Introduction to Linguistics - Assignment 6 James Madison University

1. Draw an accurate phrase structure tree diagram (based on the rules on page 98 of our text) of the syntactic structure of each of the following sentences:
   1. The pizza looks delicious.
   2. The couple danced across the floor. ("across" is a preposition)
   3. My brother eats worms.
2. Suppose that there is a language,"Notenglish", that is identical to English except that the order of the head and the complement in the structure of verb phrases is changed from the English order. (Hint- the complement comes after the head (X) in English phrase structure. :) )
   1. Turn each of the ungrammatical Notenglish sentences into a grammatical one:
      
      1. My dog has fleas.
      2. The magician changed into a rabbit. (note: "into" is a preposition and "a" is a determiner)
   2. What is the correct pair of rules we would need to build the VP in just the second of these two Notenglish sentences(following the X-Bar schema)?
3. Based on the discussion of transformations, deep (d-)structure, and surface (s-)structure in your text, write down the d-structure of each of the following sentences:
   1. Should that door be closed?
   2. What movie did you watch?
   3. There are too many people in this boat.
4. If possible, find a naturally-occurring example, written or spoken, of a structurally ambiguous sentence. (These come up all the time, even in The Breeze . :) ) Make up your own example only if you really find yourself unable to find a naturally-occurring one. Now answer the following questions about your sentence:
   1. What are the multiple possible interpretations of this sentence?
   2. What syntactic constituent is the source of the ambiguity?
   3. Was it possible, in context, to choose one meaning over the other(s)? If so, why?
5. Describe, briefly, how transformational rules are different from phrase structure rules.
6. Do just parts i and ii of Exercise 2 on page 130 of your text.
7. Challenge Question!(Give it a shot but don't agonize over it if it doesn't intrigue you; if you get a reasonable answer, a valueless prize is a definite possibility :) )
   The giants who live at the top of the beanstalk have a language of their own. It is a simple, nameless language with just the four lexical categories "fee," "fi," "fo," and "fum." Here are its other structural characteristics:
   A sentence must always end with a single "fum."
   There is never more than one "fum," and "fum" is not grammatical anywhere else in a sentence.
   Sometimes a sentence consists of nothing but that one "fum."
   There is no limit on how many times a "fee," a "fi," or a "fo" may occur in a sentence.
   Every "fee" must come before everything else in the sentence.
   Every "fi" must come after the last "fee" but before any "fo"s or "fum".
   Can you write a set of make-believe phrase structure rules that will produce all the possible grammatical sentence structures in the giants' language without producing any ungrammatical sentence structures in this language? Feel free to posit any phrasal categories in this language that will help you find rules that generate the correct results. Remember that recursion is a very useful tool... If you give up, your effort should still have at least two attempts at a possible rule.

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