Final

Due 3/16, to my box (Padelford A-210), by 5pm.

Please turn in stapled hard copy.

This exam counts for 35% of your course grade.

No late finals will be accepted.

Note: You may not discuss the final with other students (until after everyone has turned it in). Please send any questions about the final directly to me (via email) rather than posting on EPost. I will respond by email and post answers as appropriate on the EPost. Please read EPost.

Problem 1. Chapter 8, Problem 7 (Japanese Causatives; 30pts)

Problem 2. A Tree (40pts)

A. Draw a tree for the following sentence, according to the instructions below. (NB: This problem is not only about long distance dependencies, but also about multiple phenomena involving the SPR feature as well as argument marking prepositions, and the rules and principles of our grammar.)

  1. Crayons I think kids are easy to entertain with.

Instructions

  1. Show the whole tree (i.e., no triangles under nodes).
  2. Label each node with an appropriate abbreviation (e.g., NP).
  3. Show the value of GAP on every node, and the values of SPR and STOP-GAP where they are non-empty.
  4. Use tags and indices to indicate identities involving the features you show and nodes in the tree.
  5. Assume that with is an argument-marking preposition.

B. Describe each step in the cascade of identities that link the INST value of the 'crayon' relation to the INSTRUMENT value of 'entertain' relation. Your answer should take the form of an enumerated list. Each item in the list should describe one step, i.e., state which features are required to have the same value and state which lexical entry, rule or principle of the grammar requires this.

I found 15 steps in this chain. To start you off, here are the first and last:

Problem 3. Some lexical rules (30pts)

A. For each word in the following sentence, list the lexical rules involved in licensing its word structure. (Again, this question is cumulative, and not only about LDDs. Also, while you do not need to provide a tree for your answer, it might help you work through the problem to sketch one out.)

  1. This paint, Kim thought couldn't be expected to be washed off the walls.

B. The word couldn't goes through three lexical rules in this sentence. Show the output value of each, given the lexical entry for could and any previous lexical rules. Your output should show the constraints that are imposed by the lexical rule given its input. Include constraints inherited from types (e.g., those on auxv-lxm and its supertypes, those on word).

C. How does our analysis capture the fact that be is required before expected in this example? That is, why don't the following (with nothing there or the other semantically empty auxiliary) parse?

  1. *This paint, Kim thought couldn't expected to be washed off the walls.
  2. *This paint, Kim thought couldn't do expected to be washed off the walls.

Back to course page