Hello Apprentices of Linguistic Wizardy!

A few reminders for the weekend…

First, remember next week has updated office hours (in my office and on virtual chat):
Monday, 29-September: 10:30am-12noon
Thursday, 2-October: 4pm-5:30pm

Second reminder: Quizzes 7, 8, 9 are back online. Don’t forget to take them when you have a chance.

Third reminder: You need to create a Google Doc for your group to collaborate on what’s going in Blog-2. Here’s a video explaining how to create a Google Doc if you’re not sure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKt3-fruLyE
Make sure to send me the link to your Google Doc this weekend.

Finally, think about language this weekend… think about words not as single items, but as… things in need of other things. In order to build a sentence, we need a subject and a predicate. At their most basic, a Subject is a Noun Phrase consisting of the single Noun head and a predicate is a single Verb Phrase consisting of a single Verb head: Miranda sighed. But not all verbs work that way– *Miranda gave is not a normal grammatically acceptable sentence in English. That’s because different verbs have different Thematic Roles they can or must give out. Likewise, when the noun is rock (as in, any plain old rock you find on the side of a mountain), then you can’t have a sentence like *rock sighs. Not only does sighs need to give out a kind of thematic role that rock can’t fulfill, but also, rock is the kind of noun that needs something else in its Noun Phrase (like a determiner, as in The rock rolled down the mountain.).

The people at the Penn Tree Bank have been thinking about this for years. Have a look at how they categorize words and parts of speech and see if you agree or disagree with them. For possible extra credit, Microblog about Penn’s POS-tagging schema on the Language Village Tumblr– or write a full blog post about it on the course website. And take care with your formatting!

Have a great weekend!

-doug