CAS LX 522 F08

I was just reminded of the fact that, in principle, you have now seen DPs, and so there is a question about what to do with the homework that is due Thursday. My intention was that you would use NPs on homework 6. In general, the homework is intended to relate to the things that were covered up until the point when it is handed out, and the things that are covered in class after that are really things that will be applicable to the following homework.

So, in brief: Draw NPs on homework 6, no DPs until homework 7.

I’ve finally gotten through working out the mid-semester grade estimates, and I’ve added them to the Blackboard site for the course. You should see a column called “MidSem”, which contains a number on a 4-point scale. The idea is that anything above 3.67 is an A, above 3.33 is an A-, above 3.00 is a B+, and so forth.

I computed these based on the assumption that there were only 5 assignments (one score dropped), and that the score on the final is the same as that on the midterm.

I will post information about the BUCLD extra credit assignment within a couple of days, which is something you can do to substitute in for the next lowest homework score.

Also: please double-check that there isn’t something unexpected there, e.g., a homework you gave me that didn’t get recorded, or a typo in a score.

Ok, sorry to have been slow making this available, but this is how I would line up the points on the midterm to letter grades. Note too that I pushed it up a little bit in order to exclude (2e).

47–50 = A, 43–46 = A−,
39–42 = B+, 35–38 = B, 31–34 = B−,
27–30 = C+, 23–26 = C, 19–22 = C−.

This is perhaps better than you might have anticipated, if you think of 60% as the cutoff for passing—but it’s far too difficult to try to design a test that is exactly the right difficulty level to make the percentages line up that way. The scaling I give above pretty well reflects the actual nature of the test I think.

As for how you are doing overall at this point, I’ll try to work up a kind of midterm estimate within a day or two. You can kind of figure it out based on the scale above, dropping a homework, etc., though the scale for the midterm and the scale for the homework will be slightly different to reflect their differences in difficulty. So, soon, on that. I’ll make it a visible column on the Blackboard site when it is ready.

It was just brought to my attention that there is a small error on the key for homework #4.

It’s on the very last sentence of the homework: John does bind him and so it should have been underlined.

For completeness, I’ve replaced the key online, although this is the only change.

Addendum: It appears that some people lost a half-point for underlining John, even though it should have been underlined. You can have that half-point back, just bring your homework to class and I’ll fix it. And if you didn’t underline John and didn’t lose a half-point, you can feel free to take a half-point off your score (but don’t bother telling me about it).

In response to another question over email, about the questions on the practice midterms that ask about how may [uP*] features are in the trees.

The answers to these basically hinge on whether the PP in the tree is getting a theta role or not. If a PP in the tree is getting a theta role, it must have been Merged into that position, which would have to happen in order to check a [uP*] feature.

The way to tell is basically to look at where the PP is in the tree, and what its mother and sister nodes are. First of all, the only kind of theta role that we can assign to a PP is Goal (PP sister of V). So, if any PP gets a theta role, it’ll be in that position in the tree.

Another way to determine this is to look to see if the sister node and mother node are the same (somethingP). That would indicate that the PP was attached to the structure using Adjoin. So, if the sister is vP and the mother is also vP, then the PP does not get a theta role, and so it was not introduced into the tree to check a [uP*] feature. Same if the sister is NP and the mother is also NP, no [uP*] feature was checked when the PP was added to the tree.

Then, you basically just count them up. In a simple sentence with a single verb, the answer really only could have been “zero” or “one”, since introducing a Goal is the only place where we would find a [uP*] feature.

Side note: Above I said Goal is PP sister of V. For ditransitive verbs like give and put, this is the same as saying PP daughter of V′ (which is what I said in class and what Adger says in the book). However, I think it might be more accurate to say that it is the PP sister of V, based on the structure we’d probably want to assign to something like Pat glanced at the handout. I won’t ask any questions on the midterm that rely on this difference, but I just wanted to note it in case anyone looked back at how we handled glance (back before we introduced the “little v“) and wondered how that would work with the UTAH.

In response to a question I got over email, let me just give a couple of examples of evaluating Binding Theory satisfaction and violations.

For Binding Theory, the thing to keep in mind is that binding only goes one direction, from higher in the tree to lower in the tree. For the most part, things that are further left in an English sentence are higher in the tree than things that are further right, although it is more complicated when there is a larger constituent on the left (like John’s mother).

Specifically, a node A binds a node B when A c-commands B and they share an index.

So, in something like John_i told Mary that he_i saw himself_i we have three things that share the index i. There are no larger constituents to worry about here. The binding relations are:

• John_i binds he_i.
• John_i binds himself_i.
• he_i binds himself_i.

