Linguistics/English 394
Spring 2011
Prof. Suzanne Kemmer
Rice University

Assignment 2

Do the following exercises and problems and upload your file to the Assignments module in Owlspace. Type your name on the first page somewhere near the top in your Word file. Give your file a title with your last name in it and the assignment number, e.g. murphyasgn2.doc or similar.

Honor Code:
Try the textbook problems by yourself first, but you can compare with others if you wish.

For the parsing part of the assignment, before you begin any writing or tree-drawing, you can discuss the sentences you are analyzing with others currently in the class if you wish--but not with other people outside the class, including those who took the class earlier. However, try to draw your trees independently and without looking at other students' trees or tree parts. You can use your textbook as a reference if you want. But to simplify matters, don't use other printed or internet materials besides your text and course notes. (Our class Wiki pages are ok too if you find any relevant ones.)

If you are a non-native speaker or just don't know how to classify a word into a part of speech, you can check a good dictionary. Be aware that sometimes dictionaries use a traditional classification that is not consistent or internally coherent; or they are just wrong. So try to reason out what part of speech a word might be, based on what you've learned from book and class.

Part I. Exercises from textbook.

Ch. 16 Morphology
1. p. 289, 1.
2. p. 289, 2.
3. p. 289, 7. (can interview native speakers of English if desired, devising sentence frames for the forms of the verbs you wish to find)
4. p. 289, 9. (can interview native speakers of English as above)
5. p. 290, 18. i-x

Ch. 3 Verbs
6. p. 60, 5.

(Extra practice, not to hand in: can you do p. 60, 3., p. 60, 6.-9.? Hopefully these are not hard and you can answer similar questions. If you see any problematic ones, you can send me a question via email.)

Ch. 4 Clause structure, complements, adjuncts

7. p. 80, 1.
8. p. 81, 7.
9. p. 81, 9.

(Extra practice, not to hand in: can you do p. 80-81 3., 6., 8? These should be easy; make sure you are able to answer these and similar questions. )

Part II. Sentence Analysis: Parsing and tree drawing

Parse the sentences below, that is, assign syntactic categories (parts of speech) to each lexical item, and group the words and phrases into constituents that form a tree structure of sentence parts (constituents).

Use the online program phpsyntax to draw the tree.
Ignore the ellipses (i.e., the omitted parts signalled by "...")

You might run into questions about how to parse some parts of the sentences, because not all the elements of English or issues in parsing have been introduced so far. Do the best you can to parse and label using what we have studied so far as well as making hypotheses about other elements not yet introduced.

Comment briefly on any parts where you ran into trouble or are unsure, and where you see more than one possibility. In the latter case, say briefly why you made the choice(s) you did.

1. Information about words like this must appear in the dictionary.
(source: our textbook)

2. The giant standing cockroach...was spotted last week in front of an apartment building on Eighty-third Street. (source: New Yorker, 1/15/07 p. 23)

3. It was twelve feet tall and hideous, its tentacles waving in the breeze.
(source: continuation of above)

4. The number of women who take 20 or more business trips a year is growing substantially.
(source: New York Times, Jan. 2007)

5. Here the coordination is marked by or in the second clause. (our textbook, p. 25)

Aims of Part II

1. To have student apply techniques of sentence analysis (identification of parts of sentences, both structural and functional)

2. To give practice in representing an analysis using tree structures.

© 2011 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 8 February 2011