The schedule page now has links to the keys for homeworks 1–3 and some midterms from previous years to practice on, along with their keys.

Note that for the homework keys, you need the username/password that I gave out in class, it’s not your BU Login password that you enter there. Email me if you’ve misplaced it.

With respect to homework 4, I think rather than have people struggle with it, with a few things even still somewhat underspecified, I have decided to give you an extra class period to do it, which turns out to mean an extra week. So, I’d like to collect it on the day of the midterm, at the latest. If you are comfortable with it, feel free to hand it in on Thursday, but if you’d like to use the time Thursday to clarify things that aren’t clear about the material on the homework (which is relevant to understanding what we’re doing, and therefore also relevant for the midterm), that’s also fine. I feel that we didn’t get as far as I’d have liked to today.

So, to reiterate: You can hand in homework #4 as late as Thursday October 14 without it counting as coming in late.

I just realized that I was a bit too hasty in coming up with sentences for you to do on homework #4. In particular, the fourth and fifth sentences have the pronoun me in them.

It turns out that we don’t quite know how to do those yet, so please substitute a name in for me in those examples. I will try to remember to say this in class on Tuesday.

That, is consider these sentences to be Balloons exploded above Pat and Ducks quacked near Chris.

The problem with me is that we saw earlier on that we want to treat them as having category D, not category N, and it is not clear how something with the feature [D] can check an uninterpretable [uN]. We will resolve this issue before too long, but for the moment pronouns do not fit comfortably in the trees we’re drawing. On the homework you just turned in, this was ignored in the features that I gave you for the pronouns—there I called them Ns, but I should probably have used names there as well.

A couple of people have asked me about question 2, which is the one where I give you the features of a verb, but not the verb itself, and ask you to come up with a verb that fits it.

Phrasal verbs like hand in or stir up are not really what you want here, and you do want a verb for which the PP is required (not optional). But re-read the hint. Really. It’s a good hint.

One quick note about the problem about theta roles too: Don’t be concerned that the answers to all of the sentences are almost the same. That’s intended. The (a) sentences are going to generally be all alike, with some differences in whether there is a Theme or a Goal, that sort of thing, and the (b) sentences are also going to be alike.

Also: concerning the difference between Theme and Experiencer. In general, an Experiencer is something that is conscious, able to experience something. So, a rock is not a likely Experiencer (though it is a fine Theme). Experiencers are also just about always subjects, like Agents are. Experiencers and Agents basically occupy the same places in sentences.

Themes and Experiencers are both things that the event “happens to” in a certain sense, so they are a little bit difficult to distinguish, but in general just keep in mind that objects are quite likely to be Themes, and subjects are good candidates for Experiencers. (This isn’t a perfect rule, since it doesn’t work with passive sentences, and it is certainly possible for a conscious being to be a Theme, but it’s kind of a workable “rule of thumb.” For this homework, at least, it works.)

I talked with a few people today about what exactly I was after in part 4, so let me say a couple of things about that here (I know it’s kind of late relative to when the homework is due, but I’ll try to post comments like this as soon as someone asks about them).

First: don’t forget about the previous post I made about this: There is a typo in the instructions when I talk about what meanings you should get in Parts 1-3. Parts 1 and 3 have the same meaning, Part 2 has a different meaning.

Second, none of these constituency tests are going to fail outright. You’ll be creating 6 sentences, 2 each for parts 1-3, and they should all be grammatical sentences. But there is a nuance when it comes to what your test sentences can mean, which is what is explored in part 4.

So, here’s the idea about part 4:

The sentence in the homework has a structural ambiguity that arises from the fact that the phrase from Belgium could be attached in a couple of different places. For simplicity, let me forget about the chocolates and concentrate on the box: I got a box from Belgium. It’s possible for from Belgium to modify box, so then what we’re talking about is a Belgian box (a box from Belgium). It’s also possible for from Belgium to specify something about the getting—I got, from Belgium, a box.

These two meanings correspond to two different syntactic structures. In the first, the PP from Belgium is lower in the tree, and in the second, it is higher. But the way you pronounce both of these trees is the same, so we feel the sentence to be ambiguous—the words in that order could correspond to either tree, so to either meaning.

Part of what is meant by having a different structure is that different things will be constituents. Something that is a constituent in one tree might not be a constituent in the other tree. And the constituency tests are a way to find out what a constituent is. So, when we are testing a box from Belgium to see if it is a constituent, we are implicitly testing to see if it is a constituent in both trees. If the test passes for the first meaning (Belgian box), then that means that a box from Belgium is a constituent in the first tree. If the test passes for the second meaning (received from Belgium), then a box from Belgium is a constituent in the second tree. But if it only passes one, then it is probably a constituent only in one of the two trees. So, if the test sentence (like It’s a box from Belgium that I got) only corresponds to one of the meanings (Belgian box), then we preliminarily take that to mean that a box from Belgium is a constituent only in the “Belgian box” tree, but is not a constituent in the “received from Belgium” tree.

So, that’s what we’re doing when we are considering the meanings that the test sentences can have—we’re trying to determine which tree the string of words we’re testing is a constituent in.

Now, one last thing: from Belgium is a constituent, in both trees. But yet when we test it, it seems that the test sentences only have one meaning (the “received from Belgium” meaning). That’s what the little note I added in on Part 4 relates to—there is an additional condition on sentences that says, essentially, you can’t topicalize or cleft something that is inside an NP. For example, if you have an NP like the book about squirrels that John bought in a sentence like I read the book about squirrels that John bought, you can’t form a cleft using squirrels (*It’s squirrels that I read the book about that John bought or form a topicalization using squirrels (*Squirrels, I read the book about that John bought), even though we know that squirrels is a constituent (since it’s just one word). The reason you can’t use either test is that squirrels is inside the noun phrase, and topicalization and clefting simply doesn’t work for constituents inside a noun phrase.

If you think this through just a little bit further, I expect that you’ll see why testing whether from Belgium is a constituent wound up unambiguously having the “received from Belgium” meaning, even though from Belgium actually is a constituent in the structures for both the “received from Belgium” and the “Belgian box” meanings.

Anyway, I hope that helps make what’s going on here seem a bit less of a mystery. I still want you to try to write out a short explanation of why the test sentences wind up not being ambiguous, but what I’ve explained here should take you most of the way through that part.