Linguistics 101 Assignments Fall 1996

Assignment 1

Assignment 1: Grammaticality

1. Prescriptive & Descriptive Grammar

In order to answer this question, you will have to be familiar with some notation used in linguistics. An asterisk (*) is used to mark sentences which are ungrammatical. Grammatical sentences are unmarked. Recall that "ungrammatical" is used in the descriptive sense of interest to linguists, not in the prescriptive sense. Pinker, whose use of the term we will follow, defines "grammatical" as "well formed according to consistent rules in the dialect of [a] speaker..." (p. 31). The dialect we have in mind here is the spoken language of the general college-educated American population.

(A) Look at the sentences in (1a) and (1b). Why is (1b) ungrammatical?

(1)	a.	Two paintings are on the wall.
	b.	*Two paintings is on the wall

(B) Now consider the sentences in (2). Do the grammaticality judgments indicated correspond to your own? Assuming the correctness of these judgments, what rule or rules could a speaker use to generate the grammatical sentences (2a) and (2c) but not generate the ungrammatical sentence in (2b). Keep in mind that your rule(s) should also be able to account for the sentences in (1). How does your description of the sentences in (1) and (2) differ from prescriptions that govern standard usage?

(2)	a.	There are two paintings on the wall.
	b.	*There is two paintings on the wall
	c.	There's two paintings on the wall.

(C) The sentences in (3) show a similar pattern to the pattern seen in (1). However, the pattern in (4) is different from the one in (2). Write a description of the rules needed to generate the grammatical sentences in (3) and (4). Your rules should not generate the ungrammatical sentences.

(3)	a.	A painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee are hanging on the wall.
	b.	*A painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee is hanging on the wall
(4)	a.	*There are a painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee hanging on the wall
	b.	There is a painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee hanging on the wall.
	c.	There's a painting by Picasso and a painting by Klee hanging on the wall.

2. Grammaticality Judgments

(A) Decide whether the phrases in (1) - (15) are grammatical in your spoken dialect. (If you are not a native speaker of English, consult a native speaker for judgments). Mark ungrammatical sentences with an asterisk ( * ) and say briefly what's wrong with them.

(1)	To the bank.
(2)	The rat the cat the dog bit chased ran.
(3)	The cat the dog bit ran.
(4)	Being so flat, the Dutch bicycle everywhere.
(5)	Who do you wonder whether they will come.
(6)	Ivan a tin of caviar ate quickly.
(7)	Its mayor praised her village.
(8)	If you go to school, there's an elephant on the corner.
(9)	Susan told John that washing herself in public is a bad idea.
(10)	The candy ate the boy.
(11)	Immediately he opened the door he saw the murderer standing there.
(12)	The police officer arrested Sam and I.
(13)	Earlobe seven by hexed fruitless.
(14)	Go take dog for a walk!
(15)	Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

(B) Often it is possible to make sense of an ungrammatical sentence. Likewise a grammatical sentence can be incomprehensible. Mark the incomprehensible but grammatical sentences in (A) with a number sign (#).

3. American Sign Language

Read the discussion of deaf sign language in Pinker and the Perlmutter article in the bulk pack before answering this question.

Sign language users all over the world have been struggling for years to eradicate the notion that because they do not use speech, their communications systems are not "real" languages. One characteristic of languages in general is that there is an arbitrary relation between words and what they represent. You can't hear the French word 'chien,' for example, and know by its sound that it refers to what the English word 'dog' refers to. Critics of sign languages have often described them as "iconic," as a series of pictures and gestures for acting out the real world -- and thus dismissed them as nothing more than complex mime. Consider the issue of iconicity in American Sign Language (ASL) in light of the following evidence.

(A) The signs for male and female:

original:
female: running thumb along jaw toward chin, mimicking bonnet strings
male: grasping an invisible cap near the forehead

current:
female: thumb on chin, with a hand shape as if thumbing your nose at someone
male: thumb on forehead, same handshape.

-- How have these signs changed over time? How does this development affect the debate over whether signs are iconic or not?

