I’ve update the Schedule page with links to PDF versions of the handouts I gave out in our last class, including last year’s final and key, and the summary notes. If you need a key for one of the homework assignments, just email me and I’ll send it to you.

On the summary notes, I observed a little bit too late that I left the last section on phases and islands in, but we didn’t really get to cover the island types very thoroughly, and I don’t think we talked about phases at all. I won’t ask questions about that on the final, therefore, and you can disregard questions on previous finals that relate to those things. I’ll try to post finals for previous years before long, though if you’re resourceful with web searching you can find them, since I’ve linking to previous finals and their keys for several years. But I’ll try to get them properly into this semester’s schedule page before long.

Ok, I’ve had a look at the score distribution, and how I’ve graded the midterm in the past, and so forth. If you wish to convert your midterm score to a letter grade equivalent, use the following (basically, every 2 points is a grade increment):

This is a bit generous, since the test was so easy, but dropping a grade increment every point is too harsh, so this looks about right. The grade you get here is yours to keep, but if you got less than about 18, try to be sure you catch back up and understand what went wrong and what’s coming next. The final will not be quite so gently graded.

As for the homework, it’s really quite difficult to get a good sense of it due to the complexities of having different numbers of points per assignment, and the fact that one gets dropped. Here’s how I’m computing it, for better or worse. Each homework is just treated as a percentage (your score over the total possible), and then the lowest percentage is dropped, yielding an average percentage over 4 homework assignments. I’m scaling that the same way, so 92% and up is an A, 84% and up is an A-, 76% and up is a B+, 68% and up is a B, 60% and up is a B-, 52% and up is a C+, 44% and up is a C, etc. That’s also generous, but that balances of some of the intrinsic risk of being confusing in homework assignments, and the fact that it counts for so much of the overall grade.

So, if you do the math, you are going to almost certainly be doing better than you thought if you’d done the math before I gave the scale, but casting my eye over the results, this looks about right to me. On the generous side, but not too much so.

I’ve finally had a chance to populate the scores to date on the Blackboard site for the course, so this includes all the scores from homework 1 up to the midterm. I haven’t yet done what is necessary to convert the numbers you see there into something resembling a letter grade, but it still might be worth checking what you see there to see if you have what you expected to have. I typed it all in by hand, so it is not impossible that there are typos. If you see a discrepancy in your scores, let me know.

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:

X_i introduced Y_i to Z_i.

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.

*He_i introduced John_i to Z.

But it’s fine with “Mary”:

He_i introduced Mary_j to Z.

Similarly:

*He_i introduced Y to John_i.
He_i introduced Y to Mary_j.
*X introduced him_i to John_i.
X introduced him_i to Mary_j.

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.

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.

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.

Hello, this is where the course site for the Fall 2012 edition of CAS LX 522 A1 (Syntax I) will be. Things are still being put into place, so nothing here is final until, well, the final. But it should be a pretty good approximation by the beginning of classes. See you in September!