So, everything binds to the right. (Though, keep in mind, binding really depends on c-command, not just being to the right. See the second example below).

Then, to evaluate Binding Theory, you look at each one in turn.

• John_i is an R-expression, and is not bound by anything.
• Principle C says that R-expressions cannot be bound.
• So, Principle C is satisfied (for John_i).

• he_i is a pronoun, and is bound by John_i.
• Principle B says that pronouns cannot be bound within their binding domain.
• The binding domain for he_i is the clause containing it.
• The clause containing it is (that) he saw himself, and John is not inside.
• So, Principle B is satisfied (for he_i).

• himself_i is an anaphor, and is bound by John_i and he_i.
• Principle A says that anaphors must be bound within their binding domain.
• The binding domain for himself_i is the clause containing it.
• The clause containing it is (that) he saw himself, and he_i (but not John_i) is inside.
• So, Principle A is satisfied (for himself_i) by virtue of being bound by he_i.

A more complicated example would be one like: His_i mother thinks John_i is a genius.

• Here, nothing binds anything else.
• His_i is inside the constituent His_i mother and so it does not c-command John_i.
• John_i is further down the tree and so clearly does not c-command his_i.

• For his_i, Principle B says it must not be bound within its binding domain.
• The whole sentence is the binding domain.
• But nothing binds his_i at all, so it is safe.
• Principle B is satisfied (for his_i).

• For John_i, Principle C says it must not be bound.
• Nothing binds John_i, so it too is safe.
• Principle C is satisfied (for John_i).

And, of course, these results are what we want, since both sentences are grammatical.

One last example, this one is not good: *John_i saw him_i.

• John_i binds him_i.
• John_i must not be bound according to Principle C.
• And it is not, so Principle C is satisfied (for John_i).

• him_i must not be bound within its binding domain, according to Principle B.
• But it is bound, by John_i, and John_i is within the binding domain.
• So, him_i violates Principle B.
• And, indeed, the sentence is ungrammatical.

Monday is a holiday, and then Tuesday is a “Monday.” I don’t generally have office hours on Mondays and I won’t be having office hours on Tuesday as a result (also, I’ll be out of town).

Feel free to email me questions you have about the midterm, though, in the meantime. And I’ll try to be relatively available on Wednesday, so if you want to just schedule a time to come in and talk then, it should be possible to work something out.

Paper and pencil work fine, but how can you draw your trees electronically?

When I’m using Word, I usually do this with the help of Arboreal. This is a $20 font that you can use to draw the tree branches. If you have the font, I have an example document that demonstrates the style I have set up to make tree drawing quite fast. If you do this, you still need to draw the movement arrows in using Word’s drawing tools (unless you want to use the square arrows that Arboreal provides).

More recently, I’ve been using LaTeX (usually via LaTeXiT) to draw the trees. More specifically, I’ve been using John Frampton’s pst-jtree package to do it. But if don’t already know LaTeX, it’s got a pretty steep learning curve.

Perhaps the easiest way to do this might be to use phpSyntaxTree, which is a web page where you can go, type in labeled brackets, and have it draw the tree for you as a png image. The resulting trees aren’t super-elegant, but they’re not bad. And, again, you have to draw the arrows in yourself.

Using phpSyntaxTree, you can draw the sentence “Pat might have been eating lunch” from the last class handout using these brackets, for example:

[TP [NP Pat] [T' [T+M might] [MP <might> [PerfP [Perf have] [ProgP [Prog be] [vP <Pat> [v' [v+V eat] [VP <eat> [NP lunch]]]]]]]]]

This yields:

The actual tree on the handout was produced with LaTeX. If you want to see how I did it, you can email me (I don’t want to post it here, it looks too frightening).

Just something like a clarification: You can only Adjoin to something that doesn’t have any Merges left it needs to do. Effectively, this means that you can only Adjoin to XPs. You don’t have to necessarily wait until the very end of the derivation to Adjoin — you just have to do all of the Merges first for the projections of any given head. That is, you can Merge the V and its object, forming a VP, and if there are no more [uN] features on the V, you can then Adjoin something to the VP before continuing on to Merge the v and VP (to satisfy the Hierarchy of Projections).

What you can’t do is, say, Merge “to Mary” and “introduce” (which will check off one of two [uN] features it has), then Adjoin something to the result, and then Merge “John” to the result to check off the other [uN] feature. You have to check both of those [uN] first with Merge, before you Adjoin.

Another quick note based on a question I got. Although it is possible to say “John read” (and one can debate whether this implicitly means “John read something” or not), for the purposes of the problem on homework 4, assume that “read” is a regular transitive verb. With an Agent and a Theme. Like “see” or “kick”, etc.