Question

1) What is wrong with the following rule of English syntactic structure?

Answer 1

1) What is wrong with the following rule of English syntactic structure?

Answer:  The correct version of this rule is: "A prepositional phrase is formed with a preposition followed by a noun/noun phrase/pronoun."

Explanation:

Prepositional phrase normally consists of a preposition which is followed either by a noun, pronoun or a noun phrase. If we state in the definition that a preposition is followed by a noun only, it will not encompass all of the cases and will lead to certain ungrammatical structures, such as "with girl". In this particular case, we need to add an article before the noun, and thus create a noun phrase "a girl."

2) Do phrase structure rules represent deep structure or surface structure?

Answer: Deep structure.

Explanation:

The two terms, deep structure and surface structure, were proposed by Noam Chomsky, a linguist and a cognitive scientist. Chomsky argued that deep structures are generated by phrase-structure rules, while surface structures are constructed from deep structures when they undergo certain transformations. As he defined it, deep structure represents concepts, thoughts and ideas, while the language that we use to describe the deep structure is called surface structure. Deep structure is a necessary condition for the application of transformation rules.

3) Which of the following expressions are structurally ambiguous and in what way?

Answer:

(a) The meaning of this sentence can be interpreted as "for small boys and (all) girls" or "for small boys and (small) girls."

b) "The parents of the bride and (the) groom" - as if only the bride's parents were present

"The parents of the bride and (the parents of the) groom"

d) The history teacher could be from England, or the teacher could teach English history

e) "Flying planes" can be interpreted as planes that are flying, or one's occupation

f) The students either complained to everyone whom they could not understand, or they told everyone about their problem that they could not understand.

Explanation:

Let us first define what structural ambiguity is. Structural (also known as syntactic) ambiguity is a situation in which there are multiple possible interpretations of a single piece of language (it can be a phrase, sentence, clause, etc.). The ambiguity occurs due to the way in which words and phrases are organized.  In this case, all sentences except sentence c) are structurally ambiguous.

Lexical ambiguity, on the other hand, is when a single word can be interpreted in different ways. This is seen in sentence c), where we have different meanings for "legs" and "foot."