In Which I make things more complicated than they need be.
Its 8 o'clock and I've been up for awhile. (Not the while I'd intended, thanks to the invention of the snooze button.) I have some stuff to read and some sounds to edit and I had to type up my homework from Syntax. You know, the usual stuff that you do at 7 in the morning on a Wednesday. (I also have to frost cupcakes for today's Speech Perception Lab.)
We've been discussing this homework between classes now for about two days (it was circulated via email over the weekend) and the second part of it seems to be bothering a number of us. (It is the sort of exercise where we have a rule, we have some sentences and we can either argue for the rule or against it.) I didn't find that part particularly troubling. The rule generates the sentences fine, that is no problem, but it doesn't also generate sentences in which modifiers can be added to a certain thing, and I find that inadequate because a certain tweak to how things are set up and another rule could handle it all just fine.
Not that I'm a syntactic genius. Quite the opposite, in fact. I suppose to balance things out, I did have some trouble with the (syntactic) trees we had to draw. (Oh, why is it that we're not just allowed to sketch sycamores?) In case you were wondering, down has many uses, including uses as both a preposition and an adverb. Fun. Regardless, I am still a little concerned about what I'm missing about the argument section.
