By the way, to clarify explicitly a couple of things about the “extra credit homework” (Trees are easy to draw) that I handed out in the last class.

It says on it that is due on some imaginary Friday, but it is not. It is due on the 18th, a Tuesday, at the final.

The idea is that this essentially replaces your second-lowest homework score (your lowest homework score having already been dropped). So, it helps more if you’ve missed a homework or didn’t do well on a couple of them—but it’s also not bad as a kind of a review exercise as well. You can’t lose points by handing it in, either.

The first sentence you’re asked to draw on HW7 contains a DP her brother’s Coke. This is an extension of the possession constructions we’ve looked at. What’s special about this one is that it has two possession relationships (her-brother, and brother-Coke). The trick here is just that any DP can be a possessor within another DP, that’s what makes these “recursive.” An easy way to approach this would probably be to sketch out the DP for her brother and for his Coke, and then replace the DP his in his Coke with the DP you sketched for her brother. They’re both legitimate DPs, either his or her brother are perfectly fine possessor DPs.

The other thing I noticed has to do with the capitalization of Coke. I meant, of course, the carbonated beverage distributed by the Coca-Cola company. However, note that this is not a proper name. Possession constructions are incompatible with definite DPs like proper names (“*the his dog”, “*his the dog”). If you put a proper name in that place, you can mean something, but it turns the meaning into something like possession of an instance of a kind. That is, “his James Bond” takes on some kind of meaning other than the (fictional) person James Bond possessed by him, it is something more like “his interpretation of the character” or “his action figure” or whatever, depending on the context. Something of which there are several, one of which can be possessed by him. It might have been more perspicuous if I hadn’t used something with a brand name like Coke; I could have de-capitalized it to make it clearer, except that those not hailing from the southern US might have then taken the sentence to mean something somewhat different from what I’d intended.

The reason the proper name thing is relevant is just that the head D of the topmost DP in her brother’s Coke should be the null ∅_GEN, and not ∅_PROPER.

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.

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.

[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.

Somehow, I’d missed this, but there’s a typo in (1)—it won’t materially affect what you’re doing, but on the homework I gave out, both the “A” and “B” forms of the Sinhala verb ‘tell’ were given as kiənəwa. The “B” form should be kiəwenəwa, it is in fact distinct from the “A” form.

This note is a bit late in coming, but in case people are still working on the homework:

Part 6 asks you to work with the sentence One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, using a couple of our constituency tests. The thing is, with one morning in there, this results in some kind of awkward-sounding sentences, but they are awkward in a way that isn’t really important. One morning is a kind of adverbial phrase that you could just as easily leave out. I’d suggest actually just dropping that from the sentence altogether and analyzing it as if it were just I shot an elephant in my pajamas. Alternatively, it’s ok if you want to put one morning at the end of the test sentences (rather than at the beginning).

At least to me, even unchanged, the test sentences don’t sound terrible, it just winds up sounding more like poetry or something, not terribly natural but still clearly English.

That black box problem causes everyone involved no end of headaches. I still like it, but even though I’ve been assigning some variant of it for several years, tweaking it each time, I still haven’t managed to make it really clear.

In part 1, I give what I call a “non-optimal” model of the box. But actually, that wasn’t really a good thing to call it. It’s not just that it’s “non-optimal”, it’s actually a bad model. “Non-optimal” kind of suggests that it does what it needs to do, but just could be more elegant. In fact, it doesn’t do what it needs to do, and (or even because) it could be more elegant. The reason it is a bad model of the black box’s behavior is that it predicts that the box should do things that it doesn’t in fact do.

In part 2, then, I have you contemplate a “better” model. And what I mean by “better” here is something more like “adequate”—a model that doesn’t make these wrong predictions that the box should do things that observation reveals it doesn’t do. So, by “better model” I mean something like “not a complete failure of a model.”

The basic idea is not particularly complicated, once you see what I’m after. And I do think that that Car Talk puzzler thing at the beginning is kind of relevant to the thought process. Just to save you needing to do a lot of searching for it, here is the original puzzler and the answer.

Here’s the first “homework”, just a couple of demographic questions for you. You can email your answers to me. If I did it right, you can click here to start your email with the questions already there. But the questions are:

What other Linguistics courses (or related courses) have you taken?

What are your (actual or planned) major/minors?

What languages (other than English) do you know, and how well?

What language(s) did you grow up speaking?

Do you prefer to be called something other than what I see in the class list?¹

Anything else that seems relevant?

¹Within reason, that is. “Your Excellence” is not a valid answer here.