Introduction to Linguistics - Assignment 8

James Madison University

  1. More practice with phrase structure trees: Using just the PS rules on page 92 in our textbook, draw the phrsae structure trees that represent the syntactic structure of each of the sentences below.
    1. The politicians spoke to their constituents. (FYI, "their" is a possessive determiner)
    2. Our guests arrived.
    3. The tornado destroyed the building.
    4. The children thought that their parents knew that the school closed. ("that" is a complementizer in this sentence)
  2. Do Exercise 21 at the end of chapter 3, just exampes a, c, and d.
  3. Look at the handout on "alternative theories of syntax" available on CANVAS under "Files." Then, write down just one way that any one of the theories briefly described in the handout differs (in some big, noticeable way) from the theory in our textbook with respect to its general approach to the characterization of sentence structure.

    4. Moving on:

  4. Do Exercise 2 (but just examples a through k) at the back of Chapter 4 (the Semantics chapter).
Syllabus for ENG308 Linguistics Resources Oxford English Dictionary Send email to Prof. Cote