Monthly Archives: October 2012

10.29.12
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Binding

Another question I got is how one determines whether a syntactic object “is bound with anything.”

I do want to make a clarification point here: there is an error in the question, and it’s actually something that often seems to be confusing to people. But binding is asymmetric. Even if X binds Y, you can’t suppose that Y also binds X. Things are not “bound with” each other, nor do you say X and Y “are bound” if either X binds Y or Y binds X. It’s a one-directional thing. X binds Y, Y is bound by X.1

But as for the question itself, the way you can tell by definition whether one thing binds another is to see whether X c-commands Y and then see if X and Y both have the same index.

Another way to answer that question is in fact to use Binding Theory and possible meanings—probably the safest way to do this is by checking judgments about Principle C: if you put “he” in for X and “John” in for Y and it’s ungrammatical (but would be fine if Y were “Mary”), then X almost certainly binds Y. That is:

Xi introduced Yi to Zi.

X binds Y and X binds Z, and Y binds Z.

If you put “He” in for X and “John” in for Y, it’s bad.

*Hei introduced Johni to Z.

But it’s fine with “Mary”:

Hei introduced Maryj to Z.

Similarly:

*Hei introduced Y to Johni.
Hei introduced Y to Maryj.
*X introduced himi to Johni.
X introduced himi to Maryj.

1 It is conceptually possible for X to bind Y and Y to simultaneously bind X if X and Y c-command each other— that is, if they are sisters. This situation will never arise, though. The only such combination Binding Theory would allow would be two anaphors combined together (“himself himself”) and you couldn’t Merge them together to form a larger object because it wouldn’t check any features or satisfy the Hierarchy of Projections. So, for all practical purposes, if X binds Y, Y does not bind X.

10.29.12
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Maximal, minimal, and intermediate projections

One of the questions I got was asking for a clarification of “maximal”, “minimal”, and “intermediate” projections. I’d encourage you to read the summary notes if you haven’t, because I do go into this there, but here’s another version of that, possibly in a bit more detail.

Maximal, minimal, and intermediate projections—so, what the whole syntactic derivation is about is taking a set of lexical items and “arranging” them by combining them together two at a time. So, when you pick up two of these lexical items, you combine them into one, and we need to know what to call the thing we’ve got as a result (the thing made from the two objects we combined). The idea is that each of the lexical items has a bunch of properties, maybe most significantly its category (it’s a noun, or a verb, for example). Once we’ve combined two lexical items into one object, we need to know what the properties of that object are, and it appears that what happens is that the property of the combined object are the same as the properties of one of the things we combined to make it.

So in every combination of two objects to make a combined object, one of the two objects is special, since it’s the property of the special one that determine the properties of the combined object. We say that the features (properties) of the special one “project” up to the combined object—which just means that the combined object has the same properties as the special one had.

So, that’s essentially what it means to say that the features of an object “project” (projéct, as in “form a projection”). The terms maximal, minimal, and intermediate projection just refer to points along the path of a feature’s projection. A minimal projection is the place where the features start, when the features haven’t projected anywhere. This would be the head of a phrase. A maximal projection is the point beyond which a feature no longer projects—so, when you combine two objects and the special one’s features project to the combined object, the *other* object is necessarily a maximal projection because its features didn’t project any higher than that. An intermediate projection is just any point along the path of projection that is neither at the top nor the bottom.

Now, that’s kind of abstract—in terms that are probably more familiar, a “minimal projection” corresponds to the head of a phrase, like the V in a VP. A “maximal projection” corresponds to the whole phrase, the VP in a VP. And an “intermediate projection” corresponds to the nodes in the middle, for example the V′ in a VP. So, the maximal projection of V is the VP it heads, the minimal projection of V is the V itself, and the intermediate projections of V are any V′ nodes between V and VP.

10.28.12
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Monday wind-day

So, turns out classes have been canceled tomorrow, which—although doesn’t directly affect the midterm scheduled for Tuesday—does mean that I’m not going to be able to meet with people who had questions about the midterm material. To the extent that the power’s on at least, I will plan to post questions I get and answers I provide here, though. I’ve already gotten a couple over email that I plan to put here. So, stay tuned here and feel free to email me questions you might have.

10.21.12
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HW5: The missing slides

I mentioned in class that I was going to post the missing slides referred to in homework 5, and I did, but I neglected to post anything here about the fact that I had. But here they are: The missing slides from the end of handout #11.

The homework makes reference to these slides in an inaccurate way (particularly since they were not on a handout). It says “handout 8b in the last ‘Auxiliaries moving to T’ slide on page 7.” And by that what I really mean is: “The last of the three missing slides I just linked to above.”

As I kind of walked through in class, question 1 says “Run through the definition of Agree, just as I did above for the first step, …” By this I mean, replicate the bullet points above that, based on the definition of Agree from handout #11. The example I gave above question 1 was what you would do if X were V, F1 were [uN*], Y were NP, and F2 were [N], based on the very first step of the derivation, where V and NP are Merged to form VP. In question 1 you are asked to do this same thing but for a step a little bit later in the derivation, at the point where Perf has Merged with vP to form PerfP, using Perf for X, v for Y, [Perf] for F1, and [uInfl:] for F2. When I say “You have exactly two to do” I mean that you will run through this definition once in question 1, and then a second time in questions 2 through 4 (and 5, sort of).

Last point: In the second problem, part 4, it says “The part of our system that causes auxiliaries to move to T is that part on page 6 of handout 10 that you looked at earlier”. Very confusing, very inaccurate. That’s the same slide you were looking at before, it’s the last of the three missing slides I linked to at the top of this post.

Probably you could figure it out anyway, but just so that you’re confident that you’re looking at the right stuff, I hope I’ve now set the record straight.

10.04.12
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HW4: Due October 11

As announced in class today, the due date for homework 4 has been postponed. It is now due next time, which—as it happens—is a week later. I will update the schedule page shortly, but:

HOMEWORK 4 IS DUE ON OCTOBER 11.

Also, given that, you can now disregard the previous posting.

DO (12) AS WELL, AS PART OF HOMEWORK 4.

10.03.12
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HW4: Don’t do (12)

[Update: I have solved the problem addressed here in a different way. Rather than have you skip (12), I made the homework due a week later so we could talk about what you needed to know. So, do (12) too as part of homework 4.]

Sorry, I got ahead of myself, even more than I’d thought. Number (12) on the homework (Claudia gave Oliver mustard) requires something that we haven’t talked about, it’s buried at the end of the handout that I didn’t get through on Tuesday. So, if you can decipher what the handout means, then you could probably do it, but nevertheless, I intend to add this to homework #5 instead.

So DON’T DO (12)!

But if you figured it out and have already done it, it wasn’t time wasted, it’ll just be counted as part of homework 5.