Problem 1

Background

As discussed in the lecture notes, individual human languages often have quite regular patterns of word order, even though the particular patterns may vary from language to language. Here are two examples of generalizations we can make about English word order:

i) In English, the verb generally precedes the object, so that we say:

John ate the pizza

     instead of

*John the pizza ate

     Note: (*) means that the sentence is ill-formed or ungrammatical (in the descriptive sense!) in the language in question.

ii) Furthermore, English has prepositions – that is, words like for, of and with precede the nouns they are associated with. This means that we say:

with sauce

     instead of

*sauce with

Look at the following sentences from Hindi. In line 2 of each example, there is a word-for-word translation (or gloss). In line 3, the sentence is translated into its English equivalent. Compare the first and third lines of each example.

1		phala
2	Rama	fruit	ate
3	‘Rama ate fruit’

1	Mary-ne		se
2	Mary	book	with	the boy	hit
3	'Mary hit the boy with the book.'

Question:

How is Hindi word order different from English word order? Talk specifically about the placement of verbs and words like with.

Problem 2

Background

Beyond the basic word order differences among languages, syntax is concerned with the fundamental idea that human language is hierarchically structured. In any given sentence, certain groups of words seem to be more closely related than others, and we can keep breaking down these groups of words into smaller and smaller units. The basic idea is that sentences are interpreted, layer by layer, in a way that depends on their structure.

One way to illustrate this point is by observing cases of structural ambiguity. Look at the following newspaper headline:

Enraged cow injures farmer with ax

Why is this funny? Because in addition to the intended interpretation ('the farmer had an ax and the cow injured the farmer'), there is another possible interpretation that is highly unlikely to correspond to any real-world situation ('the cow used an ax somehow to injure the farmer').

The ambiguity here has to do with the prepositional phrase with ax. In the intended interpretation, with ax modifies the noun farmer. In the alternative interpretation, with ax modifies the larger phrase injures farmer.

One way to represent this structural difference is with syntactic trees. Look closely at the following representations of the sentence The cow will injure the farmer with an ax:

For now, you don’t need to understand why the nodes of the tree are labeled as they are (although you may have guessed that PP stands for prepositional phrase and VP stands for verb phrase). The important thing to understand is that each XP label corresponds to a constituent – that is, all the words underneath it are ‘grouped together’ so that they behave as a syntactic unit. Notice that each constituent can potentially contain another constituent. This reflects the fact that human language is recursive.

Some of the constituents of tree (a) include:

DP: an ax
PP: with an ax
DP: the farmer with an ax
VP: injure the farmer with an ax

In English, any DP constituent (no matter how many words it contains) can be replaced with a pronoun. For example, we can replace the DP the farmer with an ax with the pronoun him, and the sentence will still be grammatical:

a') The cow will injure him.

This is an example of a constituency test - a way to check whether we have correctly analyzed the constituents of a sentence.

Now look at tree (b). Notice that the PP with an ax is located in a different place – it is no longer grouped together with the farmer under a single DP node. In other words, the farmer with an ax is no longer a constituent, since it does not exhaust the contents of any single node in the tree.

We can still substitute the object DP with a pronoun, but the resulting sentence will be different from the sentence in (a'):

b') The cow will injure him with an ax.

Questions

The following two sentences are structurally ambiguous. Write a paraphrase of each interpretation for each sentence. Make sure your paraphrases are clearly unambiguous - if you want, you can draw pictures to help disambiguate the sentences.

• Samantha hit the guy with the cell phone.
  Interpretation 1:
  Interpretation 2:

• The students will discuss some problems with the teachers.
  Interpretation 1:
  Interpretation 2:

Now draw two trees (similar to those shown in (a) and (b)) that correspond to the ambiguous sentence The students will discuss some problems with the teachers. Label your trees 'Interpretation 1' and 'Interpretation 2' depending on what you wrote in the blanks above.

We recommend that you use a program called Trees Player to draw your trees. Here's how:

• Download Trees Player (you'll need to use your PennKey) and the Ling-001 grammar tool. The program is only available for Windows - if you own a Mac, you'll need to find a way to get access to a PC in order to use the Trees Player for this part of the assignment.

• Open Trees Player. Go to File > Choose Grammar and select the Ling-001 grammar tool.

• Go to File > New.

• At the left side of the window, you will see a list of words. Click on the first word, will. A small tree will appear below the list of words. Click on the tree and drag it into the blank area to the right.

• To the left of the word will on the tree, there is a DP node with nothing under it. This location in the IP tree is typically occupied by the subject of the sentence. (DP stands for determiner phrase; examples of determiners include the and a.)

• Scroll through your list of words and click on the. Drag the tree onto your workspace. Notice that the highest node in this tree is labeled DP.

• Now, click on the DP node at the top of your the tree and drag it on top of the DP node at the left side of your will tree. When you let go, the trees will be joined at that node.

• Continue putting together the pieces of the tree in this manner. If you make a mistake, you can use Edit > Undo, but note that only one Undo is allowed. Save frequently!

• To attach the prepositional phrase, drag the PP node on top of either the NP node or the VP node, depending on which interpretation you want.

• When you're done, print out the trees directly from Trees Player by going to File > Print.

If you are unable to use the Trees program for whatever reason, you can draw your trees by hand. Use the trees in (a) and (b) as a guide.

Problem 3

Answer one of the following questions.

• Can you think of any exceptions to the two general principles of English word order listed in Problem 1 under (i) and (ii)? Give specific examples and briefly explain why they count as exceptions.

• Can you think of any other examples of constituency tests, besides the pronoun substitution test discussed in Problem 2? For example, how could you test for a VP or PP constituent? Include specific examples in your discussion.

• Draw a tree for the second Hindi sentence in Problem 1. Note that this sentence is not ambiguous - it can only mean that Mary used a book to hit the boy. For our purposes here, you can assume that the I node (where will is located in the English trees above) is empty in this Hindi sentence. In drawing your Hindi tree, think about how you answered problem 1. What is the simplest way to capture these word-order differences between English and Hindi? Hint: Your Hindi tree should be structurally quite similar to the English trees above, but with one or two minor differences. Briefly explain what these differences are.

  You can draw the tree by hand or, if you're feeling adventurous, use the draw-tree1.1 grammar tool that comes with Trees Player. You'll need to play around with the grammar tool to get the hang of how it works; to enter the Hindi words, just use the magnifying glass and click on the ###.