Ling001 Fall 1998 Homework

General information

  1. There will be a homework assignment due almost every week -- 9 in all during the course of the term.You can ask questions about the current homework in your recitation section, or by email to the course instructors. If it's warranted, we'll post a "frequently asked questions" list for each homework, with answers.
  2. You should give your completed homework in class to the course TA, Yuan Sun, on the day it's due. If for some reason you can't make class that day, make other arrangements with her to hand it in.
  3. Homework will be given back to you and discussed in the next feasible meeting of your recitation section.
  4. We're happy to see students work in pairs on homework assignments. In this case, you should submit two copies of the same answer (with a note indicating that you have done so). If both participants really contribute actively to the exercise, then they may well learn more working together than they would working separately. Of course, if one partner has done much more of the reading, and is responsible for most of the insight, then the other one will not learn very much, and is likely to have problems on the exams. Likewise, if one partner does all of half of the assignment, while the other partner does all of the other half, each misses half of the opportunity to learn -- so don't do this! Finally, as the group size grows, the chances that everyone can participate fully gets smaller, so we would prefer not to see groups larger than three.
  5. As the course introduction indicates, homework counts for 40% of your grade. However, the purpose of the assignments is to give you an opportunity to learn by doing, and we'll give you every opportunity to get as much of the 40% as possible. If you do badly on a particular assignment, and would like to do some sort of make-up or extra credit work to compensate, let us know.

Homework assignments

Due Date Description Source Notes
A. 09/23 Categorization of article and book titles online  
B. 09/28 Fromkin & Rodman chapter 1 F&R p. 29-30, #1,2,3 additional instructions
C. 10/05 Prescriptive linguistics F&R p.31 #9 additional instructions
D. 10/12 Vocabulary size/
basic morphology

F&R p.98 #1/
online

additional instructions
E. 10/26 More morphology F&R p.99-104 #2-13  
F. 11/11 Syntactic structures online  
G. 11/18 Semantics and pragmatics F&R p. 205-211 #2, 3, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18  
H. 12/2 Languages of the world online  
I. 12/7 Language change F&R p. 483-489 #1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12