Linguistics 113							Spring 2007

Assignment 10
Due Friday  May 4

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.

Start with set I.  Discuss anything new, and particularly discuss the
categories of the wh-pronouns that appear in these examples.

For set II, state explicitly any new thing that needs to be said about
subcategorization.  What is the category of "where the monkeys put the bananas"
in (16)?

Set III will require a new 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.

Example set IV

(17)  What have the dwarves been saying?

(18)  Whose car will the princess be riding in?

(19)  What are the monkeys putting in the boxes?

(20)  Which boxes are the monkeys putting the bananas in?

(21)  How far can your dog's fleas swim?

(22)  Where was the money hidden?

(23)  How silly can a person get?

These will require some additional assumptions or formulations, I expect.
State carefully what is happening in set IV.  Does your new movement
transformation have anything to do with the derivation of these sentences?
Where does the moved thing move to?

Formulate an explicit account of the position of the AUX in these examples.

Example set V

(24)  Will the monkey get out of the cage?

(25)  Have the monkeys gotten out of the cage?

(26)  Is the monkey getting out?

(27)  Are you here?

Give precise derivations for these too.

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