is in March, in fact basically right at the beginning of BU’s Spring recess).

So, keep this in mind. Plus, Montréal is a fun place, I hear.

HW7: Same rules as above

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Rather close to the due moment, but just a note: I’ve gotten a few questions about what I intended on HW7, 3) of part 2, when I said “Same rules as above.”

What I don’t mean is that you should draw two trees. Just draw one tree. There’s no relevant ambiguity in (f). The rules I was really referring to were: Just draw the tree(s), no steps, no features being checked.

HW7: The People Have Spoken: Take an extra week

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Ok, ok. I’ve been getting quite a lot of questions about homework 7, and I think I need to spend a bit more time talking about these things before I call time on this homework.

So: homework #7 is not due tomorrow.

Due to the holiday next Tuesday, this means I’m giving one more week on this.

Homework #7 is due Thursday Nov 13.

And I’ll talk about related issues in class tomorrow (Nov 6).

Demoting HW6

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Thinking about homework 6 some more, a couple of things:

First, concerning the features of elect, there was supposed to be a [uN*] feature there. I have posted an updated key to reflect this (but you should mark your paper copy). I will record a score 1 point higher for everyone across the board, because the informal polling suggested that it was pretty much universally marked off.

Second, homework 6 was simply too short, and I don’t think holding it to the 35-point scale that the previous homeworks were on makes much sense. I will therefore cut it in half, making it worth 17.5 points.

So, to summarize: To get your actual score, take the number written on your homework, add one, divide by two, and consider it to be out of 17.5.

When I do the computation at the end, homework 6 will only be dropped (if it has the lowest percentage score) where the outcome is better than dropping the second-lowest, since homework 6 is now worth less.

HW6: NPs were what I had in mind

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I was just reminded of the fact that, in principle, you have now seen DPs, and so there is a question about what to do with the homework that is due Thursday. My intention was that you would use NPs on homework 6. In general, the homework is intended to relate to the things that were covered up until the point when it is handed out, and the things that are covered in class after that are really things that will be applicable to the following homework.

So, in brief: Draw NPs on homework 6, no DPs until homework 7.

Midsemester grade estimates posted

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I’ve finally gotten through working out the mid-semester grade estimates, and I’ve added them to the Blackboard site for the course. You should see a column called “MidSem”, which contains a number on a 4-point scale. The idea is that anything above 3.67 is an A, above 3.33 is an A-, above 3.00 is a B+, and so forth.

I computed these based on the assumption that there were only 5 assignments (one score dropped), and that the score on the final is the same as that on the midterm.

I will post information about the BUCLD extra credit assignment within a couple of days, which is something you can do to substitute in for the next lowest homework score.

Also: please double-check that there isn’t something unexpected there, e.g., a homework you gave me that didn’t get recorded, or a typo in a score.

Midterm scaling

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Ok, sorry to have been slow making this available, but this is how I would line up the points on the midterm to letter grades. Note too that I pushed it up a little bit in order to exclude (2e).

47–50 = A, 43–46 = A−,
39–42 = B+, 35–38 = B, 31–34 = B−,
27–30 = C+, 23–26 = C, 19–22 = C−.

This is perhaps better than you might have anticipated, if you think of 60% as the cutoff for passing—but it’s far too difficult to try to design a test that is exactly the right difficulty level to make the percentages line up that way. The scaling I give above pretty well reflects the actual nature of the test I think.

As for how you are doing overall at this point, I’ll try to work up a kind of midterm estimate within a day or two. You can kind of figure it out based on the scale above, dropping a homework, etc., though the scale for the midterm and the scale for the homework will be slightly different to reflect their differences in difficulty. So, soon, on that. I’ll make it a visible column on the Blackboard site when it is ready.

Small error on the HW4 key

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It was just brought to my attention that there is a small error on the key for homework #4.

It’s on the very last sentence of the homework: John does bind him and so it should have been underlined.

For completeness, I’ve replaced the key online, although this is the only change.

Addendum: It appears that some people lost a half-point for underlining John, even though it should have been underlined. You can have that half-point back, just bring your homework to class and I’ll fix it. And if you didn’t underline John and didn’t lose a half-point, you can feel free to take a half-point off your score (but don’t bother telling me about it).

Counting [uP*] features

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In response to another question over email, about the questions on the practice midterms that ask about how may [uP*] features are in the trees.

The answers to these basically hinge on whether the PP in the tree is getting a theta role or not. If a PP in the tree is getting a theta role, it must have been Merged into that position, which would have to happen in order to check a [uP*] feature.

The way to tell is basically to look at where the PP is in the tree, and what its mother and sister nodes are. First of all, the only kind of theta role that we can assign to a PP is Goal (PP sister of V). So, if any PP gets a theta role, it’ll be in that position in the tree.

Another way to determine this is to look to see if the sister node and mother node are the same (somethingP). That would indicate that the PP was attached to the structure using Adjoin. So, if the sister is vP and the mother is also vP, then the PP does not get a theta role, and so it was not introduced into the tree to check a [uP*] feature. Same if the sister is NP and the mother is also NP, no [uP*] feature was checked when the PP was added to the tree.

Then, you basically just count them up. In a simple sentence with a single verb, the answer really only could have been “zero” or “one”, since introducing a Goal is the only place where we would find a [uP*] feature.

Side note: Above I said Goal is PP sister of V. For ditransitive verbs like give and put, this is the same as saying PP daughter of V′ (which is what I said in class and what Adger says in the book). However, I think it might be more accurate to say that it is the PP sister of V, based on the structure we’d probably want to assign to something like Pat glanced at the handout. I won’t ask any questions on the midterm that rely on this difference, but I just wanted to note it in case anyone looked back at how we handled glance (back before we introduced the “little v“) and wondered how that would work with the UTAH.