If you have questions and want to stop by my office to ask about them, rather than emailing me, I will have office hours on Wednesday 12/14 from 11-1 and on Thursday 12/15 from 3:30-5. The final itself, remember, is Friday 12/16 from 3-5 in the regular classroom.
Many study materials posted
I’ve now linked a bunch of things into the schedule page that might be useful for studying. I’ll just copy the text and links here:
There is an extra credit homework you can do, and there are exercises (with possibly more coming), last year’s final (and the key), as well as finals from F09 (key), F08 (key), F06 (key). Also, read over the Summary notes II, the concise summary, and the I saw John’s destruction of his hat example.
HW7 and triangles
It appears that the grader and I were not entirely in sync about the use of triangles on homework #7. Even though it didn’t say so in the instructions, I’d indicated that it was ok to use triangles so long as somewhere on the assignment you’d written out a comparable structure in full, but it appears that a number of half-points were taken off for triangles that should have qualified as ok.
If you could look over your homework and identify where there are triangles that refer back to already completed structures, that would be good. I’ll try to mention this in class tomorrow, and maybe after class ends I can take a quick inventory and refund you some the points that were lost to this.
Sorry about the confusion…
Don’t forget: HW7 is due Thursday (Dec 1) not Tuesday (Nov 29)
I’ve gotten a few emails from people who wanted to meet to discuss homework 7 before Tuesday’s class, which is great, of course—but the homework itself is not due until Thursday’s class. If you are having trouble getting started on homework 7, or are unsure of a few things, then:
- You are not alone.
- I can talk about them on Tuesday if you ask about them.
I think, in any event, I’ll probably try to work through one example tree in class, similar to the ones actually on homework 7.
Tortoise express
Lately, I’ve quite often found that email arrives in my inbox after spending sometimes up to almost 24 hours dawdling around on the BU mail servers. Although it is true that I’m also drowning in email and don’t always respond immediately, it is not impossible that I simply haven’t received your email yet. Kind of frustrating, but also not much that can be done about it. So, just so you know, this makes it even less of a good idea to send me questions about, e.g., homework assignments just a few hours before the homework is due.
HW6: instructions
The instructions for homework #6 got a little bit mixed up with respect to the numbering. What you’re being asked to do is draw three trees, one tree each for (1), (2), and (3), following the example given for (4).
So, in other words, follow the spirit and not the letter of the instructions. I’ll still take off points if no tree is drawn for sentence (1), even though you weren’t specifically told to draw a tree for it. 🙂
(This happened because in my original draft of this homework, the example came before the sentences for you to draw, and so was “(1)”, and then I added a third sentence after I wrote out the instructions and failed to mention it in the directions.)
See you at 3:30
I seem to have confused a couple of people with my previous post. Class will be tomorrow at the usual time. The usual time, however, is an hour more distant from last week’s class than it is most weeks, due to the conclusion of Daylight Saving Time. :p
Class postponed
Reminder: The time between last Tuesday’s class and this coming Tuesday’s class will be 10050 minutes, rather than the usual 9990. I wish you all the best in coping with the delay during this difficult time.
BUCLD syntax
I promised this a while ago, but here are a few selected talks from this weekend’s BUCLD that might contain some recognizable terminology. This list is not exhaustive, though. Many of these will be about syntax beyond where we’ve gotten, or be about syntax and something else that you may not be as familiar with.
I may come back and annotate these a little bit more. For the moment, I’ll just post these as they are. This was kind of a rush job so I could at least post something, sorry. I will also try to come back and verify the rooms that they’re in.
Friday
- B 9:00 Tense and Truth in Children’s Question Answering
- B 9:30 What Sarah reveals about the link between the RI stage and the use of non-agreeing don’t
- A 11:00 Development of parsing ability interacts with grammar learning: Evidence from Tagalog and Kannada
- B 2:00 The role of islands in processing English as a second language
- C 4:15 Parsing for Principle C at 30 months
- Poster: Binding in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)
Saturday
- B 9:00 Reanalysing the L2 acquisition of anaphoric binding: A feature-based approach
- B 9:30 L1-Korean L2er’s sensitivity to Givenness in the English dative alternation
- B 10:00 Statistical learning constrained by syntactic biases in an artificial language learning task
- B 11:00 ‘Experiencing’ a slight delay: Intervening arguments and the acquisition of subject-to-subject raising
- B 11:30 Raising is birds, control is penguins: Solving the learnability paradox
- B 2:15 The acquisition of NP recursion in English-speaking children
- B 2:45 A constraint on argument ellipsis in Child Japanese
- B 4:30 Abstract CP/IP configuration in Child Japanese
- Poster: Does Case matter in the acquisition of Romanian relative clauses?
- Poster: Mapping intransitive verbs to self-propelled actions
- Poster: Dative alternation in Norwegian child language
- Poster: Interpretation of scope ambiguity by Korean-speaking learners of English: the case of numerically quantified NPs and negation
- Poster: Ambiguous anaphora in the L2 English and L2 Spanish
- Poster: Evaluating syntactic production in young children with and without language delays
- Poster: Past tense marking in English L2 children with and without SLI: Evidence for a usage-based approach
- Poster: Modeling the acquisition of English past-tense
BUCLD extra credit
I announced this a couple of times in class, but I failed to ever post anything about it. If you are going to the BUCLD this weekend and want to avail yourself of some possible extra credit toward your homework score, the deal is this: If you write up a short summary of two talks (what it seemed to be about, what they seemed to be concluding, what the evidence seemed to be, and whatever comments you have—including notes on things you didn’t really understand), I’ll count that in place of the lowest non-dropped homework score. I envision the summaries being somewhere between a half-page to a page each.
Preferably, these would be talks that are somehow syntax-related. It’s not an absolute requirement, but I encourage you to try to choose talks that look like syntax.
If you can’t go to the conference, there will be some alternative opportunity for extra credit later on, so you won’t be disadvantaged if you can’t go, but you might as well take the opportunity if you can.