Linguistics 113							Spring 2018
Assignment 6
Due Friday  April 20

Example set I:

(1)  Who has been eating my porridge?

(2)  What stopped you from bringing the gorilla in?

(3)  Which students have been accused of not finishing their homework?

(4)  Which students have read which books?

(5)  Whose car ran over my dog?

(6)  Who shot who?

Example set II:

(7)  I wonder who has been eating my porridge.

(8)  We all know what stopped you from bringing the gorilla in.

(9)  It is irrelevant which students have finished their homework.

(10)  Which students have finished their homework is irrelevant.

(11)  They won't tell me whose car ran over my dog.

Example set III:

(12)  I wonder what the dwarves were saying.

(13)  We would like to know which boxes the monkeys put the bananas in.

(14)  We couldn't figure out what the monkeys were putting in the boxes.

(15)  Whose car my dog was run over by is a mystery to me.

(16)  It doesn't matter where the monkeys put the bananas.

Study all these examples.  The first task of this assignment is to decide
what needs to be said in the grammar of English to get them all generated.

Does anything interesting happen in the derivations of the sentences in set I?
Show derivations for a couple of them.

For set II, state explicitly any new thing that needs to be said about
selection.  What is the category of "which students have finished their homework"
in (9)?  Show the derivation of (10).

Set III will require a (now familiar) movement transformation.  State it explicitly,
saying exactly what moves and where it moves to.  Give several arguments that
these sentences do indeed require a transformation, rather than just being
base generated as they are.  Show the derivation of (15).








Example set IV

(17a)  Whose car will the princess be riding in?
(17b) *Whose will the princess be riding in car?

(18a)  Which candidate do you expect to win the election?
(18b) *Which do you expect to win the election candidate?

(19a)  Which boxes do the monkeys seem to be about to put the bananas in?
(19b) *Which do the monkeys seem to be about to put the bananas in boxes?

(20a)  How far can your dog's fleas swim?
(20b)  How can your dog's fleas swim far?	(grammatical, but different meaning)

(21a)  How silly can a person get?
(21b)  How can a person get silly?		(grammatical, but different meaning)

Example set IV demonstrates a surprising but fundamental property of WH questions.
Describe the phenomenon as well as you can in plain English, and then propose a mechanism
for restricting WH movement appropriately.


Make sure everything you propose is in accord with X-bar theory and the
theory of movement developed in class.