exam of Linguistic, include Transcription, Rhotic allophony, Verbal Morphology, Syntactic phrase structure

Humanities

There are 6 questions, I will upload some materials documents as examples~ The following is one of the questions:

The following is a sentence of English:

[ɛni bʌs əv ˈtɹ̩ɪsts fɹʌm ˈbɔstn̩ wɪl ɹəˈsiv ə wɑɹm ˈwɛlkəm ɔn ˈtuzdeɪ.]

  • This sentence is ambiguous; give two plausible interpretations for it. (2 points)
  • Is the ambiguity here lexical or structural in nature? Explain your answer (1-2 sentences will suffice). (2 points)
  • What syntactic category do you think the first word in the sentence belongs to? Explain your answer (1-2 sentences will suffice). (1.50 points)
  • Focus on the first interpretation you gave in part 1. Create a fully-articulated tree diagram (no triangular shorthand) for the original sentence that unambiguouslyconveys this interpretation. Your tree should conform to the set of phrase structure rules introduced in our course. (12 points)
  • Focus on the second interpretation you gave in part 1. Explain what differences you would have to make to your answer for part 4, so that you can unambiguously convey this second interpretation. (1.50 points)
  • Focusing on the tree diagram you provided in part 4, identify one syntactic unit that functions as an adjunct and one syntactic unit that functions as an argument; be sure to note which phrases these units are performing these functions in. How can you tell what status the units you’ve selected have? Explain your answer (1-2 sentences will suffice). (2 points)
  • Make a case that the group of words represented above as [ˈtɹ̩ɪsts fɹʌm] likely does notconstitute a constituent in the original sentence. Your claim should be based on results from at least three constituency tests, accompanied by a brief (1-2 sentence) explanation of your argument. (2 points)

1 day ago

exam_1.docx