Reading journal: Spring Term, Weeks 2 and 3

The Acquisition of Syntax by Children

Bloom, P. (1990). Subjectless sentences in child language, Linguistic Inquiry, 21, 491-504.

Hyams, N. (2008). The acquisition of inflection: a parameter-setting approach. Language Acquisition, 15, 192-209. 

Vainikka, A., G. Legendre and M. Todorova (1999). PLU-stages: an independent measure of early syntactic development. Cognitive Science: Technical Report, 99 (10), 2-25.

Valian, V. (1990). Null subjects: a problem for parameter setting models of language acquisition. Cognition, 35, 105-122.

Westergaard, M. (2009) Usage-based vs rule-based learning: the acquisition of word-order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. Journal of Child Language, 36, 1023-1051.

Topics in Syntax

Chomsky, N. (1991). Some notes on economy of derivation and representation. In: R. Freidin (ed.): Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Ch. 14.

Chomsky, N. and H. Lasnik (2005). The theory of principles and parameters. In: Chomsky, N. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, Ch.1.

Johnson, K. (1991). Object positions. Natural language and linguistic theory, 9(4), 577-636.

Advanced Topics in Syntax and Semantics (audited UG module)

Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: its nature, origin and use. Praeger: New York, pp.164-186.

Schlenker, P.  (2005). Non-redundancy: towards a semantic reinterpretation of binding theory. Natural Language Semantics, 13, 1-92.

Ethically exhausted...already

It's been a while since I've turned to the blogosphere, but as I managed to write around 12,000 words over the Christmas holidays, I don't think I had any words left to give to this blog (or to use in conversation - just ask my housemates/parents/Julius about my complete inability to make any sense for the last few weeks).

My faithful big blue bike at Neptune, about 7 miles from Selby.
Image from my Project365 (or 366) blog

However, everything is in, hand-in #1 last Thursday (3 essays) was celebrated with an impromptu 15-mile bike ride up the York-Selby Solar System route. Well, once you get to Jupiter you might as well go all the way to Neptune, right? The only problem being that you then have to turn around and head back. Against the wind. I fell victim to cramp at Venus but luckily Tesco was within limping distance, so all in all, lactic acid overload notwithstanding, I enjoyed myself greatly after being cooped up for so long. The temperature across the country then dropped by about 10 degrees (no joke...), which motivated me to finish off the last essay and hand that in this Monday. No endorphins for me this time though, 2 hours later I was in my first lecture of the new Spring teaching term. No rest for this Master's student.

Good question.
Image from www.flprobatelitigation.com/articles/ethics

As I may have already mentioned though, I have high hopes for this term, with a lot of syntax and a burgeoning feeling of actually achieving something in my near future. However, this comes with quite a high time- and effort-cost; I've already read upwards of 150 pages of journal articles and book chapters, not to mention the 50-odd question ethics form, replete with information sheets, consent forms and example test items, which needs completing, checking and submitting by 3rd February.

Welcome into 2012. You're not going to see much of it, but you'll be blimmin' busy.

Hello 2012, hello Harry Fairhurst...

If you're not from York, you might wonder why Mr Fairhurst merits a blog-title greeting.

If you are from York, you'll know exactly where (rather than with whom) I've been spending my time. Oh yes. The library.

The sunset from my perch in the Harry Fairhurst building.
I did see the sun that day. Honest.

A week today, the first four summative assignments of my Masters are due and, even though the formative ones went pretty well, I can't help but feel a bit nervous. I mean, I'm quite pleased with how I managed my time over Christmas - I got in plenty of present-giving/receiving, daft-game-playing and a superhuman amount of eating over the festive period, don't get me wrong, but I also came back to York with two full drafts and a 2500-word stream of consciousness about multiple wh-constructions in Czech. If I carry on with these workdays in the library, we're on course for the 12th January, I think (and there's a whole host of lovely linguists to lunch with and keep me sane in the meantime).

Looking forward to 13th January, there's a lot coming up this term. We're specialising more this term, so whilst phonetics has been fun, I can bilabial-click-it goodbye and focus on syntax, syntax and more (first language) syntax. There's a really interesting-sounding colloquium in the first week of term about grammaticality versus comprehensibility, so that seems to be starting as it means to go on, and, as I mentioned back in December, the other Rebecca-Louise-syntactician and I will be livening up the department with our art/syntax project. Yeah, they're totally compatible. AND I may even have half a good idea for my dissertation...watch this space!

Reading journal: Autumn Term, Week 10

This is a smidge late, and there is SO much more I could add to it after the last few days (seeing as the first full draft of my Psycholinguistics assignment is complete, hooray!) But here's the most accurate reflection of week 10:

Directed Readings in Syntax

The master of Slavic linguistics,
so it would seem...
Image of Zeljko Bošković
from linguistlist

• Bošković, Z. (1998). Wh-phrases and wh-movement in Slavic. Unpublished paper presented at the Comparative Slavic Morphosyntax conference, Spencer IN., 5-7 June 1998. Available at: http://www.indiana.edu/~slavconf/linguistics/bosk.pdf (accessed 10 December 2011)
• Bošković, Z. (2001). On the interpretation of multiple questions. Linguistic variation yearbook, 1(1), pp.1-15.
• Bošković, Z. (2002). On multiple Wh-fronting. Linguistic Inquiry, 33(3), pp.351-383.
• Cruschina, S. (2009) The syntactic role of discourse-related features. Cambridge occasional papers in linguistics, 5, pp.15-30.
• Franks, S. (2005). The Slavic languages. In: G. Cinque and R.S. Kayne, eds. The Oxford handbook of comparative syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ch. 9. 
• Stroik, T. S. (2009). Locality in minimalist syntax. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. 
• Toman, J. (1981) Aspects of multiple WH-movement in Polish and Czech. In: R. May and J. Koster, eds. Levels of syntactic representation. Dordrecht: Foris. Ch. 10.