(B) First person pronouns:

When hearing children are first learning to speak, they often display a charming tendency to confuse the pronouns 'you' and 'me.' When asked, "Do you want milk," they reply, "Yes, you want milk," believing that they are describing themselves. In a curious parallel, deaf children who are learning to sign will display, at the same age, the tendency to confuse the signs for 'you' and 'me.' The adult will point to the child and ask a question, and the child will point at the adult in reply, even though, once again, these children are describing themselves.

-- Why do you think children make these mistakes? Based on the assumption that ASL is a true language, would you expect hearing children (who are not exposed to ASL) to make the same mistake as deaf children when responding to pointing? Why or why not?

(C) Character placing:

When telling a story, an ASL signer is likely to name the characters at the beginning (or whenever they appear) and in doing so, to "place" them at some location in space (one to the left, and one to the right, for example). From that point on, the signer will refer to those locations by pointing instead of repeating the names.

-- Does these rules for pointing remind you of anything in spoken language?

(D) Handshapes:

While fingerspelling is not a grammatical part of ASL, many signs in ASL are signed with the handshape of the first letter in the English word -- 'language' is signed with the "l" shape, 'class' with the "c" shape, and 'water' with a "w". The colors blue, purple, green, orange and yellow are all signed with the same motion, shaking the initial letter (b, p, g, o, or y) back and forth. 'Apple' is an "a" shape rotated at cheek level. At the same time, 'onion' is an "x" shape moved the same way, so this pattern does not always not hold.

-- How do these facts impact upon the iconicity debate?

(E) Iconicity in spoken language:

Assignment 2: Language, Grammar, and Thought

1. Tongan Syntax

The following (simplified) sentences are from Tongan, a Polynesian language spoken on the island of Tonga in the Pacific. Each sentence is glossed (directly translated) and an English translation is also provided. The following abbreviations are used: Pr=present tense, Pst =past tense, Nom=nominative case, Acc=accusative case, 1ps=First person singular, 2ps=Second person singular.

Answer the following questions based on your observations of sentences (1)-(4): (a) what would you say is the main structural difference between Tongan and English? (b) how is tense realized in Tongan? (c) are the nouns marked in any particular way?

(1)	oku	ui	ehe-	tamasi	ae-	tangata
	Pr	call	Nom	child	Acc	man

          'The child calls the man.'

(2)	oku	kai	ehe-	fefine	ae-	ufi
	Pr	eat	Nom-	woman	Acc-	yam

          'The woman eats the yam.'

(3)	nae	ako	ehe-	tamasi	ae-	lesoni
	Pst	study	Nom-	child	Acc-	lesson

          'The child studied the lesson.'

(4)	nae	haka	ehe-	fefine	ae-	ika
	Pst	boil	Nom-	woman	Acc-	fish

          'The woman boiled the fish.'

How are the following sentences structurally different from the ones above? Also, why is the 1ps pronoun in (5) different from the one in (8)? Similarly, why is the 2ps in (6) different from the one in (7)?

(5)	nae	ku	ui	ae-	tangata
	Pst	1ps	call	Acc-	man

          'I called the man.'

(6)	oku	ke	kai	ae-	laise
	Pr	2ps	eat	Acc-	rice

          'You eat rice.'

(7)	oku	manako	koe	ehe-	tangata
	Pr	like	2ps	Nom-	man

          'The man likes you.'

(8)	nae	tokonia	au	ehe-	kakai
	Pst	help	1ps	Nom-	man

          'People helped me.'

If you have adequately analyzed the above sentences, you should now be able to do some simple translations from English into Tongan! Try translating the following:

The man scares the child. ('scare' = 'fakailifiai')

The woman saw me. ('see' = 'vakai')

You ate the fish.

You like me.

