Task One: Apply the indicated constituency test to the bracketed string in each of the following sentences. Rewrite the sentence after you apply the test. Then indicate if the string is a constituent.
1. [An explosive] broke three windows of a new Starbucks store last night. (Substitution test)
2. An explosive broke three windows of a new Starbucks store [last night]. (Stand-alone test)
3. This type of incident is extremely rare in [this socially active neighborhood]. (Movement test)
4. The owner of a gift shop across the street was [unhappy]. (Stand-alone test)
5. Fire [crews] arrived within three minutes. (Substitution test)
6. These fire crews [contained the fire quickly]. (Substitution test)
Task Two: The constituents are underlined in the following sentences. Circle the head of each constituent and name it (your choices are noun phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases, verb phrases or prepositional phrases)
1) The girls in beautiful blue dresses walked into the studio gracefully.______________
2) Those beautiful dresses were made in a small French factory. ________
3) The studio offered lessons on folk dances every Sunday. __________
4) These beautiful girls were really afraid of strangers. ______________
5) The girls ate at a fancy restaurant after their dance practice. _________________
Task Three: Identify the part of speech of each underlined word; justify your answer based on linguistic criteria (syntactic and morphological).
At last, we had begun filming. Should I say `we'? I was living in the house and extremely curious about everything connected with the film. Fortunately, they let me hang around and even gave me a job. As an historian, I kept an eye on detail and did not allow the filmmakers to stray too far from the period of Louis Philippe. The project was to make an hour-long film about Houdin and it was decided to shoot the picture in Switzerland. This may have been a bad idea. It certainly mixed professional and domestic affairs. (adapted from World of Wonders, R. Davies, I, 2)
begun _________________________________________________
extremely ________________________________________________
detail ______________________________________________________
about ______________________________________________________
filmmakers________________________________________________
professional __________________________________________________
Task Four: Draw tree diagrams for each of the following phrase. Label them carefully and properly . Draw your trees right-side up; the words should be at the bottom.:
1. the house 2. eat a hamburger
3. with a friend 4. afraid of spiders 5. the house on a hill
Task Five: Underline the subjects in the following sentences.
a) These days, the smartphone in your pocket gives you easy access to information held in all the libraries on earth.
b) In this issue the new tools and data sets at our disposal are carefully examined.
c) Online sharing services like Uber make underutilized vehicles and apartments more productive.
Task Six: Identify if the underlined expressions are complements or modifiers. Write ‘comp' for complements and ‘mod' for modifiers in the spaces given after each sentence.
1) May is Jamestown's 400th birthday. ______________.
2) For many years, the trials and mistakes were severe. __________
3) Its quest for democracy gave Indians and slaves a lot of pain. ______
4) The Portuguese were harvesting dyewood in Brazil. ________
5) Queen Elizabeth II will be very pleased to celebrate the occasion. ___________
Task Seven: Consider this structurally ambiguous sentence. You should have no trouble finding two different interpretations. For each interpretation, draw a tree diagram and give an unambiguous paraphrase. Draw two complete trees - one for each of the structures. Make sure
you draw two trees for the original sentence and not for your paraphrase. Draw your trees rightside up; the words should be at the bottom.
The magician touched the baby with a wand.
Interpretation 1: Tree diagram
Paraphrase:
Interpretation 2: Tree diagram
Paraphrase:
Task Eight: Consider the following sentences and answer the questions that follow:
a. Barry loves video games.
b. Sam knows that Barry loves video games.
c. He knows that Sam knows that Barry loves video games.
1) Write another sentence that includes sentence (c)
2) What does this set of sentences reveal about the nature of sentence structure?
Task Nine: The following data are from Igbo, a tone language spoken in Nigeria.
a) Nwáanyi áhu b) ulu a Woman that house this ‘that woman' ‘this house'
i) What is the order of determiner and noun in Igbo?
ii) Draw the phrase structure trees for the two Igbo phrases.