More Practice Syntax Problems

More Practice Syntax Problems

GRAMMAR 2:

1. 1. Using Grammar 2, draw trees for the following sentences.

a. The archeologists found a strange, very old painting on the wall.

b. Thieves stole the doctor’s wife’s car.

c. The dogs and the cats ran from the room.

d. Every student studied the text and did a good translation.

e. e. Some strange ill-defined figures stood outside the door of the classroom.

f. f. That kind of idea made the students extremely unhappy.

2. Modify Grammar 2 to account for the data below.

The modified grammar has to deal with all, both, and half. They are noun modifiers in these sentences, but are not determiners (they can cooccur with determiners) or adjective phrases (they come before the determiners, so not in the postdeterminer location that adjective phrases fall in, nor can they serve in the AdjP slot in VP--so you can't say *The children are all). We can see that they form a constituent with the noun and its modifiers: so They like them, not *All they like both them, (the pronoun substitutes for the entire NP); Who likes both dogs? All the children shows that all the children stands alone in answer to the appropriate question, etc. Therefore, we have a new category that is part of the NP and appears before the determiner--a predeterminer! So our new grammar is

a. All the children like both dogs.

b. Both Mary’s friends thought about all the trouble.

c. Mary gave half the prizes to all those players.

d. Half the children and all the pets are in the backyard.

e. Those men in the back of the bus saw a bird through the binoculars.

3. Using your modified grammar, draw a tree for each structure of the following ambiguous sentence (indicate clearly the meaning associated with each structure).

Wanda considered the answer to the first problem and the second problem.

4. Fr4. French

1. Le professeur achète un stylo neuf. “The professor buys a new pen”

2. Un professeur curieux travaille. “A curious professor works”

3. Le professeur regarde le médicin curieux. “The professor looks at the curious doctor”

4. Un médicin mystérieux achète le stylo. “A mysterious doctor buys the pen”

5. Le médicin danse. “The doctor dances”

6. Un professeur curieux regarde un médicin mystérieux. “A curious professor looks at a mysterious doctor”

a. Identify all lexical items in the data above and report it out as a complete lexicon. Put each lexical item into a syntactic category (N, V, etc.)

N V Adj Art

professeur 'professor' achète 'buys' mystérieux 'mysterious' le 'the'

médicin 'doctor' travaille 'works' curieux 'curious' un 'a'

stylo 'pen' danse 'dance' neuf 'new'

regarde 'looks at'

b. Give set of PS (phrase structure) rules which (with the lexicon you gave in (4a)) will generate all the sentences above.

GRAMMAR ONE

NP → Art N (Adj)

VP → V (NP)

S → NP VP

OR

GRAMMAR TWO

NP → Art N (Adj)

S → NP V (NP)

c. Draw a tree for (4(6)) using the rules you worked out for (4b).