Practical Grammar

Warm-up Exercise

Sentences

(1) John [disappeared].
(2) The bottle [broke].
(3) Martha [stayed at the hospital].
(4) Fred [resides in Chicago].
(5) Robert [went to the hospital].
(6) Alice [moved into the room].
(7) Joe [saw Fred].
(8) Alice [broke the bottle].
(9) We [moved it into the room].
(10) Fred [took Alice to the hospital].
(11) John [sent Martha a check].
(12) We [gave Fred a wastebasket].

Syntactic Categories

S, NP, N, VP, V, PP, P, AP, A, D

Phrase Structure Rules

A phrase structure rule is well formed, if it is of one of the following forms

C₀ -> C₁
C₀ -> C₁ C₂
C₀ -> C₁ C₂ C₃

and each C is one of the categories listed above.

The S rule

S -> NP VP

Task

Using only the syntactic categories listed above,

a. draw plausible phrase structure trees for the odd-numbered sentences. Assume that the bracketed expressions are VPs.

Draw the trees with the program at the following website:

jsSyntaxTree

Example: to draw a tree for sentence (12) above, paste the following line into the textfield of jsSyntaxTree:

• [S [NP We] [VP [V gave] [NP Fred] [NP [D a] [N wastebasket]]]]

You can download the tree by clicking on it.

b. Write the phrase structure rules needed to license the phrase structure rules that you drew.

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