[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.