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. Underline all the complementizers in the following sentence and circle any other words that are homonyms with complementizers but are NOT complementizers in this example:
   "That child hopes that the circus will come to town, but his parents wonder whether the clowns will scare him if they start laughing.
2. Mark each of the following examples as either a 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. _____
3. Underline the ONE existential marker "there" (FYI, also called the "expletive-there") in the following sentence:
   There is not doubt that the murderer was still there when we were in the basement. _____________________
4. Give an example of a non-grammatical word that might be appropriate before or after (or maybe both :) ) each of the following sentences:
   • ______________ I'll see you later. ______________
   • ______________ We won the contest! ______________
   • ______________ Open that door for me. ______________
5. Do Exercise 1 of Chapter 5 on page 165 of your text.
6. 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 it plural and used it in that plural form in as a stand-alone noun phrase to fill in the blank in the sentence "We understand ______________."
7. (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 TRANSITIVE? ____________; is it DYNAMIC? ___________