Practical Grammar

Description

In this practical course, you will learn how to teach your laptop the basic grammatical structures of English. For this purpose, we will use software that was developed here at Goethe University. The software is completely free of charge and it runs on all Windows, Mac OS, and Linux computers. (After the course, you may keep the software.)

The program is completely visual. If you can use a text processor or an email program, then you will be able to learn this software easily! No further computer skills are necessary and we will not be doing any kind of programming.

The purpose of the course is for you to learn the basics of English grammar in a fun and interactive way, in an environment that you control and can use any time you want.

Students should bring their laptop to the first class.

Course and Module Requirements

Follow this link

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

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