Dear Instructors - Blackwell Publishing

Dear Instructors, This document contains editable MS word versions of all the problem sets
for your own use. You are welcome to edit and use these in your own
classes. However, if you do so please indicate that the material you are
using comes from Carnie, Andrew (2006) Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 2nd Edition.
Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Failure to include this citation information is a violation of copyright.
Usage of this material is limited to classes where the textbook has been
assigned as either a required or recommended textbook. You may not post
these on the web, even if you have edited them, unless the website is
password protected and limited in access to your own students. Other than
these restrictions you have my permission to edit these and use them in
your own classes. I'd also request that you not distribute any answer keys to these materials
either on paper or in electronic form. This ensures that the material
continues to be of use for other instructors in future years. Some of the problem sets use the Doulos SIL Unicode font. You can download
this from www.sil.org. Thanks for using the text in your class Andrew Carnie
Chapter 1
General Problem Sets 1. Prescriptive Rules
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Basic] In the text above, we argued that descriptive rules are the primary focus
of syntactic theory. This doesn't mean that prescriptive rules don't have
their uses. What are these uses? Why do we maintain prescriptive rules in
our society? 2. Judgments
[Application of Skills; Intermediate]
All of the following sentences have been claimed to be ungrammatical or
unacceptable by someone at some time. For each sentence, indicate whether
this unacceptability is i) a prescriptive or a descriptive judgment, and
ii) for all descriptive judgments indicate whether the ungrammaticality
has to do with syntax or semantics (or both). One- or two-word answers are appropriate. If you are not a native speaker
of English, enlist the help of someone who is. If you are not familiar with
the prescriptive rules of English grammar, you may want to consult a
writing guide or English grammar or look at Pinker's The Language Instinct.
a) Who did you see in Las Vegas?
b) You are taller than me.
c) My red is refrigerator.
d) Who do you think that saw Bill?
e) Hopefully, we'll make it through the winter without snow.
f) My friends wanted to quickly leave the party.
g) Bunnies carrots eat.
h) John's sister is not his sibling. 3. Learning vs. Acquisition
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Basic]
We have distinguished between learning and acquiring knowledge. Learning is
conscious, acquisition is automatic and subconscious. (Note that acquired
things are not necessarily innate. They are just subconsciously obtained.)
Other than language are there other things we acquire? What other things do
we learn? What about walking? Or reading? Or sexual identity? An important
point in answering this question is to talk about what kind of evidence is
necessary to distinguish between learning and acquisition. 4. Universals
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Intermediate]
Pretend for a moment that you don't believe Chomsky and that you don't
believe in the innateness of syntax (but only pretend!). How might you
account for the existence of universals (see definition above) across
languages? 5. Innateness
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Intermediate]
We argued that some amount of syntax is innate (inborn). Can you think of
an argument that might be raised against innateness? (It doesn't have to be
an argument that works, just a plausible one.) Alternately, could you come
up with a hypothetical experiment that could disprove innateness? What
would such an experiment have to show? Remember that cross-linguistic
variation (differences between languages) is not an argument against
innateness or UG, because UG contains parameters that allow minute
variations. 6. Levels of Adequacy
[Application of Skills; Basic]
Below, you'll find the description of several different linguists' work.
Attribute a level of adequacy to them (state whether the grammars they
developed are observationally adequate, descriptively adequate, or
explanatorily adequate). Explain why you assigned the level of adequacy
that you did. a) Juan Martínez has been working with speakers of Chicano English in
the barrios of Los Angeles. He has been looking both at corpora (rap
music, recorded snatches of speech) and working with adult native
speakers.
b) Fredrike Schwarz has been looking at the structure of sentences in
eleventh-century Welsh poems. She has been working at the national
archives of Wales in Cardiff.
c) Boris Dimitrov has been working with adults and corpora on the
formation of questions in Rhodopian Bulgarian. He is also conducting a
longitudinal study of some two-year-old children learning the language to
test his hypotheses.
Challenge Problem Sets Challenge Problem Sets are special exercises that either challenge the
presentation of the main text or offer significant enrichment. Students are
encouraged to complete the other problem sets before trying the Challenge
Sets. Challenge Sets can vary in level from interesting puzzles to
downright impossible conundrums. Try your best! Challenge Problem Set 1: Anaphora
[Creative and Critical Thinking and Data Analysis; Challenge]
In this chapter, as an example of the scientific method, we looked at the
distribution of anaphora (nouns like himself, herself, etc.). We came to
the following conclusion about their distribution: An anaphor must agree in person, gender, and number with its antecedent. However, there is much more to say about the distribution of these nouns
(in fact, chapter 5 of this book is entirely devoted to the question). Part 1: Consider the data below. Can you make an addition to the above
statement that explains the distribution of anaphors and antecedents in the
very limited data below? a) Geordi sang to himself.
b) *Himself sang to Geordi.
c) Betsy loves herself in blue leather.
d) *Blue leather shows herself that Betsy is pretty. Part 2: Now consider the following sentences:[1] e) Everyone should be able to defend himself/herself/themselves.
f) I hope nobody will hurt themselves/himself/?herself. Do these sentences obey your revised generalization? Why or why not? Is
there something special about the antecedents that forces an exception
here, or can you modify your generalization to fit these cases? Challenge Problem Set 2: Yourself
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Challenge]
In the main body of the text we claimed that all anaphors need an
antecedent. Consider the following acceptable sentence. This kind of
sentence is called an "imperative" and is used to give orders. a) Don't hit yourself! Part 1: Are all anaphors allowed in sentences like (a)? Which ones are
allowed there, and which ones aren't? Part 2: Where is the antecedent for yourself? Is this a counter-example
to our rule? Why is this rule an exception? It is easy to add a stipulation
to our rule; but we'd rather have an explanatory rule. What is special
about the sentence in (a)? Challenge Problem Set 3: Is Language Really Infinite?
[Creative and Critical Thinking; Extra Challenge]
[Note to instructors: this question requires some background either in
formal logic or mathematical proofs.]
In the text, it was claimed that because language is recursive, it follows
that it is infinite. (This was premise (i) of the discussion in section
4.3). The idea is straightforward and at least intuitively correct: if you
have some well-formed sentence, and you have a rule that can embed it
inside another structure; then you can also take this new structure and
embed it inside another and so on and so on. Intuitively this leads to an
infinitely large number of possible sentences. Pullum and Scholz (2005)
have claimed that one formal version of this intuitive idea is either
circular or a contradiction.
Here is the structure of the traditional argument (paraphrased and
simplified from the version in Pullum and Scholz). This proof is cast in
such a way that the way we count the number of sentences is by comparing
the number of words in the sentence. If for any (extremely high) number of
words, we can find a longer sentence, then we know the set is infinite.
First some terminology: > Terminology: call the set of well-formed sentences E. If a sentence x
is an element of this set we write E(x).
> Terminology: let us refer to the length of a sentence by counting the
number of words in it. The number of words in a sentence is expressed
by the variable n. There is a special measurement operation (function)
which counts the number of words, this is called ?. If the sentence
called x has 4 words in it then we say ?(x) = 4. Next the formal argument: Premise 1: There is at least one well-formed sentence that has more than
zero words in it.
(x[E(x) & ?(x) > 0]
Premise 2: There is an operation in the PSRs such that any sentence may be
embedded in another with more words in it. That means for any sentence
in the language, there is another longer sentence. (If some expression
has the length n, then some other well-formed sentence has a size
greater than n).
(n [(x[E(x) & ?(x) = n]] ( [(y[E(y) & ?(y) > n]] Conclusion: Therefore for every positive i