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Public service announcement• What is a Ponzi scheme?• How is the passive voice formed?

• (someone) ended the Ponzi scheme quickly.• AGENT THEME

• The Ponzi scheme was ended quickly

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice• Two sentences later, Madoff said, "When I began the Ponzi scheme, I

believed it would end shortly, and I would be able to extricate myself, and my clients, from the scheme." As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him . . . In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice, but felt the hand of a lawyer: "To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties."[9]

11/11/13 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University

SYNTAX 3DAY 32 – NOV 11, 2013

Brain & Language

LING 4110-4890-5110-7960

NSCI 4110-4891-6110

Harry Howard

Tulane University

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Course organization• The syllabus, these slides and my recordings are

available at http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LING4110/.• If you want to learn more about EEG and neurolinguistics,

you are welcome to participate in my lab. This is also a good way to get started on an honor's thesis.

• The grades are posted to Blackboard.

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REVIEWThe quiz was the review.

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SENTENCE COMPREHENSION AND SYNTACTIC PARSINGIngram IV. Sentence comprehension, §12

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Complex sentences: Ellipsis

11) The elephant hit the rabbit and … hugged the bear. NP1 V NP2 … V NP3

12) The elephant that … hit the rabbit hugged the bear. NP1 … V NP2 V NP3

13) The elephant hit the rabbit that … hugged the bear. NP1 V NP2 … V NP3

14) The elephant that the rabbit hit … hugged the bear. NP1 NP2 V … V NP3

15) The elephant hit the rabbit that the bear chased …. NP1 V NP2 NP3 V …

• Ellipsis makes language more economical, but for full semantic interpretation, the elided material must be recovered.

• Which roles should be most difficult for agrammatic aphasiacs?• AGENT of the first verb?• RECIPIENT/THEME of the first verb?• AGENT of the second verb?• RECIPIENT/THEME of the second verb?

11/11/13Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane

University

NEXT TIMEIngram §13 On-line processing, working memory and modularity

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