Assignment:
1. Tree-diagram the following sentence:
A contemporary Hemingway may be waiting in the wings.
2. Point out and comment (briefly!) on the interpretation of the previous sentence, which the Syntax cannot show: specifically, attend to the Semantics and the interpretation of the VP waiting in the wings.
3. Identify all the Noun and Pronoun constituents and any immediately associated apparatus (such as DETs) in the following sentence-2 below and tell what the functions of the Nouns and Pronouns in the sentence are. Follow the example -1
E.g.,1. Helsinki is full of offbeat charm.
The NP offbeat charm is part of a larger (immediately higher) NP that begins with the Pre-Articlefull of and is the Predicate Noun (or Nominative) following the BE verb; charm is a common, abstract, noncountable Noun.
Now you do this one:
2 Dave, quoting himself from his latest article in Esquire, asserted that men's fashions are retuning to a more elegant look.
4. Figure it out! Rule ordering has been (used to be) a real controversy in some Syntax schools of thought. The "problem" or "confusion" that MM refers to (alleges) on pp. 84-85 evokes a commonly used example of how rule ordering might work in producing sentences.Assuming (for the sake of the argument) that English Syntax includes two movement-rearrangement-etc. rules, Passivization and Reflexivization, which order must they be applied in?
Recall that we assume that rules apply to underlying sentences (i.e., sentence representations which contain all the basic category and hierarchy information, but have not yet undergone necessary morphological and other tweaks to make them "good sentences"). Thus, MM's example on p. 84 would appear this way in its "basic" form:
The graduating seniors threw the graduating seniors a party.
The output of the rules that we are looking for, then, is:
The graduating seniors were thrown a party (by themselves).
Show, first, how the wrong order of application (discover it) of Passivization and Reflexivization produces wrong sentences; then show how the right order produces correct sentences. Write a "ta-dah!" sentence that says that this demonstration supports the concept of rule ordering.