TA Contact Info
Kathryn Pruitt
Office: South College 303
Office Hours: Thurs, 1pm-2pm; other times by appointment
Mailbox: South College 226
Email: kpruitt at linguist dot umass dot edu
Links Directions to South College Useful Linguistics Vocabulary (I've taken down this page because it was getting more hits from Google than from people I believed to be associated with our class. If you want the page to return or want some information from it, just let me know.)
Experiment sign-up (Remember that we don't drop a homework grade unless you participate in an experiment! -- Use this website to sign up for one.)
General Announcements
5/16/07 -- I'm having office hours tomorrow (Thursday, 5/17) from 12-2. These will be drop-in hours for exam help. (I sent an email about this to everyone early in the week.)
5/6/07 -- If you participated in an experiment, please give me the slip of paper you received when you finished. The experimenters won't independently tell me whether or not you participated, so please hand those in to me so I know to drop your lowest homework grade.
5/6/07 -- There is no lecture tomorrow, May 7.
5/3/07 -- Regarding last week's discussion, I think I was misleading when I discussed the maxim of Quantity. I had characterized it as "be brief", but there are two problems with this: (1) you may occassionally see Manner abbreviated this way too which makes things needlessly confusing, and (2) Quantity also dictates that you should provide enough information as is necessary. So, in addition to not providing too much information, which is what I meant when I characterized it as "be brief", obeying Quantity also involves providing enough information. In short, Quantity means providing exactly the right amount of information, no more, no less.
Old announcements have been removed.
Post-discussion Announcements
(Here is where I'll post information about that day's discussion, after it has taken place. If I give out handouts in class, I'll post a copy here. And occasionally I'll post links to interesting websites as a follow-up to that day's discussion.)
May 11
Agenda
Homework 7 returned
Quiz 6 returned
Exam tips and review
Notes
The final will be open note, as with the other exams. You can bring any paper notes and other materials from the course, but no electronic devices will be allowed.
You should particularly study your assignments, quizzes, and exams from the course. If you got something wrong previously and are not sure why, I encourage you to get those points of confusion cleared up before the final. (Note that the stuff from the morphology unit did not appear on either of the first two exams, but it is fair game for the final -- you had some homeworks and quizzes from this unit, so study those along with the coursepacket for this unit.)
The final is cumulative, so bring ALL your coursepackets, etc. We won't have extras at the exam!*
I'll have extra office hours next Thursday, the day before the exam. I'll send an email to the class and post an announcement on this page giving you the exact times I'll be available.
Don't forget to give me your extra credit slips! (If you lost yours, send me an email.)
*If you never got one of the coursepackets, you can let me know before the exam (as in at least a day before), and I can make sure you get a copy. All the course materials are available on the main course website, but I understand that printing an entire coursepacket is not free.
May 4
Agenda
Course evaluations
Homework 6 returned
Homework 7 due
Quiz 6
Discuss presuppositions and speech acts
Notes
Today was our second to last discussion. Next week we will have a review for the exam (which is May 18). Please bring questions to that meeting. I will give you some tips for studying and doing well on the exam.
Please hand in your extra credit slips. Otherwise I won't know you participated in an experiment (even if it was mine!)
There's no lecture on Monday, May 7.
April 27
Agenda
Quiz 5 returned
Homework 6 due
Discuss pragmatics
Notes
Today we talked about the differences between literal and non-literal meanings and thought of how we might tell them apart. Two characteristics of non-literal (pragmatic) meanings that are not shared with literal (semantic) meanings are cancelability and reinforceability. We discussed examples that illustrated these characteristics. We also talked about Grice's maixims or 'rules of conversation'. These principles of cooperative conversations are his attempt to understand how listeners arrive at non-literal meanings in a very reliable and systematic way. We also further defined the terms enrichment and implicature.
That reading I mentioned in class is here. It's optional, but it provides a good overview of the maxims.
We also talked today about how advertisers often assume that you will do the pragmatic enrichment necessary to make their ads relevant and understandable. This is why they can show you a picture of a snail and then talk about cold medicine in the same ad -- you assume, based on relevance that the snail is meaningful in some way, so you posit some hypotheses about what they're actually trying to get across in the ad. This is also why a long jumbled ad full of evocative words about septic systems and with some scientific-sounding results may be enticing to people. 'It sounds obscure', the reader says, 'so there must be some complicated science behind it', etc.
