Modern Grammar - ASSIGNMENT 20 James Madison University

Instructions: This assignment will be marked as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.

1. Give your own example of an otherwise very simple to diagram sentence that contains an INFINITIVE SENTENTIAL SUBJECT. Remember that you will need to use the complementizer "for." Diagram your sentence, remembering that the rule for the infinitive marker is VP --> inf VP. (This is the only sentence you need to diagram for this assignment!)
2. Add an appositive to the following sentence: His masterpiece was on exhibit at the Louvre.
3. Undo the inversion in the following sentence: Out of the mouths of babies come words of wisdom.
4. Add a tag-question to the following sentence: They haven't stopped carrying frozen yogurt.
5. There are two different types of clauses in English that use a meaingless "Filler-it" that is not really a pronoun. (Unlike the normal personal pronoun "it," this "filler-it" does not have any reference; there is no third person singular "thing" that is its antecedent.) Both clause types are formed by transformation. Look at the two pairs of sentences below. Each pair has a canonical sentence and one with the same meaning but a transformed syntactic structure with a filler-it. In each case, try to characterize how one got transformed into the other. (Hint: check your textbook for discussions of "Extraposition" and of "It-clefts.")
   
   1. Snoopy fought the red baron. It was Snoopy who fought the red baron.
   2. That his toenails are green worries him. It worries him that his toenails are green.

6. Now read the discussion of "Relative Clauses" below and then follow the directions for the identification practice.
   A RELATIVE CLAUSE is a clause that both has a specialized grammatical form and modifies a noun.
   Relative clauses show up with all kinds of nouns, even proper nouns, and with pronouns too(!), and they are grammatically marked by the fact that they either contain a relative word (like a relative pronoun or a relative determiner) that corresponds in meaning to the same entity or idea the noun the clause modifies refers to or a missing piece, a “gap” corresponding to this same information. When there is a relative pronoun in a relative clause, the relative pronoun is always at the front of the relative clause, even if it is a direct object or something else that would not normally be in that position.
   [As we've seen, a noun complement can modify a small subset of nouns too, but a noun complement has no specialized grammatical characteristics, and does not have to include a reference to the noun being modified. On the other hand, it does usually tend to have a complementizer in front of it….]
   For example, the sentence "The man who bought the monkey is a musician" contains a relative clause. The relative pronoun is who and the relative clause is "who bought the monkey." As another example, "The elephant that the ringmaster trained is a brilliant performer" also contains a relative clause. The relative pronoun in this case is that. That is not a complementizer here; it is a pronoun that is a part of the structure of the S itself. It stands in for the direct object of “bought” even though it is moved to the front of the clause. The whole relative clause is "that the ringmaster trained." Your intuition as a fluent speaker of English should tell you that the that in the elephant example could have been omitted. If it had been omitted, then you would have a perfectly grammatical example of a relative clause with a “gap.”
   For each of the following sentences, underline the relative clause, if there is one. One of these sentences does not have a relative clause:
   1. The winning player says he has skills that the other players lack.
   2. The losing player has proof that the others were cheating.
   3. The butler whom we employ is quite reliable.
   4. Nobody knows the troubles I have seen.
   5. Styrofoam, which is a non-biodegradable material, is filling up our landfills.
   6. The individual whose shoes we stole must have cold feet.