Modern Grammar - Assignment 12 James Madison University

Instructions: This assignment contains both some more practice with word class details, plus some practice with new material from this week. [This assignment will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort. ]

1. Mark each of the following examples as either a complete, stand-alone sentence (S), an incomplete sentence (I), or a run-on sentence(R) based on the constraints on subordinate conjunctions vs. discourse connectives.
   • While Harriet was sunning herself in the garden. _____
   • Nonetheless, the cat ate the mouse. _____
   • We crowded into the room when they opened the doors. _____
   • Since the water was warm, the solar panels must have been working. _____
   • Until I thought about what was happening to the world. _____
   • The fish, therefore, started to wear their goggles. _____
   • Many birds are flying north, nevertheless it is still winter. _____
2. Attempt to underline all and only the quantifiers in the following somewhat familiar-looking sentence :) :
   All my friend's clovers had three leaves, but most of mine had four, and so without giving it much thought, I gave him several of the biggest ones because no clover is more important than a friend.
3. Give an example of a non-grammatical (AKA agrammatical, but NOT UNgrammatical!) word that might be appropriate before and/or after each of the following sentences:
   • ______________ I'll see you later. ______________
   • ______________ We won the contest! ______________
   • ______________ Open that door for me. ______________
4. Do Exercise 1 of Chapter 5 on page 165 of your text.
5. Based on the relevant handout and the textbook discussion in Chapter 5, give one example of a noun that is normally a mass noun. Then, give an explanation for what it might plausibly mean if you made that noun plural, testing the idea by considering what the sentence below would mean if you used that plural form to fill in the blank:
   "We understand ______________."
6. (Re-)read the descriptions of transitive verbs and dynamic verbs in Chapter 5, and attempt to answer the following questions:
   
   • Is the verb in the following sentence TRANSITIVE? "My dog has fleas" __________; is that same verb DYNAMIC? _________
   • What is the verb in the sentence "The tree might have fallen over last night"? __________________; is it a TRANSITIVE verb? ____________; is it DYNAMIC? ___________