Prep 2

A very small vocabulary of content words

Bring:

• One transitive verb
• One intransitive verb
• Two common nouns

Some grammatical information

• What word orders are permissible in transitive and intransitive sentences?
• Try to understand the basics of case and agreement in your language. We're not going to be working on that this week, but it will help you in creating grammatical sentences for your testsuites.
• What particles or determiners or other elements are necessary to complete a noun phrase?
• Try to find cases of NPs consisting of just a noun (no determiner or other element) and determiner + noun in your langauge. 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.
• Determiners: Discover whether your 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.