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
Here are the scores so that you can compare your performance to
others.
(max 150)
94.95
96.00
112.50
129.50
140.00