April 20
Agenda
Quiz 5
Exam 2, Assignment 5 returned
Discuss exam
Word-order typology
Notes
Today we looked a bit more at the typology of word order (the study of possible word orders among the world's languages). We discussed the fact that our theory of syntax, with a few modifications, does a nice job of capturing many of the world's most common word orders. In particular, we saw that reversing the order of our local trees gives us the word order of languages like Hindi. We also saw that there appear to be regularities in, for example, whether transitive verbs and prepositions come before or after their NP complements. We tend to find that languages in which the verb comes before its object, also have prepositions that come before their objects (head-initial languages), and vice versa (head-final). The prepositions in this latter type of language are often called post-positions (because they come after their objects).
April 13
Agenda
Test 2
April 6
Agenda
Homework #4 and Quiz 3 returned
Homework #5 due
Quiz 4
Discuss homeworks
Discuss NPs
Notes
Your second midterm exam will be next Friday, April 13 in discussion.
Today we motivated the bar-level in NPs. We saw that the Det element is obligatory for some kinds of NPs and optional for other kinds (depending on the features [+/- count] and [+/-plural]), similar to how a complement is required for some VPs but not all (depending on whether the V is [trans] or [intrans]). However, we also saw that making the Det a sister of N, which is parallel to what we did for VPs, would not work. In particular, there has to be an extra level to allow for modifiers, because these can show up between the determiner and its noun (for example the red truck). This is why we posited the N' ("N-bar"), which is a recursive level that will allow any number of modifiers.
A point to remember: There will always be at least one N' between an NP and an N; there will be one additional N' for every modifier of the noun (both left and right modifiers).
We've now made a distinction between what we might call local dependency, such as the relationship between a transitive V and its complement, and non-local dependency, which describes the relationship between an N and its Det (if it has one). In a local dependency, there cannot be intervening material between the two elements (*ran gladly the race). In a non-local dependency there can be (the noisy red truck). The N' level helps to capture this distinction, because it is precisely the bar-level which allows non-local dependency in Ns, while the absence of a bar-level in Vs (and other bar-less categories) captures the local dependency of the complement.
March 30
Agenda
Homework #3 returned
Homework #4 due
Quiz 3
Syntax and syntactic trees
Notes
Our "tree library" in this unit is similar to our catalog of morphemes and morphological rules (e.g. -able V => A) from the last unit. Just as our morphological rules were hypotheses about how to form words by putting morphemes together, the tree library is our hypothesis about how to put phrases together to form larger phrases (and eventually whole sentences) in a way that captures the constituent structure of English. Recall that the point of our syntactic trees is to model constituency. If our constituency tests reveal that a string of words is a constituent, then our syntactic tree should have a node that contains all and only that string of words. By doing this, we're following our intuition that certain parts of sentences 'go together' or 'combine first', like the words the and dog in the sentence The dog ran. The way we put the words together, or the order in which they combine, will resolve ambiguities, such as the one present in the sentence in (1), below.
(1) Ed ate the banana in the library.
This sentence has two meanings: in the first, the PP in the library modifies the VP containing ate and indicates that the eating of the banana took place in the library; in the second meaning, the PP modifies the NP the banana and indicates that the banana itself is or was in the library, but doesn't make a claim about where the eating event took place. In other words, in the first meaning, the banana in the library is NOT a constituent, because the PP modifies the VP. But in the second meaning, the banana in the library IS a constituent, because the PP modifies the NP. One can see this by noticing that while the following tests show that the banana in the library is a constituent, only the second meaning is possible in these cases (that is, the string in question is a constituent only when the meaning is that the banana itself is in the library, not necessarily the eating event).
(2) Pronominalization test: Ed ate it.
(3) Topicalization test: The banana in the library, Ed ate this morning. The apple in the hallway, he ate last night.
(4) Answer to question: What did Ed eat? -- The banana in the library.
In all of these cases, only the second meaning holds. That is, when the banana in the library forms a constituent, the sentence cannot have the first meaning, in which the eating event is in the library. Instead, the sentence has the meaning in which in the library tells us something about the banana itself rather than the eating event. Our syntactic trees thus allow us to assign two different structures to the two meanings of this sentence.
Some additional reminders
Remember that constituency structure is nested: a larger constituent may have smaller constituents within it.
Also remember that when using the pronominalization or coordination tests, the test has a positive outcome only when the whole string of words can be pronominalized with a single pronoun or can be coordinated (put together with and/but/or) with a parallel string of words. For example, if you replace only part of a string of words with a pronoun, you've only shown that that part is a constituent, not the entire string. Replacing the entire string with a pronoun or coordinating the entire string with a parallel string are the only ways for a string of words to pass these constituency tests.
