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Chapter 3
1. Linguistic knowledge. Answers will vary.
a. Structurally ambiguous sentences.
Example: I like sweet apples and oranges.
This sentence is structurally ambiguous because the adjective sweet can modify either the noun apples
2. Infinitely long sentences.
i. A possible answer would be: I know that he knows that you know that I hate war.
ii. These sentences show that there is no “longest” sentence in English; one can go on indefinitely, con-
3. Disambiguation with paraphrases.
a. Dick finally decided on the boat.
i. Dick finally chose the boat.
4. Constituency. Each of these ads has a structural ambiguity that leads to a potential humorous misinterpre-
tation. In the first ad, the intended reading is that the antique desk has thick legs and large drawers. In
For sale: an antique [[desk [suitable for lady]] [with thick legs and large drawers]]
For sale: an antique [desk [suitable for [lady [with thick legs and large drawers]]]]
We will [[[oil your sewing machine] and [adjust tension]] [in your home]] for $10.00.
We will [[oil your sewing machine] and [adjust [tension [in your home]]]] for $10.00.
5. Representing structural ambiguity.
The magician touched the child with the wand.
Meaning 1: With the wand, the magician touched the child.
Meaning 2: The magician touched the child who has the wand.
6. Grammatical categories.
a. The–Det, girls–N, love–V, sushi-N.
7. NP phrase structure rule. The phrase structure rule NP → (Det) N allows determiners to be optional before
Ns, which accounts for the grammaticality of The dog barks as well as Dogs bark and even The dogs bark.
8. Noun phrase subtrees
a. every mother b. a big black dog
c. angry men in dark glasses
d. Challenge exercise. although possessed noun phrases are not addressed directly in the text, note that pos-
Melissa’s garden
9. Embedded sentences.
a. Yesterday I noticed my accountant repairing the toilet.
b. Becky said that Jake would play the piano.
10. Phrase structure trees.
a. The puppy found the child.
b. A surly passenger insulted the attendant.
c. The house on the hill collapsed in the earthquake.
d. The ice melted.
e. The hot sun melted the ice.
f. The old tree swayed in the wind.
g. The wondrous, beautiful, blue guitar sold for a song.
11. Trees for sentences 6 to 10 words long. Here are some examples:
(Note: We’ve abbreviated some of the structures illustrated elsewhere with triangles.)
a. The warship sank into the ocean. (6 words)
b. The monkey will eat the delicious bananas. (7 words)
c. The young kids with this strange allergy hiccup. (8 words)
d. An otter played in the mud on the bank. (9 words)
The sentence is structurally ambiguous. This is one possible phrase structure tree.
e. The architect found an old picture of the ancient castle. (10 words)
12. Constituency tests:
a. a lovely pillow—NP
b. light in this room—not a constituent
c. whether Bonnie has finished packing her books—CP
d. in her class—PP
e. Pete and Max—NP
f. and to Max—is a constituent
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to substitute for it, and since it’s not a VP, we don’t expect a pro-verbal form to substitute for it.
Another interpretation is that and to Max fails this test and perhaps argues against constituency: *I
gave a bone to Pete him yesterday. But remember that negative evidence from constituency tests is
not as conclusive as positive evidence, since independent grammatical constraints sometimes inter-
fere, leading to false negative results for constituency tests.
g. Pete and—not a constituent
13. Verbal particles. (answers will vary)
a. Constituency. Up the bill does not seem to form a constituent in the sentence He ran up the bill. Note
b. 1. run off (one’s mouth)
14. C-selection restrictions.
a. *The man located. The verb locate is transitive: it requires an NP object.
15. Ditransitive verbs. Sample answers:
(1) bring: The vassal brought the emperor a gift.
16. Tamil.
i. Head final. These prepositional phrases all end with a preposition.
ii.
