Name:________________________________ Linguistics for Teacher and Writers TESC E&W Studies Study guide for week 5: The goals

s for this week are to: 1) learn how productivity in language is related to the hierarchical structure that characterizes all sentences; 2) review parts of speech; and practice analyzing sentences in to their constituent phrases and categories. Readings: Language Files: Chapter 5 Pinker: Chapter 4 Exercises from the text: Language Files: Chapter 5 Exercises (not discussion questions or activities). Additional exercises: 1. Each word can be assigned to a lexical category. Examine the following sentences and indicate the lexical category of each word. a. b. c. d. e. The glass broke. He ran toward the red post. This tall tree gives good shade. He took out the garbage. She looked up the citation in the references.

2. Generate a list of words of each category. a. Nouns: __________________________________________ b. Verbs: __________________________________________ c. Adjectives: ________________________________________ d. Adverbs: __________________________________________ e. Prepositions: _______________________________________ f. Conjunctions: _______________________________________ g. Articles: ___________________________________________

Name:________________________________

3. The following sentences are ambiguous. Please indicate, in whatever fashion you choose, what the two meaning are: a. There were old men and women b. They danced and sang the first number c. Sue saw the man with the telescope d. Bill gave the Chinese vases 4. Verbs are divided into subcategories on the basis of the elements that they can or must take as neighbors in a sentence. A transitive verb such as invite must take a NP after it, represented as: +[ __ NP]. An intransitive verb such as laugh cannot take an NP after it, represented as: -[ __ NP]. Some verbs such as eat take an optional NP, represented as: +[ __ (NP)]. Determine whether each of the following verbs has the frame +[ __ NP], -[ __ NP], or +[ __ (NP)]. a. b. c. d. e. faint destroy retract speak clean

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) subcategory o) intransitive verb p) transitive verb q) ditransitive verb r) recursion