Syntactic structure

1. Structural ambiguity

All but one of the following sentences has a structural ambiguity.

1. Sam likes green eggs and ham.
2. I ate red candies and a cookie.
3. The little girl hit the boy with the ball.
4. We need more intelligent leaders.

Provide complete labeled tree diagrams for both interpretations of each ambiguous sentence (that's six trees total); identify by paraphrasing which interpretation corresponds to which structure. For the sentence that is not ambiguous, explain what rules out interpretation as a different structure, using tree diagrams to illustrate.

2. Constituency tests

In the lecture we discussed a series of tests for constituency. Are the indicated word strings in the following sentences constituents? Which tests are applicable for each?

1. Marge read the old newspaper.
2. Marge read the old newspaper.
3. Three silly sheep dance.
4. Three silly sheep dance.
5. The clouds roll across the sky.
6. The thieves opened the door with a credit card.

3. More structural ambiguity

Explain the structural difference that leads to this joke.

Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a banana.

4. Phrase structure rules

A. Write phrase structure rules to generate the necessary structures for the following sentences:

1. Homer ate the donuts.
2. Lisa played a saxophone.
3. Marge cooked.
4. Bart hid under a table.

B. Give a grammatical English sentence that cannot be generated by the rules you have so far, and then write the necessary rule(s).

Semantics

5. The meaning of words.

Match up each pair of words with the term that best describes the relationship between the two words.

apple ~ fruit banana ~ orange before ~ after cat ~ pet fast ~ slow go ~ went invent ~ invention single ~ married toe ~ tow

a. compatible terms b. incompatible terms c. converse terms d. derivation e. inflection f. gradable opposition g. nongradable opposition h. homophony i. hyponymy j. polysemy

6. The notion of entailment

Look at the following pairs of sentences, and tell whether the A sentence etails the B sentence, whether the etailment holds from the B sentence to the A sentence, or neither, or both.

1. A. Homer ate the donuts.
   B. Homer ate food.
2. A. Someone tried to kill Mr. Burns.
   B. Not everyone tried to kill Mr. Burns.
3. A. Every boy loves Lisa.
   B. Some boy loves Lisa.
4. A. Bart will go to school only if Lisa or Marge will help him with homework; Lisa was feeling kind and actually did help him with homework.
   B. Bart will go to school.

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schedule

lecture 4
lecture 5