CAS LX 522 F08

While I’m posting PSAs, here is the web site to visit if you are interested in volunteering to help out with the Boston University Conference on Language Development.

Here’s something that has nothing really to do with features or theta-roles. Maybe in some senses about checking.

You may have heard that there’s a presidential election coming up here in the US relatively soon. For those of you who are US citizens, there is a hurdle that I just wanted to remind you of, though: to vote you need to be registered, and registration deadlines are starting to approach.

You can find a state by state breakdown of deadlines at eac.gov, along with web addresses for each state’s official election site. In general, as a student in MA, you have the option open to you either to register to vote in MA or in your home state (in which case you will also probably need to request an absentee ballot), at least as long as one of the deadlines has not passed.

For MA, mail-in registrations must be postmarked by October 15.

The earliest coming deadlines are October 4, for NV, RI, SC, WA, and VI, followed closely by (Oct 5) AK, (Oct 6) AS, AZ, AR, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IN, KY, LA, MI, MS, MT, OH, WY, (Oct 7) IL, NM, (Oct 8 ) MO. The latest mail-in deadlines are (Oct 25) IA, NH, (Oct 29) VT. The rest are in between, except for PR, for which the deadline has already passed.

Also, Massachusetts has traditionally not really been “in play” in national elections, so you might weigh that as well when deciding between registering in your home state and MA, at least if your home state is more likely be in play. I make no representations as to its accuracy, but CNN does have a little color-coded map of what states are in their estimation in play. Though, you know, vote anyway, even if you’re voting in a dark-solid-colored state.

Ok, back to theta roles.

In part II of homework #3, just to clarify, the sentence you are trying to construct does contain more than just the words called and for. There are five lexical items (five words). Three of those words are pronouns (which means I perhaps should have included something like a [PRN] feature on them as well). But the sentence contains three pronouns, the verb called and the preposition for.

I didn’t give you the pronunciation of the pronouns, but the features that I gave for them will determine the pronunciation of each unambiguously.

In the sentences (4a) and (4b) in Part 1 of homework #3, you’re asked to consider the theta-roles of the participants in a scolding.

As one of you has pointed out to me in an email, there is a sense in which when, say, John scolds Mary, John is doing something, but Mary is kind of feeling something as well. It’s weird to say John scolded the rock. There does seem to be some kind of requirement that the scoldee be a conscious being.

This is an unintentional complexity here, and I think if I ever use this homework problem again, I’ll try to pick a different verb. For the purposes of winding up where the homework is intended to lead you, it would be better to put aside thoughts of the conscious effect of scolding on the target of the scolding. You want to treat the scoldee as being a more generic object, more like the object of hit or saw.

We probably do not want to admit the possibility that two participants in an event can be assigned the same theta-role (even in the situation where we are hypothesizing that the verb assigns two theta-roles, but of the same type). If we did allow for that, then there is not so much of an issue. And, perhaps we do want to have some way to allow for this, abstractly, because if John is the Agent of John ate, then Mary and John are probably both Agents in Mary made John eat. However, there Mary is the Agent of make and John is the Agent of eat, presumably. As we will see relatively soon, the connection between theta-roles and structural position is going to be hypothesized to be quite tight, in a certain abstract sense, and so it would not be compatible with supposing that the same verb can assign two theta-roles of the same type to two different arguments.

In summary, treat the scoldee in (4) more like the story in (2) or the poetry in (1).

By the way, one thing that I keep meaning to say and keep not remembering to:

By all means, absolutely, feel free to work on homework in groups. It often helps a lot. It may or may not go faster, but it does seem to help people get a deeper understanding than they might have otherwise had.

If you do work with other people, put their names on the top, so I know who you worked with. Also, of course, you need to write up your own assignment, using your own words.

Homework 1, which I’ve given back to almost everyone now, doesn’t have a lot of explanatory comments on it. That’s because there’s a key, which you can consult. That key will be posted tonight. There is a password for downloading the key, which I will give out in class. However — once it’s posted, you can also just email me for the password.

Homework #1 was out of 35 points. I don’t generally adhere to any strict percentage-grade correlations, because what “85%” means depends in large part on how hard the homework was. Specifically, don’t assume that a score of 21 is a D. It’s certainly better than that. I’ll try to give you a way to estimate where you stand with respect to actual end-of-the-course grades, but don’t panic immediately if your homework score was lower than you’d hoped.

A couple of quick notes on homework #2.

First off: This is potentially a rather tricky one to do if you aren’t a native speaker of English. However, you are in principle not being graded on how native-like your English judgments are. The point of this homework is really to know how to apply the tests. If you can construct the sentence that you would test with a native speaker of English, that’s the main thing.

That said, it’s still important for the later parts to have categorized things as being constituents or not. For the most part, I think the judgments are likely to be available even if you aren’t a native speaker of English. But for those that you are not sure about, the best thing would be to find a native English speaker and ask for an opinion on the sentences. If this proves difficult, you can email me for judgments or stop by my office hours.

Point #2: In part 1, (c), you are asked whether from Greece is a constituent in the sentence. This one is tricky, particularly if you don’t feel comfortable with the (archaic) thence and whence that I’d suggested trying here. For this one, I’d say: the clefting test is probably the most reliable. The other tests will be hard to run, and might be misleading. So, even if you get a different result for all but the clefting test, assume that the result of the clefting test is the right one.

Just so you don’t have to go try to dig them up yourself, the links for the Car Talk puzzler I included “for fun” on the last homework are:

The puzzler itself (”Tire mounting… with but a few letters“), and the answer.

Also, you’ll notice that “guarantee” is misspelled there, by the way. That is to say, I just copied and pasted their error without seeing it. I do in fact know how to spell “guarantee.”

I’m not sure how long this date has been known, but according to the final exam schedule for standard block times, the LX522 final will be on Thursday Dec. 18, from 9am to 11am, in the usual room.

It is not impossible that this could change, but it probably won’t.

Having gotten a couple of additional questions about the light box, let me just say a couple more things.

What you’re trying to do is describe this light box. Not any light box one might be able to build with similar components. This one behaves in a special way. It has a four way switch, it has four different states it can be in.

Also: disregard the possibility of just unplugging it. That doesn’t count as a fifth state. The state we might assume it is in when it is unplugged is not part of the behavior we’re trying to describe. If you prefer, you can think of this as an exercise in describing a plugged in light box with the characteristics given.

It’s not really a coincidence that this has been assigned as a homework problem in LX522. It’s not about language, but the things we were talking about are relevant. Think about it in light of the discussion of plurality and English nouns, for example. An English noun can be in exactly one of only two states (plural or singular), and this light box can be in exactly one of only four states (red, magenta, yellow, white).

Only four.

Not eight.

Also, in part 6, when I refer to the “descriptive generalization” from part 2, I mean the description you gave, in terms of features, of when the buzzing occurs. In part 5 you should already have discovered that it’s kind of hard to state when the buzzing occurs in one of the two models (binary features vs. privative features). Part 6 is about fixing it, changing the proposal just a little bit so that you can describe the buzzing in the model where it was a problem. That’s what I meant by “capture the generalization”: describing it simply in terms of the feature model.

It’s hard to write hints and not just give away what I had in mind, but maybe this will help if you’re feeling stuck on it.