Language Acquisition

• Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language as a focus of inquiry. In: N. Chomsky (1986). Knowledge of language: its nature, origin and use. New York: Praeger, pp.1-14.
• Crain, S. and M. Nakayama (1987). Structure dependence in grammar formation. Language, 63, 522-543.

Psycholinguistics

• Forster, K. and I. Olbrei (1973). Semantic heuristics and syntactic analysis. Cognition, 2(3), pp. 319-347.
• Nicol, J. and D. Swinney (1989). The role of structure in coreference assignment during sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18(1), pp. 5-19.
• Tyler, L. and W.D. Marslen-Wilson (1977). The on-line effects of semantic context on syntactic processing. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 16, pp. 683-692.
• Van Gompel, R. and M. Pickering (2007). Syntactic parsing. In: G. Gaskell, ed. The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ch. 17.

...Guess which assignments I've been working on this week!

P.S. And on a side note - a cracking story from my godfather's old classmate, Peter Trudgill - see the very last paragraph here...

Reading journal: Autumn Term, Week 9

Psycholinguistics

• Forster, K. and I. Olbrei (1973). Semantic heuristics and syntactic analysis. Cognition, 2(3), pp. 319-347.
• Hagoort, P. (2003). Interplay between syntax and semantics during sentence comprehension: ERP effects of combining syntactic and semantic violations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 15(6), pp.883-899.
• Libben, G. (2005). Brain and language. In: W. O'Grady, J. Archibald, M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller. Contemporary Linguistics. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martins. Ch. 14.
• Van Gompel, R. and M. Pickering (2007). Syntactic parsing. In: G. Gaskell, ed. The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ch. 17.
• Zurif, E. (1995). Brain regions of relevance to syntactic processing. In: L. Gleitman & M. Liberman, eds. An invitation to cognitive science. Vol. 1: Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Ch. 13. 

Directed Readings in Syntax

• Heycock, C. (2006) Embedded root phenomena. In: M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk, eds. The Blackwell companion to syntax, Vol. 2. Malden, MA.: Blackwell. Ch. 23.
• Rizzi, L. (1990) Relativized minimality. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Ch. 3.
• Rudin, C. (1988) On multiple questions and multiple WH fronting. Natural language and linguistic theory. 6(4), pp.445-501. 

Language Acquisition

• Gass, S.M. and L. Selinker (2008). Second language acquisition: an introductory course. 3rd ed. New York, London: Routledge. Ch. 12.

Research Training

• Tsoulas, G. (2011) The linguist's beginner's guide to LaTeX. Unpublished manuscript.

Away from the studies...

• David Nicholls (2003). Starter for ten. London: Flame.

Work (very) hard, play (even) hard(er)

Them's be the housemates...

From last week's sublime combination of pleasing formative assessment marks, University Challenge madness and a fabulous weekend with the housemates and my favourite German (my REAL favourite German as seen below, not this one), I came back down to earth with a bump this week. Goodbye frivolous fun, hello never-ending reading list and unavoidable assignment preparation. To be fair, getting my head seriously down this week is only for my own benefit, because the more I do now, the more Christmas I'll get for my three-week "holiday". The plan is to get at least one full draft down (out of four!) before leaving York, though after today's effort I have faint hopes for two before swanning off to Salisbury.

...and that be the boy, helping to keep me
sane (and putting up with a helluva lot)

And here's the terrifying, towering, tremble-making topics:
Psycholinguistics: syntactic processing, and the localization/lateralization of language functions in the brain.
Directed readings in syntax: multiple WH-fronting in Czech.
Language acquisition: the Critical Period hypothesis, and ultimate attainment in L2 acquisition.
Phonetics and phonology: ...a little bit of everything!

No sweat, eh?!

Fun with ice sculptures way back when

But to get me through all of that, there's two Secret Santas (my poor housemate won't know what's hit him/her, and there's a linguistics one too), two swing dance events next week and the lovely City of York is kindly putting on one of my favourite December events, the Festival of Angels. I first came to the Festival of Angels in my first year with my housemates at the time, all new and nervous and only two months into my undergraduate degree. Five years later, I have those letters after my name, a few more to work for, and I'm proud to be a budding bridesmaid for one of the aforementioned housemates! Who knows what might happen between now and 2016?

Reading journal: Autumn Term, Week 8

Directed readings in Syntax

• Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Ch.2.
• Haddican, B., A. Holmberg, H. Tanaka & G. Tsoulas (to appear). English wh-slifting as an embedded root phenomenon.

Psycholinguistics

• Ridley, M. (2006). Genome: the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. London: Harper-Collins. Ch. 7 (Instinct).

Language Acquisition

• Bley-Vroman, R. (1989). What is the logical problem of foreign language learning. In: S. Gass & J. Schachter, eds. Linguistic perspectives on second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–68.
• Schwartz, B.D. & R.A. Sprouse (2000). When syntactic theories evolve: Consequences for
  L2 acquisition research. In: J. Archibald, ed. Second language acquisition and linguistic theory. Malden, MA.: Blackwell, pp. 156-186.

Phonetics and Phonology

• Ladefoged, P. (2011). A course in phonetics. Boston, MA.: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. Ch. 10.

Away from the studies...

• Milan Kundera (1984).  The unbearable lightness of being. London: Faber & Faber.