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Answer 1 (4th option): Before Chomskyan Revolution, linguists focused on the description of the language (e.g., finding phonemes and morphemes for each language), but Chomsky claimed that all languages have a basic syntactic configuration that we are mentally hardwired to learn and use (McWhorter).
Answer 2 (1st option): “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” correctly follows all the syntactic rules in English, but not the semantic rules (McWhorter).
Answer 3 (2nd option): Since children are aware of the hierarchical structure of the relative clause such as CP and VP (McWhorter).
Answer 4 (4th option): Both Edward Sapir and Franz Boas proposed the validity of all human cultures and rejected that world’s peoples are rankable on a scale of “development” (McWhorter).
The Study of Language
CH06
Answer 1.
Natural gender is, as we all know, the differentiation of people and animals (noun) depending upon their sex. In the English language, we have the male gender (he, him), the female gender (she, her), and the neuter gender (it, its) (Yule 84).
Grammatical gender is commonly found in other languages. Here the noun itself is given a masculine or feminine connotation that is not related to sex. Depending on its grammatical gender, the noun will be followed or preceded by related verbs, adjectives, articles, or prepositions. For example, in Spanish the ‘el sol’ (the sun) is masculine; whereas, in German, ‘die Sonne’ is feminine (Yule 84).
Answer 2.
(a) The ‘prescriptive rule’ “you must not split an infinitive” is not obeyed here (Yule 85).
Correction: The old theory consistently failed to explain fully all the data.
(b) The ‘prescriptive rule’ “you must not end a sentence with a preposition” is not obeyed here (Yule 85).
Correction: I can’t remember the name of the person to whom I gave the book.
CH07 Study Question 1
Answer 3.
The rule “a prepositional phrase is formed with a preposition followed by a noun” is not applicable in all cases. For example, we can say ‘near London’ but ‘with dog’ or ‘near tree’ sounds odd. Therefore, it is better if we say that a prepositional phrase is formed with a preposition followed by a noun phrase, which can be a proper noun (‘with Susan’) , pronoun (‘by it’), or a combination of an article and a noun (‘near the tree’) (Yule 97).
Study Question 3.
Answer 4.
a. These are designed for small boys and girls.
This sentence is structurally ambiguous as it carries more than one meaning. The design can be for small boys and small girls or it might mean for small boys only and for girls of all ages (Yule, 98).
b. The parents of the bride and groom were waiting outside.
This sentence can be interpreted in many ways. The parents of the bride and the groom alone were waiting, or the parents of the bride and the parents of the groom were waiting.
c. How come a bed has four legs, but only one foot?
This can be interpreted as a riddle or taken literally that one foot is missing.
d. We met an English history teacher.
This is ambiguous as it might mean a history teacher who is English (native of England) or a teacher who teaches English history (subject).
e. Flying planes can be dangerous.
It can mean either that airborne planes can be dangerous for people if it crashes or the profession of a pilot is risky.
f. The students complained to everyone that they couldn’t understand.
Here the anomaly is that either the students complained that they couldn’t understand or they only complained to those, whom they did not understand.
Works Cited
McWhorter, John. "6. The Chomskyan Revolution". 2016. Lecture.
Yule, George. The Study of Language. 4th ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. PDF file.
