All homework assignments in one place!
Yes, you heard it right. All three homework assignments are written down here!
Assignment 1
Provide lexical items allowing us to derive and interpret the sentence below:
- most teachers gave every student a monkey
Assignment 2
What must be the semantic types of the lexical entries used in the two analyses of the saxon genitive presented in class? (Analysis 1 was the base generation in spec of ‘s, and analysis 2 was movement from the complement of the noun to spec of ‘s.) Can we have a coherent syntactic feature - semantic type correspondance?
Assignment 3
The following sentence is semantically ambiguous.
Some monkey was sleeping on every branch
On the one hand it may be interpreted with surface scope:
- surface scope
- There is a monkey who was sleeping on every branch.
The more plausible of its readings is the inverse scope reading:
- inverse scope
- For every branch, some monkey or other was sleeping on it
The lexical entries below provide a single syntactic derivation for this sentence. Nevertheless, our semantic rules allow for both readings, depending on where we decide to retrieve the stored quantificational meanings.
Figure 1: Lexical items for the homework
Figure 2: Category-Type Correspondance
Figure 3: Meanings of lexical items
Here’s what I would like you to do.
- write out the (unique) syntactic derivation for the above sentence (as a derivation tree) - you do not need to worry about head movement.
- specify in words in which of their dependencies you should interpret the DPs so as to give rise to both of the readings above.
- interpret the syntactic derivation step by step (once for each reading) so as to derive meaning representations for each of the readings.
For this last step, you are free to just write down the meaning of the lexical items as just atomic entities (so the meaning of some is SOME, etc). If you would like, I have provided more refined λ term representations of their meanings in the table above.