2. The Relationship between Language and Thought.

It is by now a well known fact (and those of you who have tried to learn a foreign language will undoubtedly admit this) that certain things can be expressed more conveniently in some languages than in others. While one language may have a special word to refer exclusively to a particular object or notion, in another language this object or notion can be described only by using a whole phrase or sentence. For example, in Tuvaluan, a language spoken by the Polynesian inhabitants of a group of islands in the Central Pacific, there are different words to refer to many different types of coconut, which need to be described at great length in English. Here are a few examples :

pii : drinking coconut, with little flesh and much water, at a stage when the water is maximally sweet

mukomuko : young coconut with some flesh in it, before it has become too solid

uto : coconut at the stage when its husk can be chewed on and its water is still sweet

motomoto : same as mukomuko, but with firmer flesh

niu : coconut ripe enough for its flesh to be grated

uttanu : mature coconut whose sprout has already pierced through the husk and whose water has turned into an edible spongious solid kernel

How much can we conclude from examples like this one about the relationship between the language that people speak and the way that they think? Do examples like this one support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?.

3. Grammar of Non-Standard English

Study the following three groups of sentences of Appalachian English. The sentences of each group share a grammatical feature not found in Standard English. Describe these features.

(1)	Boy, I started to runnin'.
	A vein in his nose bursted and he went to hemorragin'.
	She practically raised 'im 'til he got up to walkin'.
	Just recently, I had an aunt to come from Texas.
	Usually, I hafta have somebody else to do it.
	(note: 'went' and 'got' is roughly the equivalent of Standard English's 'started')

(2)	I'd go out and cut me a limb off a tree, get me a good straight one.
	We had us a cabin, built us a log cabin back over there.
	And then you'd get you a bowl of ice water.
	He wanted some straw to build him a house out of.
	I'm gonna write me a letter to the President.

(3)	I got some kin people lived up there.
	He's the funny lookin' character plays baseball.
	'Cause there was this vampire that killed people come in the house.
	My grandma's got this thing tells me about when to plant.

4. Two puzzles

(a). Included in your bulkpack there is an excerpt from an interview with Miss Manners. What point relevant to a linguistics course does she make in her discussion of ettiquette books?

Assignment 3: Sentences as Structured Objects

1. Expressivity of Language

Consider the following sentences :

a) I hate war.

b) You know that I hate war.

c) He says that you know that I hate war.

Construct a sentence that includes sentence (c) and then construct another sentence that includes your new sentence. Can you repeat the process again to create an even longer sentence? How long do you think you can go on? Why?

2. Structural Ambiguity

Our syntactic knowledge goes beyond our ability to decide which strings are grammatical and which are not. It accounts for the structural ambiguity of expressions like synthetic buffalo hides. The ambiguity results from the fact that synthetic can modify buffalo hides or simply hides to result in two different interpretations. It is therefore due to the syntactic structure that the expression has two meanings and not due to any ambiguous words. Paraphrase each of the following sentences in two different ways to show that you understand the ambiguity involved :

a) Smoking grass can be nauseating.

b) Rob finally decided on the boat.

c) Old men and women are hard to live with.

d) That sheepdog is too hairy to eat.

e) Terry loves his wife and so do I.

f) They said she would go yesterday.

Is the type of ambiguity in the above sentences different from the ambiguity in the following sentences :

g) I walked by the bank yesterday.

h) Thomas Jefferson ate his cottage cheese with relish.

3. Mathematical exercises

Assignment 4: Mathematical preliminaries

A. Alphabets, Strings and Languages

Let be the alphabet containing the symbols a and b. In other words: = {a, b}. A language L contains all strings over which either begin with a and end with b, or begin with b and end with a. State which of the following strings belong to L, and which do not:

i) ab
ii) baa
iii) abba
iv) baba
v) bubba
vi) b

Concatenation is an operation on strings where one string is appended to the end of another string. For example, if we have two strings xy and yx, we can do the operation xy o yx (where 'o' is the symbol denoting concatenation) to yield a new string xyyx. Now, when we concatenate certain strings from the language L, we get a new string which still belongs to L. For example, the strings aab and abb are valid strings in L. The operation aab o abb gives us the new string aababb which still belongs to L (since it starts with an a and ends with ab). However, the concatenation of two valid strings of L does not always yield a new string which also belongs to L. Provide some counterexamples of when the concatenation of two strings of L results in a new string which does NOT belong to L.

