Instructions

Due date/time: Official due date and time is the end of the week before Midterm Recess, that is, Friday March 2, 2007 (11:00 p.m.). It is recommended that you make at least some progress on the midterm before this time. If you want or need more flexibility, there is a grace period that extends to Sunday March 4, also 11:00 p.m. The exam will no longer be available for submission after that time. In case of illness contact me before the midterm is due.

Honor Code guidelines for this exam: The exam is open textbook, open notes, and open with respect to all of the materials on the WebCT site for our class at the time the exam is posted. You can also use your own prior marked homeworks, but not those of others. The exam is not open for discussion with others, inside or outside the class. Do not use other books besides our textbook, and do not search the internet for information relating to grammatical analysis or other course content. (Using only the specific course materials for Ling/Engl 394 is probably going to make it easier for you anyway.) You can use examples you see online, however, if you find it useful. You can also use the program phpSyntaxTree for drawing trees if you wish (the link is posted on WebCT under the tree icon).

Time: The exam is not timed. The amount of time it takes you will depend on how much you have learned from the class, book, and web materials up to this point. Hopefully it will be possible to do it in a couple of hours. It does not have to be done in one sitting, but can be if you wish.

Answer all questions. Total points 90, plus 5 possible extra credit.

I. Parsing. (38)

Draw a tree for each of the following sentences, with all constituents labeled with grammatical categories. If we have talked about different possible analyses in class which the textbook takes a position on, use the textbook’s choice of analysis. (Don’t parse the material in parentheses that is labeled “Source”). If there are aspects of the parsing that have not been covered in book or class yet, we will allow more potential analyses in grading than for those aspects we have covered already, so you need not spend time looking ahead in upcoming chapters.

1. The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.

(Source: W. Somerset Maugham, Writer’s Notebook, 1941. Quoted in Safire article cited below.)

2. It is not this column’s policy to hurry along any great shifting sands; on the contrary, I take my stand on grammar’s burning deck until all the rest have fled.

(Source: William Safire, On Language column, “The Gotcha! Gang strikes again”, New York Times 2/11/2007).

II. Functions of constituents (10)

In modern grammatical analysis, each syntactic constituent has both a syntactic category and a syntactic function. Give the specific function(s) for each of the following constituents. (Specific functions would not include “dependent”, since dependents always have a more specific function.)

1. the best thing to do in I.1 above

2. its in I.1 above

3. to hurry along any great shifting sands in I.2 above

4. many in III.3 below

5. Having caught so many in outright lies and narrowly escaping bad situations a few times

in III.3 below.

III. What has gone wrong? (27)

Determine what grammatical errors there are in the following sentences, explain what each error is using the appropriate grammatical terminology. Describe how to fix each error to get the sentences to mean what you think the writers most likely meant to say. You can use trees for clarity if you wish, but be sure to explain your analysis of the problems and solutions in words.

1. I’m very glad contact to you.

2. Let me know that is true or not?

(Source of 1-2: Internet. Actual sentences written by non-native speakers of English.)

3. Having caught so many in outright lies and narrowly escaping bad situations a few times, they all get scrutinized to the max.

(Source of 3: Internet. Actual sentence written by apparent native speaker of English, a grumpy landlord from Florida, talking about his tenant screening policies. Many refers to tenants.)

IV. Short answer and examples. (10)

1. What is a stranded preposition? Give an example.

2. Give an example of a relative clause with a relativized subject. Underline the relativized subject in your example. Briefly explain why it is a relativized subject.

3. What is the category and function of any in I.2 above? How does the example sentence help show the polarity-sensitive nature of any?

4. Give an example of a sentence with a sentence adverb in it (underlining the sentence adverb). Why is it a sentence adverb, as opposed to some other kind of adverb?

5. What does it mean for an expression to be fossilized in its syntax? Give an example of a partially fossilized expression and explain why it is considered partially fossilized.

V. Competing analyses for an “in-between” expression (5)

In Chapter 7 in our textbook, Huddleston and Pullum argue against an analysis in which in front of is considered a complex preposition. Ultimately, they only give one POSITIVE argument for rejecting a complex preposition analysis. Can you think of any potential positive syntactic argument(s) at all FOR treating in front of as a complex preposition?

VI. Extra credit (5)

English has a number of modal auxiliaries, or modals, which not only have syntactic properties shared by the other auxiliaries, but have additional properties specific to modals.

There are a few verbs which can be called “quasi-modals” because they resemble the modals syntactically and/or morphologically in some respects, but they have some properties that make them different from prototypical modals.

Show that the English verb need is a quasi-modal. Use examples to illustrate your arguments.