LING Lesson 2 Essay
________________________________________________________________________
Linguistics 1
Introduction to Study of Language
Professor Russell Schuh
ESSAY QUESTIONS: LESSON 2 – SYNTAX
Your name:
Your section:
________________________________________________________________________
Instructions:
Essay answers should be no more than 150 words.
Please respond to all of the following prompts:
ESSAY QUESTION 1: The joke in the cartoon below uses syntactic ambiguity.
Draw two phrase structure diagrams for the sentence
The collar kills fleas and ticks for six months.
Your diagrams will have to differ both in the branching structures of the trees and in the grammatical categories that label some of the nodes in the trees. For our little grammar on page 19 of the course reader, you will need to add two rules:
NP NP and NP
VP VP and VP
For the word and, just connect it to the node of the two parts of the sentence that it joins. (See an example of how to join and from the lecture.) Call six a “Number” and put in the NP in place of Det.
[There are several options for turning in your trees: (1) use the graphics tools of your word processor to draw the trees; (2) draw the trees by hand, take a picture with your phone, and submit the picture; (3) draw the trees by hand and scan them as a PDF; (4) maybe others that we haven’t thought of.]
ANSWER:
ESSAY QUESTION 2:
In the lecture on word order types, we used Tagalog to illustrate the VSO word order type. In the table below, we see Tagalog sentences compared to sentences in Gude, a VSO language that is spoken in northeastern Nigeria. Both pose the same “problem” for linguists, in that they don’t have a unit VP—the subject NP intervenes between the verb and the object. Putting that problem aside, both languages conform fairly well to the head initial type.
Tagalog Gude
In essay format address the following questions (please use the numbers in your answers to help us in
Linguistics 1
Introduction to Study of Language
Professor Russell Schuh
ESSAY QUESTIONS: LESSON 2 – SYNTAX
Your name:
Your section:
________________________________________________________________________
Instructions:
Essay answers should be no more than 150 words.
Please respond to all of the following prompts:
ESSAY QUESTION 1: The joke in the cartoon below uses syntactic ambiguity.
Draw two phrase structure diagrams for the sentence
The collar kills fleas and ticks for six months.
Your diagrams will have to differ both in the branching structures of the trees and in the grammatical categories that label some of the nodes in the trees. For our little grammar on page 19 of the course reader, you will need to add two rules:
NP NP and NP
VP VP and VP
For the word and, just connect it to the node of the two parts of the sentence that it joins. (See an example of how to join and from the lecture.) Call six a “Number” and put in the NP in place of Det.
[There are several options for turning in your trees: (1) use the graphics tools of your word processor to draw the trees; (2) draw the trees by hand, take a picture with your phone, and submit the picture; (3) draw the trees by hand and scan them as a PDF; (4) maybe others that we haven’t thought of.]
ANSWER:
ESSAY QUESTION 2:
In the lecture on word order types, we used Tagalog to illustrate the VSO word order type. In the table below, we see Tagalog sentences compared to sentences in Gude, a VSO language that is spoken in northeastern Nigeria. Both pose the same “problem” for linguists, in that they don’t have a unit VP—the subject NP intervenes between the verb and the object. Putting that problem aside, both languages conform fairly well to the head initial type.
Tagalog Gude
In essay format address the following questions (please use the numbers in your answers to help us in