1: For each adverb determine:
1 Can it appear before the subject? (e.g., Unbelievably, I don’t know any pixies.)
2 Can it appear between the T (e.g., will, have, is, can) and the verb? (e.g., I have often wondered about the existence of pixies.)
3 Can it appear after the object? Or at the end of the sentence? (e.g., Pixies eat mushrooms vigorously.)
4 Can it appear between an object and a PP in a ditransitive (e.g., I put the book carefully
on the table.)
(Note: these adverbs may appear in several of these positions.)
Part 2: Group the adverbs together into subcategories based on your answers to part 1.
Part 3: Within each group you may find more subtle orderings. For example, within the subcategory of adverbs that can appear between auxiliaries and verbs there may be an ordering of adverbs. Try putting multiple adverbs in each position. What are the orderings you find?
CPS7. SUBCATEGORIES OF ADJECTIVES
[Application of Knowledge; Challenge]
Just as there are positional differences among adverbs (see Challenge Problem Set 6), we find an ordering of adjectives with respect to each other. Below is a list of adjectives. Pair each adjective with every other adjective and see which must come first in a noun phrase. Try to come up with a general ordering among these adjectives. (Although in the text I’ve told you to include numerals with the class of determiners, I’ve listed them here as adjectives. For the rest of the book treat them as determiners.)
big, young, blue, desperate, two, scaly, thick
One word of caution: it is sometimes possible to put some adjectives in any order. However, many of these orders are only possible if you are using the adjective contrastively or emphatically. For example, you can say the old rubber sneaker with a normal non-contrastive meaning, but the rubber old sneaker is only possible when it has a contrastive emphatic meaning (the RUBBER old sneaker as opposed to the leather one). Don’t let these contrastive readings interfere with your subcategorization.
CPS8. ANIMACY
[Application of Knowledge; Challenge]
Part 1: The term animacy refers to whether something is alive or not. We haven’t included any animacy restrictions in our subcategorization of verbs or nouns in the main body of the text. Consider the following data:
1 Susan bought some flowers for her mother.
2 Susan bought her mother some flowers.
3 Susan bought some flowers for her birthday.
4 *Susan bought her birthday some flowers.
Construct feature structures to explain the acceptability of (d). Hint: you’ll need to use choice brackets {} to do this.
Part 2: Observe the following limited data from Spanish (taken from Legate 2005). When do you use the dative marker a in Spanish? How would you encode this with a feature structure for the verb vimos?
| e) | Vimos saw.1pl “We saw Juan.” | a Juan. DAT Juan | |
| f) | Vimos saw.1pl | la casa the house | de Juan. of Juan |
“We saw Juan’s house.”
CPS9. IMPLICIT ARGUMENTS 17
[Creative Thinking; Challenge]
Above we claimed that the verb give requires either an NP and a PP or two NPs (i.e. Heidi gave a punchbowl to Andrew and Heidi gave Andrew a headache). But consider sentences like the following:
1 I gave blood.
2 I don’t give a darn.
3 Andy gives freely of her time.
4 Dan gave his life.
Each of these might lead us to conclude that give requires fewer arguments than we have claimed. Are these simply counterexamples to the claim thatgiveis of subcategory V[NP
___ NP {NP/PP}] or is something more complicated going on here?
A related but slightly different issue arises with sentences like those in (5) and (6).
1 5) Dan gives to charity.
2 6) Sorry, I gave last week.
Will your solution for 1–4 work for these examples too?
Notes
1 1. Remember, the * symbol means that a sentence is syntactically ill-formed.
2 2. Be careful here: the function of the word is clear (it is used to subordinate clauses inside of sentences) but it doesn’t have an obvious meaning with respect to the real world.
3 3. The lists in this section are based on the discussions of English morphology found in Katamba (2004) and Harley (2006).
4 4. There are verbs that begin with un-, but in these circumstances un- usually means “reverse”, not negation.
5 5. In some prescriptive variants of English, there is a limited set of adverbs that can appear after is. For example, well is prescriptively preferred over good, in such constructions as I am well vs. I am good (referring to your state of being rather than the acceptability of your behavior). Most speakers of American English don’t allow any adverbs after is.
6 6. Not all quantifiers can be determiners. For example, the quantifiers lot and least cannot function in this capacity (and are a noun and an adjective, respectively).
7 7. The possessive forms mine, yours, hers, theirs, and ours are nouns, as are some uses of his and its(when there is no other noun in the NP).
8 8. Auxiliaries are marked here as [+FINITE], but they can of course appear in non-finite clauses like I want to be dancing. When they do so, however, they aren’t marking the non-finite nature of the clause – the particle to is. The feature [±FINITE] is meant to indicate what function the word has, not where the word can appear.
9 9. If you are interested in the details of what a system with a fully specified feature structure system might look like,
