fall 2007
jan anderssen – jan at-sign linguist dot umass dot edu –
website – aim:
ling201jan
meeting times: tuesdays and thursdays 9:30 to 10:45 – bartlett hall 109
office hours: wednesdays 2 to 4 – south college #305 :: mailbox: south college #226
new things go on top. for older things, you'll need to scroll down a bit. the links to handouts, readings,
etc. will usually give you a pdf file. if you have trouble reading anything (messed up fonts, missing files, etc.), please let
me know.
here's a collection of exercises that serves a double purpose. you can use them to practice for the final (thursday 12/20, 8am, bartlett 206)
or you can turn (parts of them) in to make up for a missed homework. in fact it's called
homework number 8, even though
it's optional. for full credit, turn in answers to at least four of the questions (further details on the assignment) before monday 12/17, 5pm in my mailbox in
south college #226.
we've finished out discussion of the documentary on language acquisition, and started to talk about wh-movement and constraints on it.
homework assignment 7 is on this topic. we'll talk more about it on tuesday.
in class today, we watched the second part of gene searchinger's documentary on human languages, which was on the acquisition of
human language by children, that is the way children get to know their first language.
don't forget our third quiz today, on syntax.
homework number 6 is due on tuesday after thanks-giving. feel free to email me with questions, or set
up a time to talk on monday. here are some
lecture notes on phrase structure rules that should also help with homework #6.
we talked more about tree structures in general, and constituent structure of english sentences.
here's
homework number 5, i'll bring hardcopies on tuesday. sorry for the delay.
here are also some notes on the
formal properties of tree structures we talked about in class.
we started to talk about our new topic,
syntax. we saw that sometimes classes of words behave the same when it comes to the order
of words in english sentences (for instance there are places where all nouns seem to be able to occur), and we also saw that similarly larger groups of words
share similar properties (we saw for instance that we can use a lot of the
noun phrases that can occur in subject position also in object position).
we started to investigate the internal structure of sentences (what their
constituents are) with the help of constituency tests. here are some
notes on constituency tests.
phonetics/phonology quiz
today we reviewed the homework, and the material of the last weeks for the phonetics/phonology quiz on thursday.
todays class fell victim to the
campus closing this morning. i'll email you
homework #4, please let me know if you have any questions. please hand it in on tuesday
at the beginning of class or before if you can't make it. i can't accept it any later, since we'll review the answers in class, and i'll make an answer key, so that you can use that to study for the quiz on thursday.
we talked about the phonologycal component of the human language capacity, mostly the sound inventory (phonemes and their allophones), what our arguments are to assume an underlying abstract sound representation that is the input to the phonological system, different phonological processes, and ways to represent them. you can find a summary of most of what we talked about in this
text book chapter on phonology.
today we saw different videos showing the articulatory tract when producing speech sounds, and we listened to and explored some sounds that are not part of the phonetic inventory of english. in the end we started talking about how the grammar of a language adopts foreign words that are borrowed into that language and don't confirm to its phonological system. something that was illustrated in
this video :)
today the university operates on monday schedule, so no class. see you on thursday. don't forget homework #3.
after finishing our discussion of consonants, we looked at the vowels of english today. originally, i had planned
to show you a variety of sounds from different languages, but unfortunately i couldn't use the projector. we'll do that next time. in
the meantime, here are some links to explore:
last, but not least, here's a copy of
homework assignment #3, due next thursday.
today we started with phonetics. we have discussed how the letters conventionally used to spell words in english are often not accurate
representations of the sounds used to pronounce these words, and have started to investigate the consonant sounds of english and their classification
according to the articulatory features
voicing, place of articulation, and
manner of articulation. instead of providing lecture notes
for this class and the next, i've decided to upload a brief
textbook chapter, summarizing most of our class
discussion. please note that some of the symbols slightly differ from the ones used on the
ipa
chart.
morphology quiz.
today we mostly looked back at the material covered last thursday, and practiced how to draw morphological trees. in the end we discussed
structural ambiguities, cases in which one word can have more than one possible structure, and the corresponding meanings. you find the examples in
these notes.
we returned to english affixes, and covered a whole bunch of concepts that we could illustrate with examples drawn from english. here are
some notes on it.
we talked about
different morphological processes today, and tried to puzzle out a fairly complex pattern in tagalog.
here are the
data we used in class. instead of returning to it on thursday, i decided to let you guys finish it in the
second homework assignment, although i took out a whole bunch of the data there, to make things more manageable.
here are some
class notes, mostly discussing the differences of the irregular
and regular paradigms that we talked about, and how we might model our mental mechanism for producing them. the notes make reference to
this chapter of a book, which explains things in a nicely written and careful way.
today we mostly talked about morphologically complex words, how to identify morphemes, and what arguments we have for saying
that not every word can be memorized.
you can download some
notes from todays class. i also put
a copy of the first homework assignment up. the first question is about an
article on irregulars, which we'll
return to next class. last, i mentioned another steven pinker
article on combinatorial systems – it's actually a speech he gave,
when he received an honorary degree from mcgill university. it's fairly short, and i think it's a great read, it's optional though.
after a bit of review, we started to talk about morphology today, and i introduced you to the concept of a
morpheme
and its
allomorphs. you worked together in groups to start to practice how to identify morphemes in an unfamiliar language, by comparing
different words/meaning pairs and puzzeling out which parts stay the same and which change. here are
some notes about the class today.
here's a copy of the
syllabus. in class today, i showed you a
few examples illustrating that knowledge of your native language is unconscious. you discovered for instance that some ambiguous sentences with "want to"
loose one of their meaning if you contract "want to" to "wanna", and we examined the pattern behind this a bit more. even though you all shared an
intuition about the difference in meaning, you weren't consciously aware of the pattern before. here's a
list of the examples we used in class. next time we'll get started with morphology.