17. Tamil VPs and NPs. The data further support the hypothesis in 16 that Tamil is head final. The data shows
head final VPs: a story tell where tell is the head V and it follows its complement a story and a cow sell
where the head V sell follows the complement a cow. The VP structure in Tamil is:
We are also given data on NPs in Tamil: a story, the boy, a cow, and woman this. If we treat this as a
determiner, then we must say that some determiner can appear to the right of the noun in Tamil, perhaps
The two possible structures we have for NPs in Tamil are:
18. Wh movement.
Provide the d-structure for each of the following wh- questions. Then state the grammatical function of
the wh- phrase (e.g., subject, object, etc.)
19. Wh- movement constraints. The ungrammatical sentences d and h show that it is not possible to both
question and move one member of a coordinated structure. It is possible to just question one member of
20. Existential there sentences. When you have a sentence that has (i) an indefinite subject N and (ii) uses the
Challenge exercise. Sentences g(i) and g(ii) do not mean the same thing: (i) focuses on the students, saying,
regarding any students, they must be in the dorm by midnight, while (ii) focuses on the dorm, saying
21. Cross-linguistic syntactic variation. Sample answers:
a. French:
i. French marks future tense on the main verb, while English requires an auxiliary verb to mark the
future.
b. Japanese:
i. Japanese has subject markers and object markers, which indicate grammatical relations in all noun
c. Swahili:
i. Swahili has class markers. These are prefixes that distinguish various classes of nouns and indicate
gular subject; the agreement is marked by one suffix (-s).
d. Korean:
i. Korean (like Japanese) has suffixes on all noun phrases indicating grammatical relations like subject
e. Tagalog:
i. In Tagalog, proper names like Pedro occur with articles, while in English they cannot.
22. Ellipsis.
a. (i) Mary will study hard for the exam and John will study hard for the exam too.
b. Provide three more examples of each kind of “ellipsis” illustrated above.
(i) 1. Pat should walk every day and Chris should walk every day too.
Research question: Answers will vary. An example of a possible answer using Mexican Spanish is pro-
vided here. In this variety of Spanish, only one of these kinds of ellipsis is grammatical, namely (iii):
In Spanish you can say:
sible in both English and Spanish. (The verb was changed from ‘love’ to ‘eat’, since the verb ‘love / like’ in
Spanish works differently in terms of its argument structure.)
The patterns of ellipsis in English exemplified in (i) and (ii) don’t work straightforwardly in Spanish.
Let’s first consider (i).
Spanish does not have a free morpheme for the future so it could not form a sentence that elided the VP and
left behind the future marker. To express future, Spanish uses either a bound morpheme (estudio “I study,”
Thus, after account for the issues related to the expression of the future, it seems that this type of ellipsis also
takes place in Spanish. (Though there may be additional complications related to inflection, that we will set
aside for now.)
Finally, the pattern shown in (ii) also works differently in English and in Spanish:
Here, the difference lies in a syntactic requirement that doesn’t allow the preposition a “to” to be stranded
from its object quién “who.” This it is not possible to say the following sentence because it isn’t possible to
leave a “to” hanging there at the end of the sentence.
But rather you have to say something like the following, where a is moved together with quién:
While saying the English equivalent of this last Spanish sentence, where to gets moved with who(m), sounds
stilted in our dialect, some English speakers may use it:
23. Challenge exercise: Adverbs in French and English.
a. In French, adverbs of frequency must follow the verb, whereas in English, they must precede the verb.
b. If adverbs of frequency originate left adjoined to V and do not move, then in order for the adverb to end up
c. English and French are the same in terms of the d-structure. In both English and French, the adverb of
frequency originates in the same place, as does the verb, the tense, and the subject and object. Where
English and French differ is that French raises main verbs to T as long as there is no lexical item (e.g.,
an aux verb) there. English, however, appears to leave main verbs in V, as seen in the trees below:
24. Dutch and German questions. The data show that Dutch and German questions are different from English
25. Challenge exercise: One-replacement test.
a. with the golden arm = adjunct
The man with the golden arm and the one with the bionic leg . . .
26. Challenge research exercise: ditransitive verbs in X-bar theory. There are several proposals for handling
ditransitive verbs in X-bar theory, most of which involve positing additional structure above the VP. One
