1. What are articles and why are they important?

2. What are adjectives and what are they used for? Examplify
3. What are verbs and what are they used for? Examplify
4. How are adverbs different from adjectives? What do they modify?
5. Define prepositions. What is their purpose?
6. What are pronouns?
7. Define conjunctions.
8. How would you define agreement? Explain and examplify.
9. How would you define grammatical gender? What is the difference between grammatical and
natural gender?
10. Identify all the parts of speech used in this sentence:

The boy was standing in front of the shop window holding a giant red balloon in his hand and crying
quietly.

11. What is generative grammar?

12. How does it differ from traditional grammar?
13. How would you explain deep and surface structure in simple terms?
14. What is structural ambiguity? Explain and examplify.
15. How would you define recursion? Examplify.
16. Why do we use symbols in syntactic descriptions? What about tree diagrams? What are the main
elements of tree diagram? Explain and examplify.
17. What is the all and only criterion in generative grammar?
18. Think of some expressions that are generated by the following phrase structure rules:
a) NP > art N
b) AP > art ADJ N
c) AP > Adj NP

19. Which of these sentences would be generated after applying the rule:

NP aux VP > aux NP VP

a) John will follow Mary.

b) Will Mary buy a small cat?
c) I heard that John sent the letter.
d) Should you believe that Mary saw it?

20. Draw the tree diagrams for the following sentences:

a) The girl saw you with George yesterday.

b) John knew that you helped the small boy.
c) Betsy borrowed the money from Cristopher.

1. Articles are words that are used with nouns and they form noun phrases with them. They help us
identify things as known or unknown.
2. Adjectives are words which are used with nouns, and they provide us more information about
those nouns. (ex. nice person, blue notebook, funny girl...)
3. Verbs are words used to express actions and states and they must involve people in the events
they denote. (Action: They talked about the exam. State: The boy had a sore throat.)
4. Adverbs provide us information about the events, states and actions and adjectives provide us
information about the noun they refer to. Adverbs can modify verbs and adjectives, and adjectives
modify only nouns.
5. Prepositions are words which are used with nouns in phrases. Their purpose is to provide the
information about time, place or other connections which involve actions and things.
6. Pronouns are words used in place of noun phrases which refer to people and things already
known.
7. Conjunctions are words that make connections and indicate relationships between events.
8. Agreement is used for structuring a grammatical sentence. It includes the agreement of number,
person, tense, voice and gender. (ex. She plays the piano. - it is based on the category of number,
person and tense)
9. Grammatical gender is gender based on the type of noun. The main difference between natural
and grammatical gender is that natural gender is based on genders in nature (male and female)
and there are three types of grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter).
10. The-article
boy-noun
was-auxiliary verb
standing-verb
in-preposition
front-preposition
of-preposition
the-article
shop-noun
window-noun
holding-noun
a-article
giant-adjective
red-ajdective
balloon-noun
in-preposition
his-pronoun
hand-noun
and-conjunction
crying-verb
quietly-adverb
11. Generative grammar is a set of explicit rules specifying what combinations of basic elements
which results in well-formed sentences.
12. It differs from traditional grammar because it doesn't have the explicit set of rules, but it
desccribes the language as it is spoken, not as it should be.
13. Surface structure represents the different syntactic forms of the same sentences. That difference
disguises the fact that the two sentences are very closely related, even identical, at some less
superficial level and when the basic components shared by the two sentences can be represented,
that is called their deep structure.
14. Structural ambiguity includes two different versions of events in the same surface structure form.
It has two distinct underlying interpretations that have to be represented differently in deep
structure. (ex. Terry loves his girlfriend and so do I.)
15. Recursion is the process of repeating the same structure of a sentence as long as it makes sense.
(ex. Cathy knew that Mary helped George.)
16. Syntactic analysis is presented in symbols which are mostly a shorthand ways of representing
parts of a sentence and it provides us easier way of analysing it.
17. The "all and only" criterion in generative grammar is: grammar must generate all the grammatical
sentences and only the grammatical sentences.
18. a) the table
b) the green apple
c) interesting book
19. Sentences b) and c) would be generated after applying mentioned rule.
20. a)
S

NP VP

D N

V NP Adv

pro PP

P
NP

PN

The girl saw you with George yesterday

b) S

NP VP

PN V CP

C S
 NP VP

pro V NP

art Adj N

John knew that you helped the small boy

c) S

NP VP

PN V NP P NP

art N PN

Betsy borrowed the money from Cristopher