By William B. McGregor
1) The syntax of a language is relatively more "open" than the morphology or phonology.
True False
2) By definition a sentence is the largest linguistic unit with grammatical structure.
3) Does ‘They followed his dripping blood until nightfall, didn't they?’ constitute a single sentence?
Yes No
4) The ambiguity test shows that ‘I like the port’ has two different grammatical structures.
5) Which of the following is ungrammatical but interpretable in English?
‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ ‘The horse raced past the barn fell’ ‘The farmer was sawn kill the duckling’ ‘Where did you go to?’
6) Which of the following contsists of just a single clause?
‘I smelt the farmer spreading manure on the field.’ ‘The farmer will spread manure on the field at daybreak.’ ‘The farmer spread manure on the field and killed the duckling.’ ‘When I arrived at the piggery, the farmer was spreading manure on the field.’ ‘Who did you say spread manure on the field?’
7) Sentences are always clauses, but clauses are not always sentences.
Both claims are true Both claims are false The first claim is false, the second is true The first is claim true, the second false
8) In ‘He tripped and fell in the river’ the words fell in the river do not make a clause because they can't stand alone as an independent utterance.
True; the reasoning is good. False; the reasoning is bad.
9) A noun phrase can consist of no more than a single noun or pronoun (possibly along with words of other parts-of-speech).
10) A clause always consists of at least one NP and at least one VP.
11) One interpretation of ‘The police shot the man with a rifle’ involves a PP embedded in an NP. In this interpretation of the clause could you rephrase the clause as ‘It was with a rifle that the police shot the man’?
12) Which of the following groups of words involves conjunction of NPs?
the man and his dog the man on the moon the man's dog the green and white dress
13) Actor and Undergoer are purely meaningful categories, and have nothing to do with the grammar of English or any other language.
14) In ‘The cat fell off the wall’ the NP the cat is in the Undergoer role.
15) Which role(s) does the key serve in ‘The key was broken by the farmer’?
Just Subject Just Undergoer Subject and Actor Object and Actor Subject and Undergoer Object and Undergoer
16) Which role(s) does the key serve in ‘The key broke’?
17) Adding a tag question to a clause identifies the Theme by the pronoun that occurs in the tag.
18) Is Theme a grammatical relation?
19) Which of the following is a minor clause in English:
‘Yes!’ ‘Come!’ ‘He's sick.’ ‘Go away!’ ‘A dog.’ ‘No, never again.’
20) Does English have both prepositional phrases and postpositional phrases?
21) In which of the following clauses can the PP with binoculars be interpreted as either belonging along with the NP the criminal in a larger word group, or not so belonging?
‘The criminal with binoculars was seen by the police.’ ‘The police with binoculars saw the criminal.’ ‘With binoculars the police saw the criminal.’ ‘The criminal saw the police with binoculars.’
22) It is useful to recognise grammatical relations in syntax, but not in morphology.
23) Can a sentence consist of just a single morpheme?
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