Practical Grammar
Textbook
Throughout the course, we will use the following textbook:
Please buy a copy of the book as quickly as possible!
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:
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]]]]
Download each tree by clicking on it.
b. Write the phrase structure rules needed to license the trees you drew.
Main page Week 2