B. Relations and Functions

The above diagram shows the maternal family tree of a certain family. F is the set containing all the members of this family. Let M be the set containing all mothers in F. Hence, M = {Eve, Jennifer, Mary, Kate}. Let the relation R = "is the mother of". The statement mRf, where m is an element of set M and f is an element of set F, simply says that m is the mother of f. We can show this relationship diagramatically:

The above diagram shows a normal relation, where an element in the first group can map onto more than one element in the second group.

a) Now, let S be the set containing all sons in F. List the set S.
where R = "is the son of", sS, and fF.

c) Briefly explain why this relation is a function.

d) Let G be the set of siblings in F. List G. Is gRf a function, where R = "is the sibling of",

gG, and fF.

C. Finite State Automata

Assignment 5: Finite State Automata and Regular Grammars

1. Spot the Problem

A language L is described as follows:

L = all strings that begin with a 0, end with a 2, and contain at most three 1s

The alphabet of this language is {0, 1, 2}

a) Give an example of a string in this language which does not contain a 1.

b) Give an example of a string in this language of length 10.

c) Does the following finite state accept the language L? If not, how would you change it so that it does accept exactly the language L? (Hint: You need to add an extra state.)

2. Introduction to the trees program.

Due on Monday, October 21.

Assignment 6: More Machines and Grammars

1. More Finite Automata

Consider a finite automata whose input alphabet is S = {the, old, man, men, is, are, here, and}.

a) Construct a state diagram for an automaton which accepts the following language :
        {the man is here, the men are here}.

b) Do the same for the following language : {the man is here, the men are here, the old man is here, the old men are here, the old old man is here, the old old men are here......}

c) Construct a state diagram for an automaton which accepts all the sentences in (b) plus all those formed by conjoining sentences with and , e.g., the old man is here and the old old men are here and the men are here.

2. Portuguese verb morphology

Download the grammar Port-verb from the assignments page on the web and answer the questions below. The grammar generates the regular forms of the three conjugations of Portuguese verbs for the following tenses: the imperfect, the pluperfect, and the past subjunctive. Here are the meanings of the symbols used in the grammar:

Agr = agreement node (1, 2, 3 = persons; s/p = singular/plural)
Tns = tense node
Imp = imperfect
Plu = pluperfect
Psub = past subjunctive
Theme = thematic vowel node
T1 = first conjugation theme
T2 = second conjugation theme
T3 = third conjugation theme
St1 = first conjugation stem (example in grammar: "fal" - 'speak')
St2 = second conjugation stem (example in grammar: "beb" - 'drink')
St3 = third conjugation stem (example in grammar: "un" - 'unite')

Consider the following paradigm:

	falava	bebia	unia
	---	bebias	unias
Imperfect	falava	---	unia
	falávamos	bebíamos	---
	faláveis	bebíeis	uníeis
	falavam	bebiam	---
	falara	---	unira
	falaras	beberas	---
Pluperfect	falara	bebera	unira
	---	bebéramos	uníramos
	faláreis	bebéreis	uníreis
	falaram	beberam	uniram
	falasse	bebesse	unisse
	falasses	bebesses	unisses
Past	falasse	bebesse	unisse
Subjunctive	falássemos	bebéssemos	uníssemos
	---	---	---
	falassem	bebessem	unissem

Due on Monday, October 28.

Assignment 7: Regular Grammars and Context Free Grammars

1. Regular grammars and regular languages.

Assignment 8

Due on Monday, November 11.

Assignment 8: Context Free Grammars and Constituent Structure

1. Context Free Grammars and Pushdown Automata

For the following language L = {w | w starts and ends with the same symbol}
where S = {0,1} :

a) Give the Context Free Grammar generating L.
b) Construct the State Diagram for the Pushdown Automaton for L.

2. Structural Ambiguity

The following sentences are all structurally ambiguous. Download the grammar tool 8.2 and use it in the Trees program to construct two different structures for each of the sentences. Provide these structures by copying them into your answer or printing them out and attaching them. For each pair of structures describe briefly how the difference between them corresponds to a difference in interpretation.

(1)	John wrote the book on that table.
(2)	Short-haired cats and dogs filled the streets.
(3)	Roman history teachers lectured well.
(4)	The quarterback stared down the defensive line.
(5)	Mary said John sneezed yesterday.

3. Constituency

For each of the following sentences show its constituent structure using unlabeled brackets or trees. For example The sentence "John loves Mary passionately" would be bracketed as follows:

[John [ [loves Mary] passionately] ]

This bracketing corresponds to the following tree:

Justify the bracketing you give with the constituency tests discussed in class. Are the tests always consistent with one another? Concentrate on the way the two sentences in each pair below differ in constituency.

(1)	a.	John ran up a big bill.
	b.	John ran up a big hill.
(2)	a.	I drink my coffee black.
	b.	I know the people present.

Assignment 9

Due Monday November 18.

Assignment 9: X-bar Structure

1. X -Bar Theory

Consider the following X - bar structure and answer the following questions :

a) State (with reasons) whether the following are true or false :

(i) P and N are heads.
(ii) P' and N'' are heads.
(iii) P'' dominates P.
(iv) N dominates "bridge".
(v) DP dominates N'.
(vi) N dominates DP.
(vii) P and N'' are sisters.
(viii) AdvP and DP are sisters.
(ix) P'' is the specifier of AdvP.

b) Using the X' - model as done above for the phrase "right across the bridge", draw a tree diagram for the following phrases :

(i) meet the new governess in the foyer of the opera.
(ii) quite fond of his assistant.
(iii) buy a car immediately after the holidays.

2. Plug and Play

Consider the following sentence in French:

Les étudiants vont à Paris.
The students go to Paris
"The students are going to Paris."

The following are the X-bar projections for the words in the sentence:

And the following is part of the tree diagram for this sentence:

Given the two principles of phrase structure below, complete the above tree structure.

XP projections in French branch to the left.
X' projections branch to the right.

b. Now, consider the following sentence in Japanese ("tm" = topic marker):

sono gakusei-wa Tokyo ni iku
these students-tm Tokyo to go
"These students are going to Tokyo."

Japanese word order is quite different from French word order but it can just as easily be captured by the X-bar schema, following the principles below:

XP projections in Japanese branch to the left.
X' projections branch to the left

Using the tree diagram you have built for the French sentence as your guide, but changing the structure just enough to comply with the two rules for Japanese given above, construct the tree diagram for the Japanese sentence (Consider the topic marker as part of the noun).

3. Structural Ambiguity

Assignment 10

Due Monday November 25.

Assignment 10: Transformational Movement

1. Tree structures

Assignment 11

Due Monday December 1.

Assignment 11: Semantics I

These exercises come from the indicated readings in the bulkpack.

1. [O'Grady and Dobrovolski, p.247, #3] Three semantic relations among sentences were covered in chapter 6: paraphrase, entailment, and contradiction. Which of these relations is exemplified in each of the following pairs of sentences?

a) I saw Terry at the anniversary party.
  It was Terry that I saw at the anniversary party.

b) Jules is Mary's husband.
  Mary is married.

c) My pet cobra likes the taste of chocolate fudge.
  My pet cobra finds chocolate fudge tasty.

d) Vera is an only child.
  Olga is Vera's sister.

e) It is fifty miles to the nearest service station.
  The nearest service station is fifty miles away.

f) My cousin Bryan teaches at the community college for a living.
  My cousin Bryan is a teacher.

2. [O'Grady and Dobrovolski, p.247, #4] In discussing the nature of meaning, we noted that it is necessary to distinguish between intension and extension. Describe the intensions and extensions of each of these phrases:

a) the President of the United States
b) the Queen of England
c) the capital of Canada
d) women who have walked on the moon
e) the Prince of Wales
f) Princess Diana's first husband

3. [O'Grady and Dobrovolski, p.248, #6] Each of the following words is associated with a concept:

i) Determine which of these examples are fuzzy concepts. ii) Choose one of the fuzzy concepts above. Name one prototypical member of that concept and one member that is closer to the concept boundary. iii) Draw a diagram for the concept 'dwelling' similar to that of Figure 6.2 in this chapter. Do the same for the concept 'vehicle'.

