Homework 2 notes

I have gotten a few questions about homework 2 that have highlighted a few places where the question or intention was unclear. So, although it’s a bit close to the homework due date, let me see if I can write a couple of clarifications.

One general note: there are going to be a lot of things we are not going to be able to explain. For one thing, there are some restrictions on verbs like fear (which requires that the subject be capable of feeling an emotion) or scare (which requires that the object be capable of feeling an emotion) that we are not going to be able to account for in the syntax. (We could call these subtypes of verbs, and write rules that specifically apply to them, but it’s probably better to assume that sentences like Rocks fear hammers and Hammers scare rocks are syntactically perfectly fine, and it is the semantics that rules them out, if they are ruled out.)

Problem 1 (“Generalization”): The better rule I have in mind is one that captures the intuition a bit better, for one thing. But to be more specific, I’m thinking about treating think as a transitive verb that takes a sentence as its object instead of a noun.

Problem 2: I got a bunch of questions about this. Part of the reason is that I left it too wide open, so when you get to part D and give some sentences that the grammar generates but shouldn’t, there are a couple of different ways in which the grammar can fail. One of them was the one I had in mind (problems with mixing Dets and Ns together that can lead to things like a Lisa), but there are at least two other ways problematic sentences might be constructed. One is that the arguments we need for bought, saw, and sent are not the same. So, you can make bad sentences by using bought in a ditransitive frame (with three NPs), but that wasn’t really what I was after. The solution to such a problem would be like what we did in class, distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive verbs from ditransitive verbs, and rewrite the rules to mkae use of them and restrict them to their own frame. A third kind of problem relates to the general note at the beginning here, you can swap recipient and theme in a ditransitive construction and end up with somethig like Homer gave a gift Maggie, but this is probably syntactically well formed, it’s just semantically broken.

To get where I was intending you to go, stick to problems with NPs. Proper names taking determiners like a Lisa, or common nouns failing to have one, like gift.

Problem 3: Part B was also particularly unclear to people. Here’s what I had in mind: If you look at the sentences in (1), they show that you can add an adjective into the definition of an NP. So if you add the rule at allows an adjective in NP, you can derive those sentences. What’s interesting about the sentence Homer sent a funny comedian a cold beer is that we’ve gotten beyond the data in a certain sense. This tells us something about objects, indirect objects, and NPs in general. The fact that the system as it is set up generalizes fixes we make to subject NP to hold for any NP. This is basically the neighborhood of why Homer sent a funny comedian a cold beer might be considered interesting.

Thanks to those who asked questions, and I hope this is at least kind of helpful, but let me know if other questions arise.