The Science of Language

Study guide for week 4:

The goals for this week are: 1) to examine unbounded syntactic phenomena in English which require a more powerful type of syntactic (transformational) rule in order to adequately describe; 2) to study these transformational rules which derive new sentence forms from those generated by the PS rules; 3) to examine the syntactic differences between languages; 4) to develop a theory of syntax that captures our ability to learn different languages.

Readings:

Language Files: 6.4.2-6.6;
Pinker: chapters 4, 7

Exercises from the text:

Language Files: File 6.4, ex, 2-7; File 6.5, ex 1-4; 6.6, ex. 1-2.

Additional exercises:

1. It is possible to make a passive sentence by combining be with the passive participle. It is also possible to use get (or in the past tense got) instead:

i. This carpet gets cleaned frequently.
ii. The food got eaten by Jake.

What is the word class of get in these cases? Justify your answer.

2. There is a transformational rule that allows the movement of a verb particle to the end of a sentence, as in the following sentence:

i. Jake threw out the trash.
ii. Jake threw the trash out.

Now consider the following sentences:

i. *She stood up them.
ii. She stood them up.

i. *I wrote down it.
ii. I wrote it down.

i. *The bartender kicked out him.
ii. The bartender kicked him out.

Describe the circumstances under which the particle must be separated from its verb.

3. Consider the following pairs of related sentences:

i. The parent gave the money to the child.
ii. The parent gave the child the money.

i. I wrote a letter to the senator.
ii. I wrote the senator a letter.

a. Using a different verb, think up another such pair.
b. State as precisely as possible in terms of constituent structure the rule that relates these pairs of sentences. Formulate a transformational rule which captures this relationship.

4. Consider the following data:

a. Assume that there is a parameter in UG that allows some languages to have no subject in a tensed clause (null subject parameter). The parameter can take either of the following two settings:

i. [- subject]
ii. [+ subject]

b. Further assume that children learning language only have access to positive evidence from which to determine the parameter setting for their language.

c. Which setting will a child will hypothesize first? Explain.

Essential concepts:

a) constituent
b) hierarchical
c) structure structural ambiguity
d) constituent test
e) tree diagram
f) major/minor lexical categories
g) phrasal categories
h) noun phrase (NP)
i) verb phrase (VP)
j) adjective phrase (AdjP)
k) adverbial phrase (AdvP)
l) prepositional phrase (PP)
m) nodes
n) subcategory
o) intransitive verb
p) transitive verb
q) ditransitive verb
r) recursion
s) transformation
t) deep structure
u) surface structure
v) Wh-question
w) passive
x) particle shift
y) syntactic head