Linguistics 471: Grammar Engineering

Preparation for Lab 2

• Preferably using the vocabularly below, try to find cases of NPs consisting of just a noun (no determiner) and NPs consisting of determiner + noun in your language. For example, in English we see the following paradigm:
  • *cat
  • a cat
  • the cats
  • cats
  Good things to try for overt determiners are demonstratives. In a language that generally requires determiners, if you can't find any nouns which can appear without determiners, try pronouns and proper names.
• Vocabulary. Find translations for the following words, or send me email if any of them are problematic.
  • Nouns:

    boy	cat	apple	book	glass
    child	cow	bread	car	spoon
    girl	dog	coffee	money
    man	frog	food	pencil
    person	horse	milk	television
    woman	sheep	tea	tree

  • Verbs: (Please make a note if the translation of any of these verbs does not fall into the class it's given in, e.g., if a preposition is required for marking the object, if the verb is reflexive, etc.)

    Intransitive	Transitive
    come	buy
    die	drink
    fall	eat
    go	hurt (sense of "cause harm to")
    live	love
    play	make
    sleep	paint
    sneeze	read
    wait	see
    wake_up	want
    walk	wash
    	watch

  • Determiners: Discover whether you language has overt determiners in the following categories:
    • demonstrative (English this, that)
    • definite (English the)
    • indefinite (English a)

    If your language lacks overt determiners for one or more of the categories, are those categories expressed at all? (Many languages lack definite/indefinite determiners, but can optionally express indefiniteness with numeral phrases. Other languages might have an overt definite determiner, but no over indefinite determiner.)

    We're still not dealing with agreement, so our grammars will overgenerate (i.e., license sentences with agreement mismatches between determiners). Nonetheless, go ahead and collect the full paradigm for each determiner (e.g., French le, la, les) if your language marks gender or case or anything else on determiners. That way, you can at least parse good sentences.