Linguistics/English 394
Fall 2012
Prof. Suzanne Kemmer
Rice University

Assignment 2

Honor Code: Specifics given for Part I and Part II.

Part I, Parsing (Sentence Analysis). Written English. Genre: Popular non-fiction

Parse the underlined sentences below, i.e. assign syntactic categories (parts of speech) and functions (Subject, Predicate, Predicative Complement, Adjunct, etc. ) to each lexical item and make a tree structure to group the constituents. Use the online parsing program php-syntax to draw your trees. It will help if you think about which words 'go together' most closely into phrases that together make up a recognizable sentence part with a function in the sentence.

Parse the sentences as completely as you can, but comment briefly on the 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.

Honor code specification: 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, 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. Use the syntactic category names/abbreviations used in the textbook.

In order to simplify matters, don't use other materials besides our course textbook and notes and our Owlspace site (e.g. online lecture notes) where relevant. Don't use a dictionary for parts of speech. Often the part of speech of a word in a sentence is different from its usual one, because of the English use of "zero-derivation" -- conversion of a word from one part of speech (its usual one) into another. Figure out the part of speech by the word's function and the surrounding elements (i.e. its constructional frame).

1. Jerry Sandusky grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania.
2. His father headed the local community recreation center, running sports programs for children.
3. The Sanduskys lived upstairs.

(1-3 are running text from from article by Malcolm Gladwell "In Plain View", New Yorker 9/24/12) http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/09/24/120924crat_atlarge_gladwell#ixzz26nIgku8D )

4. The giant standing cockroach in question was spotted last week in front of an apartment building on Eighty-third Street (...)
5. It was an inflatable cockroach.

(4-5 are from "Pest Department: Roach!", by Nick Paumgartner, New Yorker, 1/15/07 p. 23, online http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/01/15/070115ta_talk_paumgarten)

Aims of Part I

1. To have student apply techniques of sentence analysis (identification of parts of sentences, both structural and functional, to understand the sentence as a whole).
2. To give practice in analysis and representing the analysis using tree structures.
3. To give experience parsing real sentences rather than simplified constructed sentences.
4. Provides basis of comparison and contrast for syntax of other genres exemplified later.

Part II. Corpora and Text Analysis. Finding syntactic patterns/constructions in corpus data.

There are a number of very frequent verbs in English which show a wide range of syntactic patterns, i.e. they occur in a number of different syntactic constructions.

For example, the lexeme have occurs in these as well as other constructions:

(i) the perfect construction have V-PastParticiple as in She has often gone to Mexico and I have seen a lot of squirrels around here.

(ii) a kind of 'causative' construction, in which one person gets another to do something: have OBJd:NP V-infinitival OBJd:NP as in I had him write a letter.

(iii) as a main verb (unlike the above in which it is an auxiliary verb), it occurs in transitive clauses V-trans OBJd:NP as in They have a lot of nerve.

Using a corpus and concordance program, do a corpus search on the lexeme give or some forms of this lexeme such as gave and gives. Show your queri(es) and your raw search results (paste them into your document, upload the file, or insert a screen shot) discuss the results as follows:

(a) What range of constructions do you find? Describe all the constructions you see in terms like those given above for have, using functions and syntactic categories (and subcategories such as V-Aux, V-PP, V-gerund-participle, etc.) for the elements of the construction besides the verb. Chapter 4 of the textbook can help you analyze your functions and syntactic categories. Put them in the order Function:Category, like OBJd:NP, which means "Noun Phrase functioning in the clause as a Direct Object." In some cases there may also be fixed lexical item(s) in the construction such as we observed in the way-construction discussed in class Sept. 13 (which has the fixed lexical item way), or the to in the to-infinitival which is part of various constructions. Give actual example(s) of each construction you can identify from your corpus search results.

(b) Which of the give-constructions you found seem to be the commonest structures?

(c) Make other observations about your constructions: what seems interesting, surprising, etc. about them. Is give like have? (In what way(s)?)

You can use the program MonoConc for Windows and the sample spoken corpus creeated by, and generously lent to us by, Michael Barlow (both located in our Resources on Owlspace); the COCA corpus by Mark Davies, also in Resources; or another concordance program and corpus of English.

You might find that some of your constructions occur as part of non-canonical clauses or sentences. You can use examples in non-canonical structures, but analyze them as though they are part of simple canonical structures. For example, in What did you give him?, you identify the basic give-structure in the sentence by substituting the canonical declarative structure instead of the original non-canonical question structure: You gave him [something]. In effect you are 'factoring out' the non-canonical construction so you can see the more basic structure exemplified in the sentence.

Aims of Part II

1. Practice extracting some basic syntactic data from a corpus.
2. Identify sentence parts (categories) and their functions from real data, and generalize over examples to identify constructions.
3. Observe the range of constructions found with a common verb in English.

© 2012 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 18 Sept 2012