Assignment 7: 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 Monday October 19th, due Tuesday October 27th.

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 when constructing your phrase structure trees for Questions 2 and 3. 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. When we used the Trees program in LING 101 before, we found that students who did not use the program made six times as many errors as students who did not use it.

• Instructions on finding, opening and running Trees 2.1.2 (currently being updated)

Assignment

1. Lexical categories

What is the lexical category of each of the words in these sentences? Write the sentence with the category of each word marked below.

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 4, exercise 4 (p.150).

Your goal in this assignment is to show how to distinguish the two meanings of a single sentence by showing that each meaning corresponds to a different structure. You should give structures for the sentence in the exercise, and you should not give structures for your paraphrases of the different meanings of the sentence.

The "Trees" program is recommended for this exercise. Note, you must use the phrase structure rules/tree-fragments provided in fromkin.gr in the Trees program, and below as "Fromkin Grammar", and you must not use the rules for modifiers given in the textbook. The grammar at the bottom of this page differs slightly from the rules given in the textbook, in the following ways, primarily involving rules for modifiers:

• VP-modifier rule: VP --> VP PP (in Fromkin & Rodman, modifier PPs are optionally added under the lowest NP node)
• NP-modifier rule: NP --> NP PP (in Fromkin & Rodman, modifier PPs are optionally added under the lowest NP node)
• N-modifier rule: N --> AdjP N (in Fromkin & Rodman, Adjectives are optionally added as sisters of the noun and the determiner)

  Note that if you use the Trees program, you do not need to worry about which kind of rules for modifiers you use, because the program only allows you to use the rules in "fromkin.gr". Note also that it is crucial that you state which meaning corresponds to which structure - see the class notes and the textbook for help on this.

3. Trees

Fromkin & Rodman, Chapter 4, exercise 7 (p.151).

The "Trees" program is recommended for this exercise. Note, you must use the phrase structure rules/tree-fragments provided in fromkin.gr in the Trees program, and below as "Fromkin Grammar", and you must not use the rules for modifiers given in the textbook. These differ slightly from the rules given in the textbook, as described in question 2.

You may find that the tree for the final sentence of this exercise is too large to fit on the page/window - if this is the case, then you should follow the tips for shrinking your tree found on the saving and printing instructions page.

4. Trees (freehand)

Now draw phrase structure trees for the following sentences. In this case you must draw your trees freehand, and you must not create them using the Trees program. You may use the program as an aid to help yourself figure out the structure, but you should write-up the structure on paper. All of the sentences can be constructed using the rules in the grammar at the bottom of this page; examples (d-g) use words which are not contained in fromkin.gr, but they use rules/tree-fragments that you should by now be familiar with.

a. The reporter found the lane.

b. The passenger realized that the children put the puppy in the sun.

c. The airliner sped by the house.

 

d. Colorless green ideas sleep in an hurry.

e. We think that these truths seem self-evident.

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

g. They strongly recommend that you draw trees with a computer-program.

5. Other languages

Fromkin & Rodman, Chapter 4, exercise 18 (pp.155-156).

Note: (a) answer the question for each language separately, (b) the exercise continues onto p.156.

Rules of the Grammar "fromkin.gr"

This list of rules repeats what is included in the fromkin.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.