Today we can began the long day’s journey into verbs. If you want a really solid review of predicates and clause types, check out the the paper by Matthew Dryer below. Otherwise, tomorrow we’re having a guest speaker—Mr. John Quijada, about whom this New Yorker article was written—so please read the preparatory handout he wrote heading into tomorrow’s lecture. Also check out this picture they did of John for that New Yorker article (lol):
Material From Today’s Class
PDFs
Links
Assignments
Reading
- Reading from John Quijada
- AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 139-148 (or save till tomorrow)
Practice
- Go and take a look at John Quijada’s Ithkuil website. Read the Introduction (up through the section entitled “Addressing the Vagueness Inherent in Natural Languages”), then what I want you to do is find your favorite example sentence throughout the site (there are tons), and post the romanized version along with the meaning to the #morphology channel. (Note: Be prepared for a lot of sentences about clowns.)
- Find an agreement pattern in a natlang grammar—but not just any agreement pattern. Find a subject (or object or direct object) agreement pattern where the same form is used for two or more different person/number combinations. In English, for example, the verb agreement for a first person plural, second person plural, and third person plural subject will always be identical. Find an agreement pattern like that, and post a link to it along with a description of the pattern in question to our #morphology channel.
Mastery
- (None Today)