I’ll bring the schedule up to date shortly here, so that it properly reflects what we’ve done so far and does a better job of indicating what we’ll do in the future.

Meanwhile, we decided at the end of the class (when a couple of people had already left), that the CHILDES lab deadline will be shifted a little bit further out. So, before, the first portion was already going to be due at our next meeting (given that we don’t meet on Tuesday). However, I didn’t really make it through the CHILDES demo sufficiently, so the first part of the CHILDES lab will be due the next meeting after [update: the next meeting after] that, on October 18.

[Update: Just so as the whole data collection part doesn’t come due two days after we talk about it, and to stay on the cycle of homework being due on Thursday, I’ve shifted it still one class meeting further, so there will be a week to do it.]

It turns out that something snuck into homework 4 that I didn’t really prepare you for. We haven’t really talked much about the “Minimal Trees” hypothesis, at least in the specifics that are relevant for the last question. There are some citations there to things in Lydia White’s textbook, though it’s not crucial that you go find those, we’ve talked about most everything.

The main thing that is relevant for this on the homework is that the Minimal Trees hypothesis has two parts: first, the syntactic structure starts out sort of small, with just the VP and no higher functional projections, and then progresses through development to add more structure. The second part is the idea that at the beginning, the parameter settings that are available to a tree that is just a VP are transferred from the first language, but not settings that pertain to the higher part of the tree (since there is no higher part of the tree right at the beginning). The question at the end is asking about how well the pattern shown by the data (from Dutch-speaking students progressing in French) can be understood in terms of the Minimal Trees hypothesis vs. in terms of something like the “full transfer, full access” hypothesis.

We’ll wind up talking about it tomorrow, but try to think about it anyway based on what I just said above.

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.