Kim Wood

ii. Constituency Test II:

b. Four out of five Americans will live [ near poverty ] at least once in their lives .

i. Constituency Test I:

ii. Constituency Test II:

c. [ Monitoring income change and financial difficulty ] is of great public health interest.

i. Constituency Test I:

ii. Constituency Test II:

d. They concluded that poverty and perceived hardship [ contribute to cognitive aging ].

i. Constituency Test I:

ii. Constituency Test II:

(2) SYNTAX RULES & TREES. For the sentence below, identify all of the phrase structure rules (see Table 14, p226) that you need to analyze the syntactic structure of the sentence. Then, draw a syntax tree for the sentence. (Hint: You may treat front as an adjective.)

The kindergarteners in the cafeteria ate the delicious bread quickly.

Phrase Structure Rules:

Syntax Tree:

(3) PLAYING WITH SYNTAX RULES. Imagine that there is a language, Benglish, that is exactly like English except for it uses the following three phrase structure rules instead of the ones used for English (listed on p226):

S → VP NP

NP → N Det N → N Adj

Re-­‐draw the tree for the previous problems with these new Benglish rules.

(4) AMBIGUITY. The sentence below is ambiguous. First, paraphrase each interpretation so that your paraphrase is no longer ambiguous. Then, draw syntax tree for each interpretation.

The pilot flew the plane from the airport.

Paraphrase 1:

Tree for Paraphrase 1:

Paraphrase 2:

Tree for Paraphrase 2:

(5) LIMITATIONS OF OUR RULES. The rules that we’ve learned and studied barely even begin to scratch the surface of the syntactic structure of English or any other human language! Indeed, there is still much that linguists do not know about human language syntax (and human language in general). Come up with a sentence of English that our system (refer to File 5.5 and the class notes) cannot yet account for. First, show and describe how our system cannot account for that sentence. Then, propose a way to enhance or syntactic analysis system to account for that sentence. For each part, I have given you space to write as well as open space to include any rules or trees you need to explain your answer.

Un-­‐analyzable English Sentence:

Why can’t our system analyze this sentence?:

How could we modify our system to analyze this sentence?:

(6) MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE. Separate the word marginalized into each of its component morphemes. For each morpheme: (a) identify its lexical category, (b) identify the type of affix or base it is, (c) state whether it is bound or free, (d) state whether it is inflectional or derivational, and (e) provide another example of a word that has that morpheme. Then, draw a morphology tree diagram for the word.

(7) MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES. Pick one English root. Then, use that root to form each of the following word types below.

root:

i. compound noun1:

ii. root + derivational prefix:

iii. root + inflectional affix:

iv. root + derivational suffix:

v. compound verb2 + derivational affix:

1 This means a compound word that has the lexical category of noun.

2 This means a compound word that has the lexical category of verb.

(8) DOING LINGUISTICS. This exercise presents you with some data of the way some younger speakers use like. It relies on using some of the things we’ve been working on – a scientific approach to studying the descriptive grammar of language. Look at the two sets and use them to answer the questions below.

Set A:

i. Bruno was like, “I’ll be there soon.”

ii. She was like, “You need to shut up during the presidential debate.”

iii. I was like, “What do I look like to you?”

iv. The baby was like, “babababa.”

Set B

i. I, like, am not sure who to vote for.

ii. There were, like, 27 cars waiting to get in the parking structure.

iii. You can, like, improve your resume.

iv. Bruno and Eva were, like, freaked out.

a) Is like being used in the same way or in a different way in Set A and Set B?

b) Let’s assume that this, like all of language, is rule-­‐governed. Try to come up with a rule that explains how like is used in Set A and Set B. If you think like is used the same in these two sets, then you should have one rule. If you think like is used differently in these two sets, then you should have two rules.

c) If someone told you that like should not be used in this way, would it be a prescriptive or a descriptive approach? Explain why.