CAS LX 522 F08

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about to and about the fact that when I drew, e.g., try-sentences on the handout, I didn’t draw to moving to T.

And, in fact, to does not move to T. We learned this back on homework #5, with respect to the sentence I wanted Joss not to have been making movies. It’s something special about nonfinite T (or, perhaps, the movement of the highest auxiliary to T is something special about finite T).

I just got an announcement for McCCLU 2009, the McGill Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates. It’s a undergraduate conference, held in March.

If you’re an undergraduate and have any research that you’ve done in Linguistics, definitely consider submitting it to the conference (the abstracts are not due until February) so anything you’re putting together this semester, e.g., for another Linguistics class, could provide material for a talk (the conference itself is in March, in fact basically right at the beginning of BU’s Spring recess).

So, keep this in mind. Plus, Montréal is a fun place, I hear.

Rather close to the due moment, but just a note: I’ve gotten a few questions about what I intended on HW7, 3) of part 2, when I said “Same rules as above.”

What I don’t mean is that you should draw two trees. Just draw one tree. There’s no relevant ambiguity in (f). The rules I was really referring to were: Just draw the tree(s), no steps, no features being checked.

Finally, I had a chance to post some examples like those we worked out near the end of class. You can follow this link to get them: His book’s cover melted.

Ok, ok. I’ve been getting quite a lot of questions about homework 7, and I think I need to spend a bit more time talking about these things before I call time on this homework.

So: homework #7 is not due tomorrow.

Due to the holiday next Tuesday, this means I’m giving one more week on this.

Homework #7 is due Thursday Nov 13.

And I’ll talk about related issues in class tomorrow (Nov 6).

Thinking about homework 6 some more, a couple of things:

First, concerning the features of elect, there was supposed to be a [uN*] feature there. I have posted an updated key to reflect this (but you should mark your paper copy). I will record a score 1 point higher for everyone across the board, because the informal polling suggested that it was pretty much universally marked off.

Second, homework 6 was simply too short, and I don’t think holding it to the 35-point scale that the previous homeworks were on makes much sense. I will therefore cut it in half, making it worth 17.5 points.

So, to summarize: To get your actual score, take the number written on your homework, add one, divide by two, and consider it to be out of 17.5.

When I do the computation at the end, homework 6 will only be dropped (if it has the lowest percentage score) where the outcome is better than dropping the second-lowest, since homework 6 is now worth less.