Part I: Answer the following questions with your own words!

(15 points)

1. What is cognitive science? Why does it relate with Syntax?

2. What are descriptive rules and prescriptive rule?

3. What is terminal node?

Part II: Make a sample of (10 points)

4. Cataphora!

5. Syntatic illness!

Part III: Make a tree structure for each constituent (50 points)

6. My grandmother

7. This old motorcycle and that new bike

8. Inside superman’s new car

9. Behind my grandmother’s haunted house

10.Gave gifts to his grandchildren

Part IV: Make two tree structures for the following ambiguous sentence (25 points)

11.The man killed the king with the red hair.

(Note: Tree structure allows us to capture the differences between ambiguous

readings of the same surface sentence. Please use your critical thinking and make

two interpretations for that surface sentence!)

ANSWER

Part I

1. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes.
Sentences and other expressions of human languages have structure relevant to their
meaning and pronunciation, and syntactic research attempts to uncover that structure.
2. A descriptive grammar is a set of rules about language based on how it is actually used. In a
descriptive grammar there is no right or wrong language. It can be compared with a
prescriptive grammar, which is a set of rules based on how people think language should be
used.
Prescriptive rules exist only to express a preference for one structure or usage or linguistic
item over another. A prescriptive grammar will not contain rules that tell you to put articles
before nouns, rather than after, because no native speakers of English put articles after
nouns.
 3. The terminal node, or final outcome, is number of lymph nodes to be removed. Decision
trees can in some instances be used to make optimal decisions. To do so, the terminal nodes
in the decision tree must be assigned terminal values.

PART II

4. If you want them, there are cookies in the kitchen.

5. Telling stories – it may be jumbled or out of order, and can be hard to follow or understand.

PART III

NP

D N
My Grandmother

This old motorcycle and that new bike

TP

NP Conj NP

D AdjP N D AdjP N
This motorcycle and that bike

Adj adj

old new

Inside Superman’s new car

TP

Adv NP

D AdjP N

inside Superman’s Car

adj

new
 Behind my grandmother’s haunted house

TP

Adv NP

NP AdjP N

D N Adj

Behind my grandmother’s haunted house

Gave gifts to his grandchildren

TP

VP PP

V N P NP

Gave gifts to

D N

his grandchildren
 1. the man killed the king wih the red hair (explain the king’s hair)
S

NP VP

D N V NP

The man killed

D N PP

the king

P NP

with

D AdjP N

the hair

red

the man killed the king wih the red hair(explain the way the man killed the king(using hair))

NP VP

D N V NP

The man killed

D N PP

the king
P NP

with

D AdjP N

the hair

red