Syntax Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Syntax tells us about how a sentence is worded and structured. It is the study of the way words are arranged into phrases, clauses and sentences, and of the rules that govern the order of words.

Phonics is a way of teaching the relation between sounds and letters. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning inside words, such as roots and affixes. Lexemes are units of vocabulary. None of these describes the structure of the whole sentence, so syntax is correct.

Answer: B

The theory of core grammar is associated with Noam Chomsky, who in the Principles and Parameters framework of the 1980s (Lectures on Government and Binding) divided a language's grammar into a core, determined by universal principles and parameter settings, and a periphery of marked exceptions.

Frank Palmer wrote on semantics and grammar generally, Joan Bresnan is associated with Lexical-Functional Grammar and John Ross with island constraints and early generative syntax. None of them put forward the core and periphery distinction.

Answer: D

The chronological order of the notions is: parts of speech (ancient Greek and Indian grammar), IC (immediate constituent) analysis (Bloomfield and the American structuralists, 1930s to 1950s), surface structure and deep structure (Chomsky's Aspects, 1965), and parametric variation (Principles and Parameters, 1980s).

Options A and B place parametric variation before surface and deep structure, which reverses the sequence. Option C puts IC analysis ahead of parts of speech and moves the parts of speech to the middle. Only option D has the correct order.

Answer: B

The dates are: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Language and Mind (1968) and The Minimalist Program (1995). So the order is (i), (iii), (ii), (iv).

Option A puts Language and Mind before Cartesian Linguistics, which is wrong. Option C starts with Cartesian Linguistics, before Aspects, and option D begins with the 1995 book, so they do not follow the publication dates. Option B is correct.

Answer: C

'Mary wonders who walks' is a declarative sentence: the main clause is a statement about Mary, and the question 'who walks' is only embedded inside it as an indirect question. The mood of the sentence as a whole is declarative.

It is not imperative, as it gives no command, and it is not interrogative, because the sentence does not ask the hearer anything (it would need 'Does Mary wonder who walks?'). Responsive is not a sentence mood in this classification.

Answer: B

Comparative is the odd one: interrogative, declarative and imperative are the sentence types or moods (question, statement, command), whereas comparative is a degree of an adjective or adverb or a type of construction, such as 'taller than'.

The other three options all name moods, so they form a group, and comparative does not belong to it. Option B is correct.

Answer: C

'I saw a man with binoculars' has structural (syntactic) ambiguity, because the phrase 'with binoculars' can attach to the verb (I used binoculars to see the man) or to the noun phrase (the man had binoculars). The same words have two different structures.

It is not lexical ambiguity, since no single word has two meanings here. It is not phonological ambiguity, which would arise from sounds that can be heard as different words, and there is clearly an ambiguity, so option A is wrong.

Answer: A

The development of grammars goes from traditional grammar (the Greek and Latin tradition), to structural grammar (the early twentieth-century descriptive school of Saussure and Bloomfield), to transformational grammar (Chomsky, 1957) and then universal grammar (Chomsky's later principles-and-parameters view). The order given in option A, with 'structured' standing for structural, is therefore right.

Option B starts with universal grammar and option C puts structural grammar before traditional, so they reverse the history. Option D begins with transformational grammar, which is too early in the order.

Answer: B

The order of appearance is the syntactic structure model (1957), the standard theory (Aspects, 1965), X-bar theory (Chomsky 1970, Jackendoff 1977) and the DP hypothesis (Abney, 1987). The code is (ii), (i), (iv), (iii).

Options A, C and D put later developments before earlier ones, for instance beginning with standard theory before the 1957 model, or with the DP hypothesis before X-bar theory. Only option B follows the actual chronology.

Answer: A

A higher-order rule that expresses a generalisation over a set of lower-order rules is called a metarule. In generalised phrase structure grammar (Gazdar), metarules derive one set of rules, such as passives, from another set.

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing is named by something closely associated with it, metaplasm is a change of a word's form in rhetoric or grammar, and metathesis is the transposition of sounds. None of these is a rule about rules, so option A is right.