Feedback on Assignment 8 (Gapping and Turkish)

As we have come to expect, very impressive work.  The outline
of Ross's argument is very clear, and identifies exactly the
empirical point on which it turns.  Your conclusion that forward
and backward Gapping, at least in Turkish, is two different
processes seems entirely right, and your proposal that backward
gapping is really across-the-board movement of the Verb to a
higher position on the right is well presented and well argued.

There was a curve ball in this assignment, in that one of the
pieces of evidence thrown at you involved a construction with
embedded clauses with an overt C to the left, which is entirely
against the grain of Turkish in general.  We should have told
you that that kind of embedded clause was borrowed whole from
Persian, an Indo-European language.  The complementizer 'ki' is
in fact cognate with the French 'que'.  We are proud of you for
not letting that fake derail you too much.  We'll talk about
other flaws in that part of the problem in class.

A few specific comments:

p.1  Michelle's last name is misspelled.

p.2  'uncontested' >> 'unattested'

" ... Gapping is a free movement ... " >> " ... is a freely ordered
operation" ?

p.3  " ... other deletion processes we've seen, such as ellipsis "
Do you intend to mention here some specific kind of ellipsis?

p.5  The paragraph under 4. needs work.  It's not very clear, and
some terms ('embedding', 'relative') are either misused or 
misunderstood.

pp.6-8	The discussion here of issues in the V-raising analysis
is right on.

p.8  You are right.  This particular structure can't be verb de-focusing.

There are several very sensible questions asked on this page which
we will try to deal with in class.

p.9  We need to talk about the Eisenberg conjecture.  For now, just
note that Eisenberg was accepting Ross's identification of forward
and backward gapping, an identification which you have already
rejected.  The question now is what to make of the facts that
Eisenberg brings to light, considering that you don't believe that
forward and backward gapping are the same thing.

The last paragraph on this page doesn't make sense (and in addition
has improper punctuation around 'however').

p.10 There's no phonological identity between 'yedim' and 'yedin'.

Last paragraph:  Are you convinced that it's *phonological* identity
that is involved?  This is one of the things we really need to
talk about.

p.11 "psuedogapping": first, it's misspelled. second, there's a common
usage for this term, and it's different from your usage here.  So
spell it right, and then don't use it for this.  (It's not that it
would be a bad term for what you have here; the term is just taken for
something else.  So call it "Ungapping", or something like that.)

At the bottom, where you say "in embedded clauses", don't you mean
"out of embedded clauses"?

p.12 Very nice discussion of the prosodic properties of this ATB
movement.

"This goes against a lot of commonly accepted typological analyses
which claim that Gapping is a universal phenomenon."  Well, we told
you that.  But we could have been wrong.

The last paragraph on this page:  Excellent questions.

p. 13  Very clear and well argued conclusion.  We look forward to
discussion of all this next week.