Linguistics/English 394
Spring 2007
Prof. Suzanne Kemmer
Rice University

Assignment 2

Text of assignment

Sentence Analysis (Parts I and II)

Honor Code: For this 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, 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. You can use the syntactic category names/abbreviations in the Keywords Week 2 terminology page posted under the Lecture Notes module. (In order to simplify matters, don't use other materials besides your text and the Lecture Notes. If you don't know a word, you can look it up in a dictionary, but don't use the dictionary's idea of what part of speech it is--use your own based on what you have learned in the class so far.)

Part I. Practice in sentence analysis (parsing) of written English

Parse the underlined sentences below, i.e. assign syntactic categories (parts of speech) to each lexical item and make a tree structure to group the constituents. In some cases, more context is given in preceding or following sentences, but you need only parse the underlined sentence.

You will probably run into questions about how to parse some parts of the examples. Parse each underlined sentence 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.

1. The giant standing cockroach in question was spotted last week in front of an apartment building on Eighty-third Street, just east of Madison Avenue. It was twelve feet tall and hideous, its tentacles waving in the breeze. It was also--on closer, but not too close, inspection--fake. It was an inflatable cockroach. (source: New Yorker, 1/15/07 p. 23)
2. As another Oscar season gets underway, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences faces a conundrum: Is what we have here a failure to communicate, or is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? (source: New York Times, Jan. 2007)
3. But it's been clear to me, anecdotally, that the number of women who take 20 or more business trips a year is growing substantially. So we'll be checking in here more often on the female segment of the business travel market. Who do you think is responsible for the revolution that has forced every major hotel chain to substantially upgrade bedding, lighting and bathrooms over the last six years or so? (source: New York Times, Jan. 2007)
4. Some of Bennet's forty-four hundred teachers and principals looked askance at this abrupt elevation of standards, cautioning that many students would fall short, and then drop out. Bennet considered this view to be cynical, and saw in the underpopulated, seemingly irremediable Manual High an opportunity to show how intolerant of low expectations he planned to be. (source: New Yorker, 1/15/07 p. 46)

Find a sample of natural conversation that has at least 5 finite clauses in it, whether in complete sentences or not. (Finite clauses are clauses with finite verb forms, i.e. verbs inflecting for number and/or tense.) The utterances in your sample can be distributed across more than one speaker, since this is a conversation. Natural conversation means your sample is not scripted, like a play or screenplay, but was a real conversation that took place orally or via computer. To get such real conversation, you can transcribe a snippet that you have taped on your phone's voice recorder or other recorder (it will probably be about 10 seconds of talk) or use a bit of online chat between 2 or more people that you observed or participated in. The sample should be collected by you alone. The transcription does not have to capture all of the details of spoken language (e.g. pauses, corrections) that discourse linguists transcribe; just put down the words you hear in standard spelling, but don't standardize any of the grammar. If you took the language from the computer, you can leave non-standard spellings if you wish, but indicate this in your description of the source. Specify the source where you found or "captured" the conversation, including date and time.

Now, parse the utterances in your sample as best you can: Divide the utterance into sentences, assign syntactic categories (parts of speech) to each lexical item and then make a tree structure to group the constituents, to whatever extent you can. For incomplete sentences, parse whatever is there.

As before, parse each sentence 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. (You SHOULD have some difficulties with your parsing, and we are at least as interested in what you thought about when deciding how to parse, as in your actual parsing. If your sample is so easy to parse that no questions come up, it is boring and you should take another one.)

Comment on the grammatical structures you found in your sample. How does the language of the sample differ from the language of the examples you parsed in Part I?

Aims of assignment

1. To have student apply techniques of sentence analysis (identification of parts of sentences, here primarily structural, but functional where needed to understand the sentence as a whole).

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

3. To show the difficulty of parsing real sentences in all their natural complexity, rather than simplified constructed sentences.

4. To illustrate differences between conversational, spoken/quasi-spoken language, vs. written, non-conversational language. Differences in complexity, word choice, kinds of linkages etc.

5. To have student discover and confront the normal problems of indeterminacy in syntactic analysis, and to lead into discussion of various kinds of indeterminacy and why they arise.

Commentary

© 2007 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 4 February 2007