Assignment 1 grading and comments

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Problem 1

25 marks

Most people did pretty well on that. There are no standard answers, so I accepted every possibility provided that it had reasonable explanation behind it.

Problem 2

4 marks, 10 marks per item

This was the most difficult problem in the whole set. There were a few common mistakes that people made. Some forgot to indicate all features required by the assignment, and not everyone recognized the fact that non-finite forms of the verb (base, present and past participle) do not carry number and person features.

One common mistake in determining part of speech was to consider "that" in (b) as a demonstrative pronoun. "That" can be the demonstrative pronoun, too, but only when it either stands for the noun or serves as a determiner with it. When it introduces a subordinate clause, "that" is a complementizer.

The other common problem was determining what are phrases. People marked all kinds of fragments like "gold fish" as NP's. This is not correct. NP is a completed constituent, so unless its head is a plural or mass noun, only the full phrase, including the determiner, can be considered NP. And even if the determiner can be absent, according to X-bar theory phrases are maximal projections, which, roughly speaking, means that within a sentence you can call noun phrases only fully completed constituents, which are not pre-modified by anything else, and pass all the usual constituency tests. One way to see that "many gold fish" is not an NP is to see that it cannot be replaced by another full NP, like "the dogs" - we would have gotten "your the dogs" there, which is not possible. Similar reasoning applies to possible verb phrases.

Problem 3

15 marks, 3 per item

Most people did very well at that. The most common problem was the explanation for "I feel floor". Many people assumed that "feel" can only subcategorize for _AP. But this is not correct, because you can say something like "I cannot feel the floor under me". The more plausible explanation is that "floor" requires a determiner to make a noun phrase.

Problem 4

20 marks, 5 per verb

People did well on that, too. The most common mistake was not drawing the distinction between verb complements and adjuncts. Verbs subcategorization structures show only possible complements. Consider a following sentence "She bought a dress in the store". The word "dress" is very closely connected to the verb in its meaning. We say that it is an argument of the verb, because we can represent buying semantically as BUY(buyer,product,cost). All of these arguments are very specific to the event and differentiate it from other predicates. So the dress is a complement. However, "in the store" is the adverbial that is much more loosely related to the verb. Almost any event can have a location, so it is in no way inherent to that particular verb. Therefore, "in the store" is an adjunct.

It isn't always easy to distinguish the adjuncts, but as a rule adverbials, including prepositional phrases working as adverbials, play that role.

Problem 5

20 marks, what, which, how - 4, the rest 2 marks each

Apparently the question was somewhat ambiguous here. It was asking as what parts of speech the wh-words can server. Some people interpreted it differently, for example, as the part of which phrases the wh-words can serve. Therefore there were many problems with answers, though I didn't take many points off if I believed that the answer was consistent and was getting close to the general idea in the question.

Several people thought that what can be a verb in an example "What are you doing?". But this is not correct. That sentence already has a verb, "do", and what serves as a complement of it. It refers to the event or activity represented by a sentence, and so it is in fact a noun.

Problem 6

30 marks, a,b - 12, c - 6

This was an easy question. The only problem was that some people were confused what was the phrase structure tree, and draw a parse search tree instead.

Statistics

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           94.95
           96.00
          112.50
          129.50
          140.00