It's a two-headed monster!

While working on my thesis, I came across the following interesting sentence today:

Taro-wa [[[dare-ga neko-o turete kita] -no] -ga nigedasita ka] sitte iru.
Taro-TOP who-NOM cat-ACC brought along NM NOM ran away Q know.
Lit. "Taro knows who(x) brought along a cat and that the cat that x brought along ran away."

Of particular interest to me is the nesting of relative clauses here. We have our most embedded clause, "dare-ga neko-o turete kita." This clause then merges with a matrix clause, "... -ga nigedasita ka." In this matrix verb, neko is interpreted as the subject of "nigedasita." However, this is further embedded in another matrix clause, "Taro wa ... sitte iru." Oddly enough in this one, dare "who" is interpreted as the object of "sitte iru!" The innermost embedded clause provides two separate heads for two successive matrix clauses!

Has anyone ever seen data like this from any other language? This is particularly complicated by the fact that the above example is a head-internal relative, and not an English-style external relative (I can't even think of an equivalent English example). I'm quite curious as to what is going on here.

Thanks everyone!

As one might guess from Oliver's last post, the 2nd Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium has come and gone. Thank you to all of our participants for braving the Ithaca weather to come and make it a wonderful weekend!

We are hoping to put out a conference proceedings by the end of May - most likely in a widely accessible online format. It will contain both the abstracts and papers that were presented at the conference.

Colloquium, this weekend

At long last, the 2nd Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium is almost here. Please feel free to join us in Morrill 106A. You can find the nearly final schedule here.

Back in business

At today's UnderLings meeting, we decided to revive the undergraduate blog without renewing the domain, which means we're back to good old Blogger. As the current Events Coordinator and Field Marshal of Keepin' It Real, I think this is a good idea; the current seniors in particular have got some really interesting research going on, and we ought to be sharing it. Also, an informal blog like this will be a great way to get new people interested in Cornell UnderLings.

I believe I'll start keepin' it real by calling on my fellow UnderLings to start posting again. Let's hear about some of these upcoming honors theses. If you're not doing a thesis, don't let that stop you–post about what you're learning in your ling classes, or about something you heard on the street that got you thinking. I wouldn't mind getting some responses to the article in the Sun about Cornellian slang– any takers?

And as long as I'm giving out ideas, how about a shameless plug for the 2008 Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium? Abstracts are due in a week (Feb. 8th), so it's not too late, but it will be soon. Mark your calendars for March 8-9th if you're on campus, and be sure to show up even if you aren't presenting, because it's sure to be a great event. Here's the call for papers.

Stay tuned for some tidbits about what I'm up to with the semantics of Japanese honorifics. To any visitors, welcome, and to the contributors, welcome back.

Trees in Powerpoint

So, until now, I have had yet to post here. Mostly a product of me being lazy, thesising, visiting grad schools and trying to maintain a semblence of a non-academic life. Anyway, this post isn't much either, but it's something. When I was working on my honors thesis defense powerpoint presentation (that's a really long compound) I decided that I needed to have movement actually taking place on the screen since I have a lot of it and a static picture doesn't necessarily cut it (read: it's too complicated for its own good).

After a little bit of toying with powerpoint, I discovered it's actually fairly simple once you get the hang of it. The biggest piece of advice I can give on the subject is to build your whole tree first on the slide and then and only then start doing the animation process. To give a basic idea of how to do one yourself, I've posted a sample powerpoint on the interweb for your use. Download it here.