choose a paper topic by looking at the titles of other people's papers

it's a tongue twister, see?
i had a good idea. but i won't be able to get to it until the weekend. probably. if at all. ok. i probably will never do it. so i leave it to you.
this morning i sat myself (and my sister) down and started reading through the references section in my syntax book so i could be inspired to find a paper topic for my final 25 page paper that is due in a bit.
while reading i noticed that some of the titles were worthy of a laugh.
so your assignment, whenever you need a break from the mundane, is to come up with out of context readings for the following titles. you could write an abstract, a subtitle or just give a blurb about what it's about. if you know, pretend you don't. much more fun. oh. and sometimes it's better if you don't read very carefully or you just read out loud so you get some homonym influence.
take it away! (i've given a few notes of my own, when i felt like it.)

• The meaning of free choice. [something metaphysical and deep.]
  
• The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis.
• V-governed expletives, case theory and the projection principle. [expletives.]
  
• Floating quantifiers, PRO and predication.
• Movement to the higher V is remnant movement.
  
• The topic of small clauses.
• The case of unaccusatives.
• A-chains at the PF-interface: copies and "covert" movement.
  
• On certain violations of the superiority condition, AgrO and economy of derivation. [superiority condition. superiority complex. superiority complex breakdown.]
  
• The Design of Agreement: Evidence from Chamorro.
• Evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP.
• (Anti)reconstruction effects in free relatives: a new argument against the Comp account. [free relatives. relatively free? liberated kin?]
  
• Where is a sign merged?
• Fronting: the Syntax and Pragmatics of "Focus" and"Topic". [here we have an excellent description of the psuedo-intellectual. fronting.]
  
• Why language acquisition is a snap. [what? no.]
  
• Control is not movement. [movement is not control. "treat others how you would like...to treat them."]
  
• Stylistic Inversion in English: a reconsideration. [a harsh creative writing critique.]
  
• Decomposing pronouns.
• Pluringulars, pronouns and quirky agreement. ["quirky" making up words. who do you think you are?]
  
• English suffixation is constrained only by selectional restrictions. [suffixation or suffocation?]
  
• Understanding stimulus poverty arguments.
• Negation in children's questions: the case of English. [bad parenting practices.]
  
• Am I unscientific? A reply to Lappin, Levine and Johnson. [johnson. i am the science.]
  
• A reanalysis of null subjects in child language. [again with the making fun of children.]
  
• Restoring exotic co-ordinations to normalcy.
  
• Re: the abstract clitic hypothesis. [re:? re:?!! but we can work with abstraction.]
  
• Control and Extraposition: the case of Super-Equi.
  
• Topic...comment: the structure of unscientific revolutions.
• The revolution confused: a response to our critics.
• The revolution maximally confused. [linguistic surfer talk? (or bad puns.) bummer. they had to write at least two rebuttals. so sad.]
• Promise and the theory of control.
  
• On the poverty of the challenge.
• Quantifier Float and Wh-Movement in an Irish English.
• What does it take to be a dative subject? [dating advice column?]
• Limits on negative information in language input. [how much rejection can you take?]
• Sideward movement. [sidewinder?]
• Reflexives and resultatives: some differences between English and German.
• The metric of open-mindedness.
• Confusion compounded.
• Relativized minimality effects. [do they know what they mean? we could take this anywhere.]
• A preference for Move over Merge. [fight or flight?]
• Icelandic case-marked PRO and the licensing of lexical arguments.
• Indeterminacy, inference, iconicity and interpretation: aspects of the grammar-pragmatics interface. [i just liked all those words together. so did they, probably.]
• The origins and development of periphrastic auxillary do: a case of destigmatisation.
• Choice between the overt and the covert. [always covert. it's like spying.]

this one's my favorite:

• From Hell to Polarity: "Aggressively Non-D-Linked" Wh-Phrases as Polarity Items.

and a quote!

This article focuses on wh-phrases like what on earth, who the hell, what the dickens--generically, wh-the-hell phrases. In simple root wh-questions, wh-the-hell phrases seem to behave just like ordinary wh-phrases.
(1) a. Who bought that book?
b. Who the hell bought that book?
Both interrogatives in (1) are genuine information questions. The speaker who utters either (1a) or (1b) expects that somebody did indeed buy that book and seeks information about the identity of the buyer(s). Hence, answers naming the buyer (e.g., Ariadne) would be appropriate.
Yet, in addition to an informative answer, (1b) licenses a negative inference of the form Nobody was supposed to buy that book; Lee (1994) labels this inference the "surprise" reading. This proposition is a pragmatic inference conveying the speaker's negative attitude toward the content of the question with wh-the-hell, as we argue in section 2.2; it generally coexists with the possibility of a positive answer.
...
Consider the following examples. which differ minimally from (1) in that they contain a modal:
(2) a. Who would buy that book?
b. Who the hell would buy that book?
Example (2a), with the regular wh-phrase who, is still interpreted as an information question, soliciting an answer like Ariadne. (2a) can also have an--arguably less salient--negative rhetorical reading anticipating an answer like Nobody would buy that book. The interrogative with who the hell in (2b), on the other hand, cannot be used as a genuine information question in this context. Rather, such a question is compatible only with the negative rhetorical answer.
...
In licensing negative answers wh-the-hell phrases are similar to the negative polarity items known in the literature as minimizers: for example, give a damn, sleep a wink, lift a finger.

den Dikken, M. and Giannakidou, A. (2002) 'From hell to polarity: "Agressively non-D-linked" wh-phrases as polarity items', Linguistic Inquiry 33: 31-61.

but really, these boring ones will end up being the most useful:

• Contreras, H. (1986) 'Spanish bare NPs and the ECP', in I. Bordelois, H. Contreras and K. Zagona (eds.), Generative Studies in Spanish Syntax, Foris Dordrecht, pp. 25-49.
• Contreras, J. (1987) 'Small clauses in Spanish and English', Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5:225-44.
• Suner, M. (2000) 'The syntax of direct quotes with special reference to Spanish and English', Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18:525-78.

so now i'm going to go find them.
suerte with finals.