Linguistics 322
Weekly Exercise No. 11
The Last one!
Draw a partial tree structure for the following sentences. NPs may
be abbreviated and PPs may be abbreviated if NP is not extracted out. Do
not abbreviate NP if it contains a relative clause.
- John found them very lazy.
- Did Mabel hear him play the harpsichord rather slowly?
- Didn't he say what Jane often puts on the table?
- Who likes the girl who lives over there?
- Who is apt to give up his struggle?
- Who are Mary and Frank likely to think that Bill threw the ball at
in the yard?
Some of these sentences are designed to test your knowledge of L222 syntax.
Brush up!
What is wrong with the following sentences? Don't give simple answers
such as wrong word order. What principle(s) is (are) being violated. There
may be more than one principle violated in each sentence:
- *It is certain Bob to write his exam today.
- Bob lacks Case, since certain is an adjective which cannot
assign Case, and to, [-Tense], does not assign Case.
- *I know that saw Bill Kate.
- Either Bill fails to be marked for Case, or Kate fails
to be marked for Case.
- *She wonders played who the piano.
- Who fails to move to CP satisfying the condition on WH-operators.
Furthermore, it is in the wrong the position to receive the nominative
Case.
- *Sally thinksn't whether him saw she.
- [-Past]+Neg cannot be lowered and adjoined to think, because
the operator Neg blocks lowering. The wrong Case is assigned to the masculine
third person subject pronominal and the feminine third person object pronominal
of the embedded clause.
Do all of these in the two-level theory.
Be as minimalist as possible. Do not create an unnecessary nodes. Be
prepared to explain how node X moves to position Y.
Go back to
List of Exercises
322 Course Outline
