Writing up your assignment:

•   This assignment is to be completed and submitted in Gradescope (through Canvas). Log into Gradescope to see the questions.

•   You must work on this by yourself – it is abreach of the university’s Academic Integrity Policy to collaborate or collude with others.

•   This is not a research assignment. You do not need to lookup books, journal articles etc., and you do not need to cite or reference anything.

•   There is no word limit for the assignment as a whole (though try to keep your answers as concise as possible while still answering the question – some guides to word counts are   provided in the questions).

•   The tutorial exercises and lecture materials should help you prepare for the assignment

questions to some extent. However, some assignment questions maybe a little different – and possibly more difficult.

•   You are expected to have developed the knowledge and skills to interpret the questions and answer them by yourself. However, you may ask one or two questions relating to this assignment, in the following way:

o Ask on the relevant Canvas Discussion board, and not by email.

o Check that the same question has not already been asked.

o Mostly, you should only ask about how to interpret the assignment questions or how to present your responses. While you can ask questions relating to content, we might not answer if we feel that doing so would give away the solution. We’re also not able to direct you to specific places in the readings or lecture notes where you can find similar examples.

o Don’t give away answers or hints to other students.

o If in doubt you can email me (Jonathon) first and then I may direct you to the Canvas discussion board if appropriate.

Notes on Gradescope and the submission process:

•   You must submit your assignment through Gradescope.

•   This assessment will not be accepted via email. Note that by submitting your work through Gradescope/Canvas you are agreeing to the terms of the University's Academic Integrity Policy (see http://academicintegrity.unimelb.edu.au/).

•   We will  not  allow  you to re-submit the  assignment  after receiving your  grade  and feedback.

•   On Gradescope, you can save/submit your work as you go along. If you close Gradescope and come back to your assignment later, just click the resubmit button to keep working on it. This will open up your previous work (provided it was properly saved). There’s no limit to the number of times you can do this as long as it is before the due date and time.

•   You  must  submit  your  work  before  the  time  specified  in  Canvas/Gradescope.  For example, if it’s due at 11.59pm, and you submit at 11:59pm on the dot, Gradescope will label your assignment as a late submission.

•   After the due date and time has passed, if you have already submitted the final version of your assignment, do not click the resubmit button anymore, not even to check your work. This will show up as a late submission.

Language X

Most of the questions in this assignment are based on the following dataset. Language X is a fictional language but shares many properties with real languages. You may assume the

following about all the sentences:

•   They are complete sentences (i.e. there is no ellipsis).

•   They are simple sentences (i.e. there is one clause in each sentence - in other words, each sentence contains one verb).

Note that sentences 20-24 are ungrammatical.

Question 1: Getting started [10 marks total]

The following questions should help you get started with tackling this dataset.

Q1.1 Two-word sentences [2 marks]

Among the two-word sentences, are there any minimal pairs (or near-minimal pairs)? Can you

tentatively place any words in word classes based on these two-word sentences? (Note: you don’t need to label any word classes as nouns, verbs, etc. yet.)

Q1.2 Comparing two-word and three-word sentences [2 marks]

Now look at the three-word sentences and compare them to the two-word sentences. Based on    this, can you identify any constituents made up of two words? (You don’t need to say what kind of constituents you have found – just write down the words which you think makeup a

constituent, and how you can tell.)

Q1.3 Suffixes [4 marks]

Looking at the words in the two-word and three-word sentences, can you tentatively identify any suffixes? If so, why do you think they are suffixes?

Q1.4frix and plez [2 marks]

Based on the two-word and three-word sentences, does frix belong in the same word class as plez? Why or why not?

Question 2: Nouns [7 marks total]

Attempt Questions 2-7 only after completing Q1 and after studying the data some more,

including the longer sentences. You do not need to provide your full working-out that got you to this stage – just answer the questions directly.

Q2.1 Which words are nouns? [3 marks]

List all the nouns in Language X, providing just their stems (i.e. the bare nouns without any affixes or other morphology).

Q2.2 Properties of nouns [4 marks]

Which properties/features do these words have in common that suggest they form a word class, and specifically that they are nouns? In your response, consider the likely functions of any morphology specific to this word class. (Identify at least three properties. Properties could be morphological or syntactic. You should be able to answer this in ~50 words but can write a little  more if you need to – note though that long answers are not necessarily better; in my experience, the longest answers often contain mistakes!)

Question 3: Verbs [7 marks total]

Q3.1 Which words are verbs? [3 marks]

List all the verbs in Language X, providing just their stems (i.e. the bare verbs without any affixes or other morphology).

Q3.2 Properties of verbs [4 marks]

Which properties/features do these words have in common that suggest they form a word class, and specifically that they are verbs? In your response, consider the likely functions of any morphology specific to this word class. (Identify at least three properties. Properties could be morphological or syntactic. You should be able to answer this in ~50 words but can write a little more if you need to 一 again, that’s at your own risk though!)

Question 4: Other word classes [6 marks]

Apart from nouns and verbs, what other word classes exist in Language X? Describe these classes by listing their members (i.e. which words from Language X belong in which class) and identify the morphological and syntactic properties of each word class. Give these classes appropriate labels (e.g. 'adjective',‘adverb’, 'preposition', etc.) and justify your choice of labels.

Question 5: Subclasses [3 marks]

Do any of the word classes of Language X contain subclasses? If so, explain what these subclasses are, how you know they are subclasses, and which words belong in them.

Question 6: Phrases [6 marks total]

Q6.1 Verb Phrase [2 marks]

Is there evidence that Language X has a verb phrase? Explain why or why not, drawing upon examples from the data. (For this question, you may assume that all the words have already been identified as belonging to various classes, e.g. you don’t need to prove that something is a verb to begin with.)

Q6.2 Phrase Structure Rules [4 marks]

Provide Phrase Structure Rules (PSRs) for this language. Your PSRs should be as parsimonious as possible while still fitting all the data. (We don't need your working out here 一just provide your final PSR's. You may ignore grammatical functions in your PSR's, i.e., you don’thave to label phrases as being subjects, objects, etc.)

Formatting: It maybe difficult to write an arrow in Gradescope, so you can just type > instead of → if you like. Contact Jonathon if you have difficulty writing any other elements of PSRs in Gradescope.

Question 7: Ungrammatical sentences [3 marks total]

The data contains five ungrammatical sentences (Sentences 20-24). Here, you are asked to consider just three of those.

Q7.1 Sentence 20 [1 mark]

Briefly explain why Sentence 20 is ungrammatical and suggest a fix.

Q7.2 Sentence 21 [1 mark]

Briefly explain why Sentence 21 is ungrammatical and suggest a fix.

Q7.3 Sentence 22 [1 mark]

Briefly explain why Sentence 22 is ungrammatical and suggest a fix.

Question 8: English [8 marks total]

This question relates to English, not Language X.

Question 8.1: Constituency [3 marks]

For the sentence below, decide whether the bracketed string is a constituent or not. Provide evidence from at least two constituency tests to support your answer. You should provide    example sentences as evidence.

Mara turned [off the iPad].

Question 8.2: More constituency [2 marks]

The following example presents a challenge to some of the constituency tests we covered in class. Assuming that on his parents is a constituent below, what is the problem for our constituency tests, and what could explain this? In what way do you think this example is different from an example like Jill ran up the hill?

(1) Olav relied on the internet a lot.

Note: we are not just looking for you to run the tests here – we want you to think about why some of the tests don’t work in the way they should. To make this clearer, you may assume the following judgements: