Introduction to Linguistics - Assignment 5

James Madison University

  1. Try to paraphrase each of the five phrase structure rules on page 95 of your textbook carefully. What exactly is each rule saying?
  2. Using just the five rules from page 95 plus the others we discussed in our class (see list of the others at the bottom of this assignment), attempt to draw tree diagrams for each of the following sentences:
    1. The rooster crowed.
    2. The angry cooks spoiled the broth.
    3. The solution was obvious.
    4. The pizza on the table looks delicious.
    5. My brother eats worms.
      6. ("my" is a determiner)
    6. Ichabod ran.
  3. Based on the discussion of transformations in your text, including the relationship between deep (d-)structure and surface (s-)structure and the issue of structural dependency, write down the "d-structure" of each of the following sentences:
    1. Should that door close?
    2. What movie did you watch?
    3. There are too many people in this boat.
  4. After reading about structural ambiguity in our text,try to find a naturally-occurring example, written or spoken, of a structurally ambiguous sentence. (These come up all the time, even in The Breeze . :) ) Attempt to 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 has two possible other constituents with which it can combine (ie., 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?



ADDITIONAL PHRASE STRUCTURE RULES MENTIONED IN OUR LAST CLASS(Note that strictly for html formatting reasons, the rules for intermediate phrase structure levels are each awkwardly marked as an "X"-bar rather than as an "X" with a line over it!):