Morphology and Syntax Practice

Irish: The data below is in a simplified version of an Irish orthography.

(1) Write a set of PS rules and a lexicon to generate the grammatical strings below (and not the *'d ones).

1. Chuala leanb an fear. 'A child heard the man'

2. Chuala leanb sceal. 'A child heard a story'

3. Thuig an fear an sceal. 'The man understood the story'

4. Chuala an leanb sceal iontach. 'The child heard a strange story'

5. Thuig fear an sceal iontach seo. 'A man understood this strange story'

6. Thuig sé an sceal iontach seo. 'He understood this strange story'

7. Thuig fear é. 'A man understood it/him'

8. Chuala sé é. 'He heard it/him'

9. Chuala an fear é. 'The man heard it/him'

10. Chuala an fear sin leanb. 'That man heard a child'

11. Chuala an fear mor seo an sceal sin. 'This big man heard that story'

12. *Chuala fear sin leanb.

13. *Chuala fear mor sin an sceal.

14. *Thuig sé sceal iontach seo.

15. *Thuig sé.

16. *Thuig é.

N V Adj OPro SPro Art Dem

leanb 'child' chuala 'heard' iontach 'strange' é 'him/it' sé 'he' an Def seo 'this'

fear 'man' thuig 'understood' mor 'big' ∅ 'a' sin 'that'

sceal 'story'

In this grammar, we are trying to get the distribution of subject and object pronouns right, as well as to make sure that the demonstratives must coccur with the definite article an. There are two different PS rules (give above) which generate NPs with the discontinuous dependency of the demonstrative and definite marker.

(2) Draw trees for (4), (5) and (11)

3. Modify the PS rules and a lexicon we produced for the earlier practice to generate 17-20 as well.

Modified grammar: