English 227: Elements of Linguistics

Check your e-mail about today's class and the expectations for Thursday!

Class,

I put a few sentences on the calendar that you can practice on for Thursday. 1) Write prose (English) explanations of the meaning(s) of each, and 2) draw syntactic trees of the original sentence, which represents each of the meanings you determined in (1).

Have fun!

Also, I have posted the trees for the "Mary called a few old friends..." sentence. You can use them to help you study, if you want.

In how many ways can the two sentences below be analyzed syntactically; there is syntactic ambiguity in both sentences.*

1. Mark saw the border patrol guard from Mexico with a telescopic rifle.
2. Mary called a few old friends and colleagues from Italy.

*Individually, write a prose explanation of each meaning.
*In groups, draw a separate syntactic tree to represent/illustrate each syntactic analysis.

Phrase Structure Rules:

• S --> NP - VP
• NP --> (Det) - (AP) - N - (PP)
• VP --> V - ({NP, AP}) - (PP)
• AP --> (I) - Adj
• PP --> Prep - NP

1. Do we have grammatical gender in English?
2. What is the infinitive form of a verb?
3. According to Yule, where did the rule "don't split an infinitive" come from? (think language)
4. What is a constituent?
5. Why are technical terms/definitions of parts of speech not reliable?

Attached, you will find the answers to the morphology exercise. They are in bold. Enjoy!

For Thursday, 10/11, read Chapter 6 of Yule. Know it inside out, upside down, all around...

Attached, you will find the answers to exercise G.

In Korean, determine the distribution of the sounds (phones) ‘p’, ‘pH’, ‘t’, ‘tH’, ‘k’, and ‘kH’. Are these sounds in contrastive distribution, complementary distribution, or free variation? How do you know? What are the phonemes (underlying sounds) and allophones for each of the phones from above?

[pHul] “grass”
[pul] “fire”
[tHlda] “shake off”
[tlda] “reduce”
[kHn]“big”
[kn] “a pound”

Data from Sohn, 1999