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

Assignment 4

Honor Code: For this assignment, you can discuss the assignment with students taking the class currently (no others), but only up until the time you begin to write answers on computer or on paper. From that point, work by yourself. What this means is, preliminary discussions with other students taking the course about the questions are OK, but once you start working on your first draft of the assignment, writing answers and parsing, you must work by yourself.

For all questions, you can use the Huddleston and Pullum (2005) textbook and the materials on our course website. For questions 1-2, you can use other reference materials if you wish, but cite your sources if you use other things besides the textbook or course materials. (The large Huddleston and Pullum grammar from 2002, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language from our bibliography, on which our textbook is based, is on reserve in the library under Ling 394 if you care to use it. )

For questions 3 and 4, however, don't use syntax books or other reference materials, including the web, outside our textbook. Other syntax books/references use theory-specific reasons for preferring particular analyses that do not apply to our relatively theory-independent material.

Submit the assignment, as all assignments, via WebCT, so that we can log its submission. If you use handwritten trees and cannot get them up onto your file for submission to WebCT, submit the assignment without the trees but indicate "please see hardcopy" on the submission, and put a hardcopy in instructor's box on due date.

Negation and polarity items

The excerpt in the box below is from a recent blog by a Capitol Hill political commentator. Examine all of the underlined items in the excerpt. Identify which ones are negators (also called negative markers), and which ones are non-affirmative items (also called negative polarity items) and place them in two groups labelled accordingly.

Note: Negator is not in the H&P glossary, but we will define it as any linguistic unit (affix, clitic, word, or syntactic phrase) that modifies another linguistic unit and makes the meaning of the latter unit negative.

(i) The negators group
For each negator you found, indicate which linguistic item it negates. Negators are modifiers, so this task is the same as finding the head of the negative constituent. For example, in a clause like I won't tell you, the verbal negator n't syntactically modifies the verb phrase will tell (in this case, with some phonological changes, but that does not affect the syntax), thus making its whole clause a negative clause.

(ii)The negative polarity items group
Then, for each negative polarity item you found, explain why you classify it as a negative polarity item (as used in the sentence it occurs in).

(iii) other items
For underlined items that do not fit into your two groups above, say what type of linguistic item they are and what they have to do with negation, if anything.

There are 16 underlined items total.

But today, the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Specter is now the ranking Republican, took a vote on issuing subpoenas to White House aides in its probe of the growing scandal. ...

Specter, who is advocating a compromise in which Rove would testify publicly but not under oath and without being subpoenaed, clearly opened his mouth and seemed to move his lips.

Then Leahy asked for the "nays", and Specter's mouth didn't open a sliver. Capitol Briefing convened a meeting of reporters afterward to decide whether Specter had voted in favor of the subpoenas. There was no clear answer, no one could actually confirm whether they heard him say "aye".

Reporters spent much of the afternoon, it seems, trying to pin down the Pennsylvania senator.

But Specter had a change of heart and decided to clear the air, tracking down a few reporters. He did not deny that his mouth might have opened during the call for "ayes", but Specter denied saying anything, uttering any sound.

"The fact of the matter is that I did not say anything. I did not vote and say either 'aye' or 'nay'. I just sat there hoping that it would all go away through negotiations," he said. "Factually, I did not say a thing.

Clause types and speech acts

The following is Chapter 9, Exercise 1 from the Huddleston and Pullum textbook, with additional items added.

Classify the following according to the clause type of the main clause, and say what kind of speech act each sentence would be most likely be used to perform. (If the clause type is negative, add the word "negative" to your specified clause type, for example "negative declarative". ) If you think a sentence is ambiguous as to clause type and/or speech act, list both types/speech acts and explain. Some of the additional items added to Huddleston and Pullum's exercise represent additional speech acts discussed in class but not described much or at all in the textbook. If you think you can identify still others, do so, choosing descriptive labels for these new types and also briefly describing what they are (i.e. what people do with them pragmatically) as best you can.

1. Please turn the light on.
2. I advise you to accept their offer.
3. I advised her to accept their offer.
4. Can you close that door please.
5. You're leaving already?
6. Where shall I put my coat?
7. What a senseless waste of human life it was.
8. Have a nice day.
9. Aren't we lucky!
10. Allow me to congratulate you.
11. May I have this dance?
12. I promise I'll do it by tomorrow.
13. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.
14. Get out of here.
15. Would you please leave me alone?
16. No way I'm going in there alone.
17. All right, I'll do it.
18. I don't know what you want me to do.
19. I can't possibly tell her that.
20. It might not be a good idea to cross me.
21. What kind of a fool do you take me for?
22. Why don't you give them a chance?
23. We should get together sometime.
24. Help!
25. Don't tell me you're leaving already.

Structure and function in 4 kinds of embedded clause structures

In class we examined the similarities and differences between prepositional phrases containing clauses; "true" subordinate clauses; relative clauses; and comparative clauses. This exercise is designed to show those similarities and differences graphically via syntactic trees and their functional and structural category labels.

Parse the sentences in 1-4 below. In your trees, include not only all the syntactic category labels, but also add to these the syntactic functions of the following constituents:

a) the underlined items in the sentences
b) the constituents in italics (including the subpart in bold italics)
c) the constituents in bold face.

If you use phpSyntaxTree in drawing your trees, you can put in both types of labels, functional and structural, by doing it this way: Just write the function label before the syntactic category label, separating the labels with a colon. The program will not allow you to put a space between the two labels, so just run them together, as in the following examples:

Head:PREP, Det:DET, Complement:CATEGORY, Adjunct:CATEGORY Modifier:CATEGORY (replace CATEGORY with whatever specific syntactic category you are labeling, of course), etc. etc.

1. I left before she could stop me.
2. I do not think that these people like strangers.
3. Those were the people who I had expected.
4. More people came than I had expected.

Use the conventions for parsing that have been emerging from analyses in the book and in class as we have looked more closely at trees, e.g. use the category "Nominal" in your NPs if the nominal includes more than just the noun; use "Clause" instead of "S", etc.

Comparative clauses: parsing

Parse the following two sentences:
1. She stayed in the same hotel as we stayed in.
2. "If everybody minded their own business, the world would go round a deal faster than it does," growled the Duchess.

© 2007 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 25 March 2007