CALT Syntax and Sentence Structure 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In transformational grammar, what is the deep structure of a sentence?
- The phonological form of the sentence as spoken
- The abstract underlying representation that captures basic grammatical relations (Correct answer)
- The surface word order visible in the written sentence
- The pragmatic meaning intended by the speaker
Correct answer: The abstract underlying representation that captures basic grammatical relations
Deep structure represents the abstract level of syntactic organization that underlies the surface form and captures core semantic relationships.
Question 2: Which construction is an example of right-branching syntax?
- The cat the dog the man owned chased escaped.
- The man saw the dog that chased the cat that caught the mouse. (Correct answer)
- Old men and women left.
- The quickly running children laughed.
Correct answer: The man saw the dog that chased the cat that caught the mouse.
Right-branching structures embed successive clauses to the right and are generally easier to process than center-embedded structures.
Question 3: What does the term 'argument structure' refer to in syntax?
- The logical relationship between premises and conclusions
- The number and type of noun phrase arguments a verb requires (Correct answer)
- The arrangement of clauses in a persuasive paragraph
- The phonological weight of syllables in a sentence
Correct answer: The number and type of noun phrase arguments a verb requires
Argument structure specifies how many participants a predicate requires (its arity) and what semantic roles those participants bear.
Question 4: A child produces: 'Him goed to school.' Which two syntactic errors are present?
- Incorrect determiner and tense marker
- Incorrect pronoun case and irregular past tense overgeneralization (Correct answer)
- Subject omission and verb omission
- Incorrect word order and article use
Correct answer: Incorrect pronoun case and irregular past tense overgeneralization
The child uses objective case 'him' instead of nominative 'he' and overgeneralizes the regular past tense -ed to the irregular verb 'go.'
Question 5: What is a 'center-embedded' clause, and why is it difficult to process?
- A clause placed at the end of a sentence, causing right-attachment ambiguity
- A relative clause inserted within the main clause, creating nested dependencies (Correct answer)
- A clause beginning with a subordinating conjunction at the sentence start
- A clause coordinated with 'and' or 'but' between two main clauses
Correct answer: A relative clause inserted within the main clause, creating nested dependencies
Center-embedded clauses interrupt the main clause mid-sentence, overloading working memory because verb arguments must be held across the embedded material.
Question 6: Which structural property distinguishes a phrasal verb from a prepositional verb in English?
- Phrasal verbs take indirect objects; prepositional verbs do not
- The particle in a phrasal verb can be separated from the verb by its object (Correct answer)
- Prepositional verbs always occur in passive constructions
- Phrasal verbs require an infinitival complement
Correct answer: The particle in a phrasal verb can be separated from the verb by its object
Phrasal verb particles are movable (e.g., 'turn off the light' / 'turn the light off'), while prepositional verbs require the preposition to remain attached to the verb.
Question 7: In systemic functional linguistics, which metafunction describes how clauses express actions, events, and participants?
- Interpersonal metafunction
- Textual metafunction
- Experiential (ideational) metafunction (Correct answer)
- Logical metafunction
Correct answer: Experiential (ideational) metafunction
The experiential metafunction of Halliday's systemic functional grammar concerns how language encodes processes, participants, and circumstances in clausal structure.
CALT Syntax and Sentence Structure 5
In transformational grammar, what is the deep structure of a sentence?