Assignment 4: Syntax

[The Trees program and logo (above) were created by Sean Crist & Anthony Kroch of the University of Pennsylvania, who are the copyright holders. They are in use at the University of Delaware under license.]

Posted Wednesday September 24th, due Tuesday September 30th.

The goal of this assignment is to give you practice in building and justifying syntactic phrase-structure trees. You will test a couple of grammars for fragments of English, and think about how the grammars of other languages are similar to or different from the grammar of English.

Although it is possible to do this assignment with just pen-and-paper, we strongly recommend that you use the Trees program that was used in class lectures to construct your phrase structure trees for exercises 4 and 7. The Trees program is designed to prevent you from making mistakes in drawing phrase structures, so by using it you greatly improve your chances of doing well. It is also designed to help you think about about sentences as structures rather than just strings of words. ...We're not just saying this for fun: using the Trees program really helps. Honest. Don't say we didn't warn you!

• Instructions on finding, opening and running Trees 2.0.1

Assignment

1. Lexical categories: what is the lexical category of each of the words in these sentences:

a. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

b. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

c. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

d. They have strongly recommended that you draw trees with a computer program.

 

 

2. Ambiguity. Fromkin & Rodman, Chapter 3, exercise 4 ("Trees" recommended"). Note, use the phrase structure rules/tree-fragments provided in hw4.gr in the Trees program, and below as "HW4 Grammar". These differ slightly from the rules given in the textbook.

 

3. Trees. Fromkin & Rodman, Chapter 3, exercise 7 ("Trees" recommended). Note, use the phrase structure rules/tree-fragments provided in hw4.gr in the Trees program, and below as "HW4 Grammar". These differ slightly from the rules given in the textbook.

 

4. Other languages. Fromkin & Rodman, Chapter 3, exercise 18 (Note: (a) answer the question for each language, (b) the exercise continues onto p.122.)

 

5. Adverbs. In the HW4 grammar we already have a rule that allows us to add prepositional phrases as modifiers to the right of VPs (VP --> VP PP). English also allows VPs to be modified by adverbs placed at the left of VP, as in:

a. Wallace quickly fed Gromit.

b. The revolutionaries happily marched through the streets.

c. Justice sometimes prevails.

The current HW4 grammar cannot generate sentences containing adverbs like this: propose a new rule or tree-fragment which can be added to the HW4 grammar to allow it to generate sentences with adverbs.

In class (on Thursday 9/25) we saw that the rule which adds modifiers to the right of VP can be used recursively, creating trees with multiple VP-nodes. We also saw that the VP-deletion process could apply to any of these VP-nodes, as in:

d. Sue wrote her assignment in the library on Sunday night, and Alex did (too).

e. Sue wrote her assignment in the library on Sunday night, and Alex did on Monday morning.

f. Sue wrote her assignment in the library on Sunday night, and Alex did in the bath on Monday morning.

By generating new sentences, try to figure out whether your adverb rule can be applied recursively, and then whether the adverbs can be deleted by the VP-deletion process.

Note: if your native language is not English, you may choose instead to ask the same question about adverbs in your own native language. If you do so, be sure to clearly present example sentences from your language (use the format in exercise 18 in the textbook as a model).

HW4 Grammar

This list of rules repeats what is included in the hw4.gr grammar in the Trees program.

S --> NP VP

NP --> Det N

PP --> P NP

VP --> V (intransitive verbs, e.g. 'appear')

VP --> V NP (transitive verbs, e.g. 'see')

VP --> V NP PP (ditransitive verbs, e.g. 'put')

VP --> V S' (sentence complement verbs, e.g. 'realized')

VP --> VP PP (vp-modifier rule)

N --> AdjP N (n-modifier rule)

AdjP --> Adv AdjP (adj-modifier rule)

NP --> NP PP (np-modifier rule)

S' --> Comp S

AdjP --> Adj

For questions 2 and 3, use these and only these rules.