Syntax

Well, I did it. One requirement for my Syntax class is to lead the discussion one week and to answer follow-up questions online. Last week was my week. I had the assignment of leading the (3-hour!!) discussion on Case licensing (can you say hard?) and answering the questions, some posed by the professor (can you say harder?)

Ok, for those of you who haven't heard of it, syntax is word math. At first it was fun, drawing tree diagrams of simple sentences, sort of like elementary algebra. You make cool connections and say, "Wow, this is neat!" It's all a trick to suck you in and make you read journal articles by people with names like Chomsky and Uriagereka and Marantz who torture sentences until they break down and cry, just to see how far they can go. Ok, so maybe math doesn't make the equations cry. I don't know. I gave up before I got that far.

Case licensing is the procedure used to tell if a pronoun or a noun (you can see it better in languages that wear their Case on their sleeves) is he, him, or his. It sounds simple, right? He goes before the verb, him after, and his when your referring to something that belongs to him. Well, it turns out to be devilishly tricky, and all those crying sentences. . .

Well, anyway, I'm just moaning. I enjoy this class a lot. But this was a bear of an assignment. We got to pick which date/topic we wanted to do, and I asked for anything early in the semester so it would be out of the way before I got into my semester projects. The presentation was rough; there was lots I didn't know, but the professor is cheerful and willing to step in (she kept apologizing for taking up too much time--hah! I wished she'd do the whole thing!). And I just now finished the last of the seventeen posted questions (some took more than an hour each to answer--well, for me; I'm pretty slow sometimes). Hooray!