Syntax 1 Wiki: Week 2

In Week 1 and the exercises on Parts of Speech and Predicates and their Arguments, we dealt with two concepts: words and phrases belong to different parts of speech and they take semantic and syntactic arguments.

This week, we will deal with both topics in greater detail and will also introduce a format for representing linguistic information.

Parts of Speech again

Our online grammar uses the following 7 parts of speech:

Type	Full name	Tree symbol	Examples
n	noun	N	Lilly, she, her, I, me, him, we, us, it, cat, letter
v	verb	V	visit, like, must, to, see, saw, seen, seeing, seen
a	adjective	A	big, new, red
p	preposition	P	to, of, with
d	determiner	D	the, a, any
adv	adverb	Adv	early, very, not
c	complementizer	C	that, whether, if

Features

The table above lists the following words as nouns: Lilly, she, her, I, me, him, it, cat, letter. Even though these words have much in common which distinguishes them from non-nouns (e.g. they can all refer to things in the world), there are also clearly some differences between them. Let us, for instance, check which of these words can serve as the subject of a main clause:

(1) Lilly appeared.
(2) She appeared.
(3) *Her appeared.
(4) I appeared.
(5) *Me appeared.
(6) *Him appeared.
(7) It appeared.
(8) *Cat appeared.
(9) *Letter appeared.

Homework for Week 3

1. Work through the following sections of the Wiki:

Phrases

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