ENG302 -- Topic: Semantics and Pragmatics - Assignment 11 James Madison University

Instructions: [Your answers to this assignment should be written out clearly (or typed :) ). As an "ungraded" assignment, your work will be collected but will be marked only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.]

1. Find an example (either spoken or written, just not created to be an example) of a sentence with a preposed element. Write down the sentence and attempt to describe how it does or does not seem to you to follow the information structure pattern predicted by the reading.
2. Choose a text excerpt at least five sentences long that contains at least three sentences with noncanonical sentence structure. Come up with a syntactic variant for each sentence that does not change the truth conditional meaning of the sentence but does sound odd or awkward at that point in that excerpt. Your excerpt can be from a novel, a newspaper, or any other text that interests you.