Marge Made Dinner for Homer

¶ … Marge made dinner for Homer and Bart watched television, "Homer and Bart" forms a constituent.

a) True

b) False (

The works of Ferdinand de Saussure were instrumental in founding Traditional Grammar.

a) True (

b) False

What syntactic function do the words the and never both perform in the following sentence, in terms of the X-bar schema?

"The President never agrees with Congress."

The words the and never are both constituent modifiers.

Draw a tree for the following sentence. Do not use triangles. You will need to create the tree in your word processing program, or with phpSyntaxTree.

"The evil scientist invented a new kind of virus."

NP

VP

The evil scientist

V

NP

Invented

a new kind of virus [Note: You need to draw a line by hand connecting a to NP, S to VP, NP to "evil scientist," VP to V, VP to NP, V to "invented" and NP to "a new kind of virus" then delete this note.]

Infants can discriminate between sounds that are phonemic in other languages as well as those in their native language. For instance, Japanese infants can easily distinguish between [r] and [l] while their parents have difficulty doing so.

a) True (

b) False

6) Research into child language acquisition has established that children primarily acquire language by means of:

a) imitation (

b) analogy

c) motherese

d) reinforcement

e) none of the above

7) A child producing sentences like I no drink milk is at the telegraphic stage of language development.

a) True (

b) False

8) Explain the significance of the critical period to modern theories of language acquisition. Include examples in your answer.

In certain animals (especially birds such as finches), infants must be exposed to adult language (such as birdsongs) in order to be able to produce full songs themselves as adults. In humans, the critical period for language acquisition is thought to be from late infancy to adolescence. After that critical period, it is much more difficult to learn language. Feral children rescued before puberty can generally learn language much better than individuals rescued after puberty for this reason.

9) Metaphor is seldom used outside of poetry and other forms of creative writing.

a) True

b) False (

10) According to the Principle of Compositionality, "The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its component parts and the manner in which they are arranged in syntactic structure."

Consider the following two sentences. Does the Principle apply equally well to both? Or does it apply more effectively to one than to another? If so, which? Justify your answer in either case.

a. Steve gave Mark the cold chicken.

b. Steve gave Mark the cold shoulder.

The Principle of Compositionality applies much better to the first example (a) than to the second example (b). It is impossible to understand the meaning of the second sentence exclusively through compositionality simply because "cold shoulder" is an idiomatic expression that is incapable of any literal interpretation without knowing the meaning of the metaphorical phrase "cold shoulder."