The Syntax Workbook. Andrew Carnie

Chapter 1 Generative Grammar

      WORKBOOK EXERCISES

      WBE1. PRESCRIPTIVE RULES

       [Critical Thinking; Basic]

      Part 1: All of the sentences below are prescriptively “wrong” according to many so-called language experts. Can you identify what’s supposed to be wrong with them (i.e., what prescriptive rule do they violate?). If you’re not familiar with prescriptive rules you may have to search around on the Web a bit to figure this out, but if you’ve been trained to write in the American or British University tradition, most (or many) of these should stand out as “poor grammar” or “poor style”. Certainly, Microsoft Word’s grammar- checking program is flagging many of these sentences as I write them!

Part 2: Consider each of the sentences above and evaluate whether or not they are really unacceptable for you. Try to ignore what you were taught in school was right and focus instead on whether you might actually utter one of these sentences, or if you’d actually blink if you heard one of them produced by someone else. Listen to your inner voice rather than relying on what you have learned is “correct”.

      WBE2. SCIENTIFIC METHOD PRACTICE¹

       [Critical Thinking Practice; Basic]

      Background: One particular kind of question in English is called a “Yes/No question”. These questions can typically be answered with either Yes, No, or Maybe. The standard strategy for forming Yes/No questions is to change the order of the words at the beginning of the sentence from the equivalent statement:

      With this background about Yes/No and declarative sentences in mind, consider the fol- lowing hypothesis:

      Hypothesis 1: Yes/No questions are formed by moving the second word in the equivalent statement to the front.

      Now look at the following sentences:

      c) Bilbo will eat chocolate-covered sausage. Statement

      d) Will Bilbo eat chocolate-covered sausage? Yes/No question

      Question 1: Are sentences (c) and (d) consistent with hypothesis 1? (Pay careful attention to the wording of the hypothesis!)

      Now consider the next two sentences

      e) The old hobbit will eat the chocolate-covered sausage. Statement

      f) Will the old hobbit eat the chocolate-covered sausage? Yes/No question

      Question 2: Are sentences (e) and (f) consistent with hypothesis 1?

      Question 3: Instead of (f), what sentence does hypothesis 1 actually predict to be the grammatical Yes/No question equivalent to (e)?

Question 4: Try to come up with a hypothesis that accounts for the grammaticality of (e). (Hint #1: words such as will are called auxiliaries. Hint #2: use as much of the language in hypothesis 1 as you can, making only minimal changes.)

      WBE3. USING CORPORA FOR DOING SYNTACTIC RESEARCH

       [Critical Thinking Practice; Basic]

      Make sure you read the discussion of blow up in section 3.2 of chapter 1 before attempting this question. Consider the phrase blow off. In colloquial American English, this sequence has two² usages with quite different meanings.

      In (a) blow means “(to move) in a burst of air”. The off is actually a preposition that is tied to the noun phrase the sidewalk. The other meaning, in (b), is the colloquial expression blow off meaning “didn’t do”, “ignored responsibilities”, or “didn’t show up” in some circumstances. Phrases like blow off or blow up often allow two orders of the object and the particle (off or up): I blew up the building and I blew the building up.

      Now consider the following sentences:

      c) Sean blew me off.

      d) Sean blew off me.

      Question 1: What meaning(s) does sentence (c) have? Are they different from sentence (d)? Is sentence (d) even grammatical in your dialect?

      Question 2: Now you get to use Google to investigate the frequency of phrases like (c–d) to see if their relative frequencies correspond to the availability of meanings. We’re going to use a tool called ngrams produced by Google. Ngrams represent the frequency of strings in Google’s collection of published books. The numbers are going to be very small, but we can get a picture of the distribution of these constructions.

      Question 3: