Homework #8: More Syntax

Posted Wednesday October 28th, due Thursday November 5th.

Note that there are opportunities for extra credit in both question 1 and question 3 - a good opportunity to boost your average.

1. Ambiguity

[Trees program not relevant for this exercise.]

Do Exercise 3 on pp.149-150 of Fromkin & Rodman and draw a syntactic tree to show the structures for the two meanings of sentence (i). When explaining the different meanings of ambiguous sentences, take special care to ensure that your paraphrases are unambiguous!

New Note!: when drawing the tree for sentence (i), you should feel free to add the complementizer "that" to the sentence, if it will make it easier for you to diagram; the new sentence would read:

They said that she would go yesterday.

You may also treat "would" as an AUX. Remember that we have already seen a rule to add an AUX into a tree:

S --> NP AUX VP

Extra Credit: draw a pair of structures to show the two possible meanings of sentence (c) in this exercise. In order to draw this tree you will need one new rule for English, in addition to the ones that you have already seen:

N --> N and N

2. Arguments vs. Modifiers

[Do not use Trees program here - the relevant words are not available]

The ultimate goal of this exercise is to draw syntactic trees for the sentences in (a-f). However, in order to do this, you will need to know whether the phrases in brackets are arguments or modifiers of the verb. If they are arguments, then they will attach to the tree inside the (smallest) VP. If they are modifiers, then they attach above VP, forming a larger VP ... as in the many examples we have seen in class.

In order to determine whether the bracketed phrases are arguments or modifiers, you will need to use the "do so" test that we used in class. Recall that "do so" can be used to stand in for a VP: therefore "do so" must replace all of the arguments of a verb when it is used, but only optionally stands in for modifiers. For example, in the two sentences below, the fact that the PP "on Thursday" can be used with do so indicates that it is a modifier; the fact that the PP "on the shelf" cannot be used with do so indicates that it is an argument of the verb put.

The cat meowed [on Tuesday] and the dog did so [on Thursday]

*The boy put the book [on the table] and the girl did so [on the shelf]

A guide to using the "do so" test.

For each of the sentences below: (a) use the "do so" test to show whether the bracketed phrase is an argument or an adjunct -- you should show in your answer the test sentence(s) that you created -- and (b) draw a syntactic tree for the sentence.

a. Wallace likes [mature cheddar]

b. Pete played [against Andre]

c. Agatha knitted a sweater [for Rebecca]

d. The cowboy walked [into the saloon]

e. Some people snored [during the class]

f. Jill ran [up the hill]

You should be able to draw these trees using syntactic rules/tree fragments that you have already seen.

3. Trees in Japanese

[The Trees program is recommended for this exercise.] This exercise is very similar to one that you did last week, except that now your task is to construct trees in Japanese! This may look daunting at first, but if you work through the examples systematically, it should be straightforward -- as we saw in class, although Japanese looks on the surface to be very different from English, we can draw structures for many sentences of Japanese using exactly the same rules that we have used for English, but sometimes with the elements reordered. [Readers of this page familiar with Japanese syntax should see the note at the end of this exercise.]

In order to use the Trees program to do this exercise, you will need to download the Japanese grammar file that we have created for this purpose. It is not currently in the Trees folder on the Mac lab computers.

• Download japanese.gr This will download the grammar file from the linguistics web server: the file that downloads is called "japanese.gr.sit" which is a compressed Stuffit file. Your web browser should automatically uncompress this to create the file "japanese.gr". If the file is not automatically uncompressed, then you can uncompress it using the program Stuffit Expander which should be on all Mac computers. If you just double click on the file "japanese.gr.sit" this should launch Stuffit Expander and automatically uncompress the file.
• To use this grammar you need to first make sure that a file called "japanese.gr" is now available on the computer that you are working at. It is likely to be on the desktop. [You can use the find command if you do not see it on the desktop.]
• Next open the Trees 2.1.2 program. If you find that your computer has Trees 2.0.1, do not use this - this is an old version of the program which should have been deleted, and it will not work.
• Once Trees 2.1.2 is open, you should close any open windows and select the command Choose Grammar from the File menu. This command opens a dialog box which allows you to select the grammar that you want to use. You will probably find that "japanese.gr" is not in the first list of files that the dialog box shows you - you will need to use the pull down menu at the top of the dialog box to go to where "japanese.gr" is stored, and then select that.
• Once you have selected the grammar file "japanese.gr", you can now use the command New from the File menu to open a new Tree drawing palette and workspace.
• Further instructions on using the Trees program can be found in the on-line instructions pages.

Strategy: almost all of the rules that you need to construct these sentences are identical to rules of English that you have seen before. You should use your trees for these sentences in English as a guide. If you are having difficulty figuring out which pairs of words go together, we recommend that you work in a "bottom-up" fashion. For example, figure out which words need to go together to form a PP; then figure out which verb the PP is associated with, and try to combine the PP with the VP. You can use the English translations to help figure out which noun phrase is the subject of which verb, and then combine the corresponding Japanese NP and VP tree fragments.

Rules that are different from English. Almost all of the rules that you need to construct the Japanese examples are identical to rules that you have seen for English, except that the order of the elements has been switched [see below for a list of the rules used]. There are just a couple of additional differences between Japanese and English.

