When you are considering (f) (postcards from Greece) and (h) (a book of postcards) in part 1, you ultimately want to conclude that these are constituents. And, furthermore, (f) should appear in the list for one of the meanings, and (h) should appear in the list for the other of the meanings, in part 2. …
Continue reading ‘HW2: Giving up a couple of answers for the greater good’ »
Talking to a couple of you earlier today, it came to my attention that there’s something funny about (i) in part 1 when you’re doing the constituency tests. This part is testing the constituency of received a book of postcards from Greece. What’s funny about it is the way the tense works. Received is in …
In an earlier draft of this problem, the sentence that the whole first chunk of the homework revolves around was about a book of cars, but I changed my mind at some point, thinking book of postcards sounded much better. However, “part 5” still refers to cars at the end. The parenthetical part there should …
Continue reading ‘HW2, part 5: The book is a book of postcards, not cars’ »
I’m not sure if I mentioned this in class or not, but there are a couple of conventional symbols used to indicate the grammatical status of example sentences. I wanted to find this out there somewhere on the web, but my searches didn’t reveal much. The best I found was a writeup about “asterisk” on …
We’re going to have plenty of opportunities to draw trees during the rest of the semester. If you wish to produce your trees electronically, you have a couple of options. Here is the easiest I think: Go to http://ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/ and enter the specification of your tree in labeled bracket notation. They have an example to …
On the topic of constituency tests, there are a few standard tests out there, and in this age of the ubiquitous internet, I’m sure some of you will head out into the world to see what other people have said about them. This may be the first point, certainly not the last, where the internet …
Continue reading ‘On constituency tests and the outside world’ »
For all of you who are undergraduates, the University of Ottawa is hosting a conference for Linguistics undergraduates. They have posted a call for papers soliciting abstracts (for 20 minute talks, 1 page abstracts) for undergraduates who are interested in presenting, but the hitch is that the deadline for submissions is today. So, if you …
Continue reading ‘Ottawa’s Conference for Linguistic Undergraduates’ »
We’ve fallen behind the schedule that I set at the very beginning of the semester, but this is fine. It’s good that we’re having lively in-class discussions, and there was padding in the schedule anyway. Plus, because this class is pretty linear, with later things depending on earlier things, it’s important to be sure that …
Continue reading ‘We’re behind the original schedule… and that’s great!’ »
Ok, I think I’ve now finally responded to everybody who sent me one of the background surveys (from the “Homework 0” post). If you haven’t sent it to me yet, please do, it’s helpful for me in planning things to know where everyone’s coming from. (And if you didn’t get a response from me, then …
Although it is true that what I put on the handout doesn’t exactly reflect what Adger had written in his textbook, I’m not yet completely convinced that the handout wasn’t actually correct. However, regardless, the source of the discussion in the textbook at that point (with respect to the Hopi dual) is drawn from Hale …
Continue reading ‘Regarding the Hopi examples from last time’ »