Assignment 2

Second Homework Assignment: Basics of Grammar

All three parts of this assignment are due Monday morning, February 10

1. Informal English sometimes allows 'contractions':

'want to' contracting into 'wanna', as in the title of the song made famous by Iggy Pop I wanna be your dog.
'is' contracting to 's', as in: he's tired

This is however not always possible, some 'syntactic contexts' block the contraction, as in the following cases:

I don't want to undress oneself in public to become standard practice
* I don't wanna undress oneself in public to become standard practice
(example given by Paul Postal and Geoffrey Pullum in a research paper on the topic)
* he is taller than she's

(The * in front of the sentence indicates that this is not an acceptable sentence.)

Your task is:

first, find as many other contraction phenomena in English as you can
second, try to give two other contexts in which the 'is' -> 's' contraction is not possible. This is because we can hope to understand the phenomenon and formulate the underlying rule only if we find in which cases it works and in which it doesn't work. Doing this exercise is thus the first task of any real researcher confronted to such phenomena

Finding new facts is a difficult enterprise, and accordingly this is not an easy exercise. We give it so that you experience a realistic research situation (or at least the tip of the iceberg!), and grading takes the difficulty into account (ie. you can get full grading even if you don't find blocking contexts, if your answer shows effort and systematicity in your attempts).

(After you found such cases, it is instructive to try to formulate the actual contraction rule. You are welcome to do this in this homework, although it is not part of the homework.)

2. Given the following two abstract sequences:

Name Auxiliary Verb Determiner Noun
*Verb Auxiliary Noun Determiner Name

(i) Construct 3 sentences conforming to the each sequence. For each sentence that you construct, state whether it is grammatical or not. (ii) the two sequences above are 2 out of 120 possible sequences of the five elements 'Name Auxiliary Verb Determiner Noun'. Construct 3 more sequences made out of the same five elements. For each of your new sequences, give 2 sentences instantiating them. Again, report your grammaticality judgments.

The goal of this exercise is to familiarise you with thinking about sentences independently of the words that occur in them, and view them as abstract patterns.

3. Examine the following sentences in Japanese. Many of the words have case suffixes on them, glossed here as CM (for 'Case Marker'). State what role each case marker plays.

gakusei-ga sake-o nonda
student-CM sake-CM drank
"The student drank sake"

Taro-ga sensei-no hon-o suteta
Taro-CM teacher-CM book-CM threw-away
Taro threw away the teacher's book

Sensei-ga Mari-ni gakusei-no hon-o watasita
teacher-CM Mari-CM student-CM book-CM passed
"The teacher passed the student's book to Mari"

gakusei-ga sensei-ni hanasi-ta
student-CM teacher-CM talked
"The student talked to the teacher"