• As will quickly become clear, Japanese generally does not use determiners like "the" and "a".
• Japanese has suffixes to mark the subject and object of clauses: subjects are marked with "-ga" and objects with "-o" ... although you can do this exercise without paying attention to these endings, they can be helpful to you in figuring out the structural position of some words, because they tell you what are the subjects and objects.
• You will need one rule which allows a VP to be a modifier of NP (appearing on the left of the NP); the rule is NP --> VP NP. You will need this rule in sentences (j) and (k).
• A couple of the original English sentences in the Fromkin & Rodman exercise have been changed slightly, to avoid getting into very complicated areas of Japanese syntax. Also, since neither I nor my informants know much about car mechanics, the "twin cams" in sentence (k) have been replaced with a "sunroof" (does the Japanese translation look familiar?).

The examples are organized as follows: the first line shows the Japanese words, in the correct word order for Japanese. The second line shows a word-for-word translation of the Japanese words. You can ignore the dots that are found between some words ... these are inserted so as to make it easy to align the Japanese words with their English translation. The third line shows a translation of the Japanese sentence into English. You do not need to diagram the English sentences (you did that last week!).

a. kori-ga toketa

a. ice.....melted

a. "The ice melted."

b. koinu-ga kodomo-o mitsuketa

b. puppy....child....found

b. "The puppy found the child."

c. tsuyoi hizasi-ga kori-o tokasita

c. strong sunshine..ice....made-melt(1 word)

c. "The hot sun melted the ice."

d. kowagateiru jyokyaku-ga kososita hikouki-de chakurikusita

d. frightened..passenger...broken...airliner...made-land(1 word)

d. "A frightened passenger landed the crippled airliner."

e. kodomotachi-ga omocha-o hako ni ireta

e. children.......toy......box..in put

e. "The children put the toy in the box."

f. hurui ki-ga kaze de yureta

f. old...tree..wind in swayed

f. "The old tree swayed in the wind."

g. wareta kori-ga hisashi de tokeru

g. broken ice.....sun.....in melts

g. "Broken ice melts in the sun."

h. gitaa-ga kanashiotto kanaderu

h. guitar...gently......weeps

h. "The guitar gently weeps."

[My Japanese informants found this sentence quite strange.]

i. kisha-ga giin-ga usootsuita koto-o kizuita

i. reporter senator lied.......that...realized

i. "The reporter realized that the senator lied."

j. oka..ni aru......ie-ga kaze de kowareta

j. hill on existing house wind in collapsed

j. "The house on the hill collapsed in the wind."

The final three sentences are available for extra credit - if you are looking to improve your grade in the course, then constructing the trees for these sentences could be a good way of gaining extra points.

New Note! : Many of you have asked what to do with the "aru" phrases in sentence (k). You need to use one of the NP modifier fragments; there is an NP-Mod which may be used to attach a VP to an NP:

NP --> VP NP

 

k. sunrufu no...aru......hayai kuruma-ga sibahu no..aru ....

k. sunroof with existing fast..car.......grass with existing

 

michi-ni iru kodomotachi-no yoko-o torisugita

road.....on..children's.....side...drove

 

k. "A fast car with a sunroof drove past the children on the grassy road." (Literally: "A fast car existing with a sunroof drove past the children's side on the road existing with grass").

l. daitouryou-ga giin-ga usootsuita koto-o kizuita koto-ga

l. president.....senator lied.......that...realized that

kanojo-o komaraseta

her......disturbed

l. "That the president realized that the senator lied disturbed her."

m. daitoryou-ga giin-ga usootsuita koto-o kizuita koto-ga

m. president....senator lied.......that...realized that

 

kanojo-ga kare-ga kokai karano..saishinno repoto-o yonda koto-o

she.......he......congress from latest....reports..read..that

 

sitteiru koto-o imisuru

knows....that...means

"That the president realized that the senator lied means that she knows that he read the latest reports from congress."

[Many thanks to Misako Nakagawa and Maiko Ishikawa for their help in creating the Japanese sentences!]

Rules of Japanese Required for Sentences Above

S --> NP VP

NP --> N

N --> AdjP N

NP --> NP N

NP --> VP NP [note: doesn't match an English rule, needed for (j) and (k)]

VP --> V

VP --> NP V

VP --> NP PP V

VP --> S' V

VP --> Adv VP

VP --> PP VP

S' --> S Comp

PP --> NP P

Note on the Japanese Syntax Assumed [LING 101 students needn't worry about this]

If you are a reader of this page who is familiar with Japanese syntax, a couple of remarks are in order about the rules assumed for Japanese here. In order to avoid introducing many features of Japanese not found in English solely for the purposes of this exercise, I have done the following:

• Nominative, accusative and genitive case markers are treated as lexically attached to nouns and 'koto'.
• All other case/postposition suffixes are treated as instances of category P, heading a PP. The trees that are constructed do not mark the fact that they are morphologically suffixed to the N.
• Not surprisingly, the grammar does not represent scrambling or any other kind of free word order.
• The prenominal modifiers headed by 'aru' in sentences (j) and (k) are treated as prenominal VP modifiers of NP, which adjoin to NP.