That was quick

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Well, I guess that’s it. Seems like it raced by, somehow. But, thanks for an interesting semester, and congratulations on all you absorbed about the current state of syntax from the sort of “immersion-style” course/seminar this past semester.

As you know, I’ll be on sabbatical during the upcoming year, but I expect to be around now and again. And, in any event, keep in touch!

Between now and the end of finals period, I’ll be around much of the time. If you want to set up a time to meet to discuss anything (e.g., about your papers), just let me know.

Incidentally, according to the corporate website, the name ‘LEGO’ is an abbreviation of two Danish words “leg godt”, meaning ‘play well.’

Good luck with your papers and any other finals you might have, and enjoy the summer!

What did you want to say about the homeworks?

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In class on Tuesday, I decided not to go through the homework keys, but I mentioned that I’d try to post something that indicated which of them I would have gone through.

And then I got a monster cold that more or less knocked me out of commission for three days. But here I am again.

I think, in retrospect, I should have just said “all of them” so that you’d just look at all of the keys. But I did have a couple in mind. One of them was #6, about Navajo questions, which I kind of sketched out in class. The second part of #6, about Chinese A-not-A questions was also something I would have gone over; I had something in mind here, but few people saw what I was getting at in the first part of the problem, which made the later part of the problem harder.

I probably would have gone over at least the last part of #3, about “who else’s mother did you meet?” And question 5 of #4 about Weak Crossover, Italian, and what’s wrong with ‘To MARIA, Giorgio, his[Giorgio’s] mother will introduce.’ I might have gone over #8 about adverbs in English just because it’s kind of nifty, plus I wanted to make the point of question 3 in case it wasn’t clear.

I might not have gone over #7 (about linearization and adverbs) since more people saw what I was after there. I probably wouldn’t have gone over #9 except to say “oops, that one was kind of a mess.” Plus, most people actually did relatively well given the impoverished directions. I probably wouldn’t have gone over #5 because I would not have had time. And going over #2 would seem a bit far back to reach. I don’t even remember what #1 was now. But I would not have gone over that one.

I think that’s all of them then.

Monday (4/30): Two events of possible interest

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In case you haven’t been keeping your eye on the Linguistic events in the Boston area page, there are a couple of things coming up on Monday. Both are at the same time, unfortunately, one at Harvard, and one at Brandeis.

At Harvard: The Cognitive Revolution at Fifty, Plus or Minus One: A Conversation with Jerome Bruner, Susan Carey, Noam Chomsky, and George Miller (Moderated by Steven Pinker). At 4pm: Harvard University, Yenching Auditorium, 2 Divinity Ave.

At Brandeis: Vita Markman (Pomona College), “What is this, Where is this? On Some Syntactic Oddities of the Pronominal Copula Construction.” At 4pm: Brandeis University, Volen 105.

Abstracts for both events are on the aforementioned Linguistic events in the Boston area page.

Across-the-Board week

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Greeting, syntacticians. Long time, no blogging.

On the off chance that you are still checking the blog, the readings for the Across-The-Board constructions week have now been posted to the readings page. We will have Seungwan Ha there to talk through the concepts and his work on the subject (and with the remaining time I plan to talk through some of this semester’s homeworks).

Seungwan has made available a draft of his chapter 6, and made several reading suggestions. They are listed on the readings page, and you’re encouraged to read them in the order they are presented there (that is, Seungwan’s chapter is the highest priority, followed by Hornstein & Nunes 2002 and Citko 2005, followed by the rest of the readings). The highest priority of all, though, is your paper draft, so get through that first, then turn to the readings.

Readings for adverbs week actually posted

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At the end of class last time, I sort of alluded to the readings, but I only just now posted the specifics. The readings include, first, a number of excerpts from Cinque’s (1999) book on adverbial syntax, and, second, a paper by Travis & Rackowski on Malagasy and Nieuan, with reference to Cinque’s story about adverbs.

Note on technology: If you know where to find the PDF file with the Cinque book excerpts, you should see a little “cloud” on the first page containing instructions about which sections are relevant. I found that this cloud printed fine on the Mac with Preview, but it didn’t appear when I printed with Acrobat. I suspect that this just means that there is a setting in Acrobat (like “print with annotations”) that I did not turn on, but if you are printing and you are relying on Acrobat to do that printing, you might benefit from looking around for the “print with annotations” options that I am hypothesizing exists.

Final project specifications

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I was surprised to discover that I never handed out the final project specifications—I actually thought I’d handed this out at the beginning of the course, but it appears that I didn’t.

So, here is a PDF outlining the different steps toward the final project (the project proposal, presentation, and paper). The proposal is due next week (March 27, in lieu of homework), and, as the specifications say:

Proposal. The proposal is basically just a sketch of the topic you would like to work on, and a list of candidate papers/books you are likely to read as a part of the project. You are not committed to using exactly the papers you put on the proposal, but you should do some initial research just to see what papers are out there. You should probably be able to put all of this on a single page, or maybe two. This is just a “safety net” designed to make sure that you haven’t picked what I would consider to be an impossible (or, more unlikely, a trivially easy) topic—and to ensure that you don’t wait until April 16th to start thinking about it.

Tuesday and the Hebrew DP

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As spring break winds down (how could it be over already?), I have an announcement about Tuesday’s class. We will as planned discuss the papers by Kyle Johnson and by Danny Fox & David Pesetsky, but after that we will have Shai Cohen, a finishing graduate student from U. Mass Amherst, coming to talk to us about some syntactic aspects of the Hebrew DP. Given that, it might not hurt to look again at the Ritter paper we read earlier in the semester as well.

See you Tuesday!

Office hours move: today 12-1

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How is it Wednesday already?

I meant to announce this earlier, but let me at least announce it. My normally scheduled 3-4pm office hours can’t happen today due to a BU faculty meeting. Instead, they will be 12-1 today, but as always, just email me if you want to meet and we can set up a time.

McGill’s Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates

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The McGill’s Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates is happening at McGill (in Montréal, just about 6 hours North of here) in late March (March 23–25), and they’ve sent around an announcement inviting submission of abstracts. The deadline is February 26, which is very soon. If you are an undergraduate and have something you’ve worked on that you might like to present, this is something to consider; let me know if you want any advice on getting an abstract together. In any event, you may simply want to attend the event, it’s a good excuse to go Montréal.

The Society of Linguistics Undergraduates of McGill (SLUM) is currently accepting submissions for the 1st Annual McGill Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates (McCCLU). Due to popular interest, McCCLU will now be accepting abstracts from undergraduate students studying at any Canadian, American, or international university. Interested students are encouraged to submit an abstract, in English or in French, for a 20-minute talk with a 10-minute question period on any topic pertaining to linguistics. Students whose abstracts are not accepted as talks may be given the opportunity to display their work at a poster session (details to be provided). Abstracts should be maximum one-page in length and should be submitted online to abstracts@mccclu.ca by Monday February 26th.

Technical difficulties here at the blog

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The machine on which this blog is run is having some technical trouble and needs to have a couple of bits replaced. (Literally, though I suppose it’s really just one: Somewhere in its gigabyte of memory, there is a single bit that won’t turn on, but this still warrants replacing the memory chip. Also, the hard drive is failing I think.) So, the blog might be missing occasionally over the next couple of days, but after that it should return to normal.