Andrew Carnie - The Syntax Workbook

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Thank you for purchasing The Syntax Workbook, 2nd Edition which goes along with the fourth edition of Syntax: A Generative Introduction . This workbook is designed to give you further practice beyond the presentation and exercises in the main text. Syntax often uses big tree diagrams, and the constant cry I’ve heard from students using the first and second editions is that there aren’t enough example diagrams or practice. On the other hand, adding practice exercises with answers would make the main text too big and expensive. So I’ve settled on this optional workbook as an alternative.

You have three different opportunities to practice now:

1 Workbook Exercises (WBE): This workbook contains enrichment and additional practice exercises that go along with each chapter in the book. You can check your own answers against the answer key at the end of each chapter.

2 General Problem Sets (GPS) (in the main textbook): You can do the general problem sets at the end of each chapter in the main textbook. I’m sorry but the answers to these questions are not made available to students. The reason for this is that many instructors use these problem sets as a means for student evaluation. Providing the answers to these would be counterproductive! If you are using the textbook for self-study or your instructor isn’t using the problem sets for evaluation, I encourage you to find a linguistics professor or linguistics (post-)graduate student who can help you with determining if you are on the right track with these.

3 If you are an advanced student or a graduate student, I strongly encourage you to try the Challenge Problem Sets (CPS) at the end of each chapter in the main textbook. These problem sets are designed to make you think critically about the presentation in the text and to think about alternatives and problems that exist for the theory. Again the answers to these cannot be distributed to students.

I hope that you find that the addition of this workbook enriches your syntactic studies and gives you more opportunities to master the material.

This is the second version of this workbook and while we’ve done our best at quality control, it’s possible that some errors have slipped through the student testing, copy- editing, and proofreading processes. I welcome any corrections or suggestions at carnie@arizona.edu. Many people helped produce this book and the textbook, a list of people can be found in the preface to the main textbook. A thank you to them all!

Andrew Carnie

Tucson

[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!

1 What did you put the present in?

2 She’s smarter than him.

3 To boldly go where no one has gone before!

4 He walks too slow.

5 Hopefully, the weather will turn sunny soon.

6 I found out something which will disturb you greatly.

7 Who did you see?

8 I can’t hardly sleep.

9 10 items or less [a sign above a register in the grocery store]

10 My view of grammar is different than yours.

11 I will not enjoy it.

12 If I was a linguist, then I wouldn’t have to study prescriptive rules.

13 The homework wasn’t done completely.

14 All of the linguists at the conference congratulated each other.

15 Me and John are going to the movies later.

16 I want to learn a new language like French.

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”.

[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:

1 Grizelda hasn’t eaten anything. Statement

2 Hasn’t Grizelda eaten anything? Yes/No question

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.)