4 . [Finegan and Besnier, p. 40-42, #6] As in Russian, word order in Spanish is used to encode information structure. The constituents of a sentence may be ordered in a variety of ways, as shown by the following examples from Castilian Spanish, all of which can describe the same event. (S = subject; V = verb; O = direct object)

Consuelo envió el paquete.
Consuelo sent the package

Envió Consuelo el paquete.
sent Consuelo the package       "CONSUELO SENT THE PACKAGE."

Envió el paquete Consuelo.
sent the package Consuelo

El paquete lo envió Consuelo.
the package it sent Consuelo

Consider the following conversational exchanges, focusing on the order of constituents in the answers.

a. Q:  ¿Qué hizo Consuelo?
      what did Consuelo
     "What did Consuelo do?"

  A:  Consuelo preparó la sangría.
     Consuelo prepared the sangria
     "Consuelo made the sangria."

b. Q:  ¿Quién comió mi bocadillo?
      who ate my sandwich
     "Who ate my sandwich?"

  A:  Tu bocadillo lo comió Consuelo
     your sandwich it ate Consuelo
     "Consuelo ate your sandwich."

c. Q:  ¿A quién dió Consuelo este regalo?
      to whom gave Consuelo this present
     "Who did Consuelo give this present to?"

  A:  Este regalo lo dió Consuelo a su madre.
     this present it gave Consuelo to her mother
     "Consuelo gave this present to her mother."

d. Q:  ¿Qué pasó?
      what occurred
     "What happened?"

  A:  Se murió Consuelo
     died Consuelo
     "Consuelo died."

e. Q:  ¿Recibó Consuelo el premio?
      received Consuelo the prize
     "Did Consuelo get the prize?"

  A:  No, el premio lo recibió Paquita.
     no the prize it received Paquita
     "No, Paquita got the prize."

f. Q:  ¿Recibó Consuelo esta carta?
      received Consuelo this letter
     "Did Consuelo get this letter?"

  A:  No, Consuelo recibió este paquete.
     no Consuelo received this package
     "No, Consuelo got this package."

g. Q:  ¿Recibó Consuelo el premio?
      received Consuelo the prize
     "Did Consuelo get the prize?"

  A:  Si, el premio lo recibió Consuelo.
     yes the prize it received Consuelo
     "Yes, Consuelo got the prize."

(A) On the basis of this data, describe how word order is used to mark information structure in statements (but not in questions). In particular, state which categories of information structure are marked through which word order possibility. Make the statement of your rules as general as possible.

(B) Notice that in certain sentences, the pronoun lo 'it' appears before the verb. What is the syntactic rule that dictates when it should and should not appear? Which rule of English does the presence of the pronoun in these sentences remind you of?

Assignment 12

Due Monday, December 9.

Assignment 12: Semantics II

1. Translate the sentences below into truth-conditional logic. You should first break each sentence down into its various atomic statements (using upper-case letters to represent each statement), and then use connectives to relate the statements. Note that the sentences contain various sorts of deletion, so you need to reformulate them first.

Example: "Jack and Jill went up the hill."

P = Jack went up the hill Q = Jill went up the hill

(a) A bear or a wolf frightened the boys.
(b) Susan doesn't like squash or turnips.
(c) John and Bill are going to the movies, but not Tom.
(d) Either John and Mary are going to the museum, or I am going to bed.
(e) Peter likes the Village People and Mary K.C. and the Sunshine Band.

2. Draw truth tables for the following expressions:

3. Let P, Q and R be true and let S be false. Find the truth values for the following statements:

4. Let's define a new connective in addition to AND ( ), OR (v) and NOT(¬), calling it IF-THEN (->). We need this connective to capture the meaning of conditional sentences like:

a) If it rains, we will stay indoors.

Here are two possible truth tables, defining the meaning of IF-THEN. Which one seems closer to the meaning of conditional sentences in English? Why?

IF-THEN1

IF-THEN2