Practical Grammar

Textbook

Throughout the course, we will use the following textbook:

Börjars et al. (2019)

Please buy a copy of the book as quickly as possible!

Review

If you need a review on parts of speech and phrases, then follow these links:

• [Words]
• [Phrases]

Exercise 1.1

Sentences

(1) John [disappeared].
(2) The bottle [broke].
(3) Martha [stayed at the hospital].
(4) Fred [talks about 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 [N We]] [VP [V gave] [NP [N Fred]] [NP [D a] [N wastebasket]]]]

Download each tree by clicking on it.

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

  Main page  Week 2 Week 3