Modern Grammar - Assignment 17 James Madison University

Instructions: This is practice with basic VP structures and with some new phrase structure rules that may be involved in building single clause sentences. Think carefully and give it your best shot. It will be graded only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.

1. First, let's just practice building various forms of VPs that correspond to the semantic and syntactic constraints of different verbs. Most of the examples will list the rule used, but the last couple leave it up to you. (You may want to do this without LLAMA syntax, but you can check your answers against that program if it helps. Just make sure to set the parser to parse VPs...)
   1. stopped (VP --> V)
   2. sleep (VP --> V)
   3. swallowed a sword (VP --> V NP)
   4. had a great time (VP --> V NP)
   5. costs money (VP --> V NP)
   6. dove into the ocean(VP --> V PP)
   7. is in a bad mood (VP --> V PP)
   8. talked to me (VP --> V PP)
   9. smells strange (VP --> V AP)
   10. appeared confident (VP --> V AP)
   11. were ready (VP --V AP)
   12. gave the largest piece to his mother (VP --> V NP PP)
   13. tossed her shoes into the suitcase (VP --> V NP PP)
   14. handed the sword to the warrior (VP --> V NP PP)
   15. handed the warrior the sword (VP --> V NP NP)
   16. gave his mother the largest piece (VP --> V NP NP)
   17. threw the ball from the outfield to homeplate (VP --> V NP PP PP)
   18. trades Monica a lollipop for her gumball (VP --> V NP NP PP)
   19. brings her friends to her private island
   20. sold that guy a phony diamond
2. Now, also try out a new rule for turning a noun phrase marked with possessive morphology into a determiner (det --> NP 's ) Yes, this is an odd rule; it suggests that inflectional morphology is really derivational, but it really is the whole noun phrase, not the noun, that is sometimes used in English as (a substitute for) a determiner. I recommend you circle a possessive 's whenever you see one in an example, because it will frequently be the case that you then notice that that particular possessive NP is actually being use as the equivalent of a determiner for another noun. In the following example, that is indeed what happens:
   
   • My dear friend's brother moved to Alaska.
3. And finally, here's just one other completely new rule. It is a rule for an intensifier adverb when it is modifying an adjective, and it is one of the rare cases where a SUBCLASS of a word class has its own rule. The rule is
   AP --> int AP
   and you'll notice that the rule really has the intensifier modify the whole adjective phrase. We can discuss why in class. Here is a sentence with two examples of this rule at work:
   • The most difficult part of the puzzle was the very monochromatic part.