March 16
No discussion today.
March 9
Agenda
Quiz 2 returned
Homework #3 Due
Practice building trees
Compound words
Notes
Recall the distinction between a root, the central meaning-bearing morpheme in a word (that is, informally, the word that all the affixes get attached to), and the root node of a tree, the topmost point of a tree. The root node always has a category label that defines the category of the whole word.
Just as we've been studying how roots and derivational affixes can create (perhaps infinitely) large words, compounding is a process that allows us to take whole words and put them together to form new ones. A thing to remember about compound words is that they are treated like a single word with respect to the syntax. Also, the category of the right-most member of the compound determines the category of the compound (99% of the time). You can verify this yourself by running our category tests from Handout 5 on these compounds, which are made up of different category combinations.
NN fire engine
AN green house
PN in-laws
VN jump suit
NV spoon feed
AV dry clean
PV under estimate
VV break dance
NA nation wide
AA red hot
PA over ripe
Of course, compounds can be longer than two words. Consider the following compound (thanks to Amy Rose for this example!):
astronaut love triangle t-shirt vendor convention organizer
This is what we might call the person who organizes the convention of t-shirt vendors whose t-shirts address the subject of astronaut love triangles. (For more on the subject of astronaut love triangles, click here.)
March 2
Agenda
Quiz 2
Test 1 returned
Discuss morphology
Notes
This week we discussed how we can represent the relationships between the morphemes in a word using tree diagrams. Linguists use trees a lot for things like this. We'll continue to see them in morphology and we will also make use of them in syntax.
The neat thing about morphological trees is that you can show how the word was 'built up'. Click here to see some of the trees we built in class.
February 23
Agenda
Test 1
Assignment 2 returned
Notes
If you have any questions about the content of Assignment 2, send me an email and/or come to my office hours. Since the rest of the course builds on the material we've covered up to this point, it will be important for you to have a clear understanding of it as we move forward.
Here are a few comments about this assignment in general:
Question 5: Many of you noted that the Lilliputians are probably still able to tell the difference between water and ice, even thought their language doesn't have different words for them and even though experiments have shown they have difficulty distinguishing them. The integrity of the experiments is not in question, however. Even if the experiments are reliable, the conclusion is still invalid because it makes claims about their biology. The 'illegitimate claim' amounts to saying that Lilliputians are born without the ability to distinguish water from ice, which is a very strong claim. In fact, since which language(s) you speak is entirely a product of your environment, we would be wrong to claim that because their language appears to affect their brain (their ability to distinguish water and ice) the speakers of this language are genetically incapable of learning this distinction. (Another way to think about it: The 'illegitimate claim' entails that if Lilliputians grew up speaking English, which has different words for water and ice, they still wouldn't be able to tell them apart. We can immediately sense that this claim is dubious. At the very least, the experiments reported haven't even tested this claim.)
Question 6: We talked about this question in discussion last Friday, and Chris went through a similar example in lecture. The question asked you to determine what category fundraising is in the sentence Ida admires fundraising, using the data given in (4) and the category tests from handout 5 of the Unit 2 Coursepacket. When we give you data like that in (4) with the grammaticality judgements already marked, we expect you to use this information to help you figure out the answer to the question. In this case, (4a) tells you that fundraising can appear after the, which is a determiner. (4b) tells you that it can also appear after successful, which is an adjective. And (4c) tells you that it cannot appear after successfully, which is an adverb. Furthermore, from lecture we know that determiners can precede nouns; and from handout 5, we know that adjectives can modify nouns, and adverbs modify adjectives (and verbs). Given that (4a) and (4b) are grammatical, it seems like the evidence of the determiner and adjective suggest that fundraising is a noun. (4c) provides additional evidence because its ungrammaticality confirms that adverbs cannot modify fundraising, which is consistent with fundraising being a noun. This is the kind of reasoning we'll be doing all semester with linguistic data. If you're still a bit shaky on it, let me know -- we can set up an appointment to discuss it.
True/False Questions: If you have any specific questions about any of these, you can send me an email.
Today's overhead on processing ("Buffalo English") can be found here.
I've started a small vocabularly list for addressing potentially unfamiliar words that come up in class or readings. You can find it here.
Although we did not get to discuss page 3 of today's handout, you should read over it to buttress your understanding of the difference between descriptive and prescriptive ways of looking at language. You should also have read On Prescriptivism for Homework 1, which also addresses this issue.
If you missed class today, send me an email with the following information: