Due: Monday June 2, 2008 at the beginning of class.

(1a) What conversational maxim does Garfield violate here?
Cat: Do you love me more than you love food, Garfield?
Garfield: Do chickens have lips?

(1b) What conversational maxim does Joe violate here?
Mother: Where have you been?
Joe: Out.

(1c) What are conversational maxims and what were they proposed to explain?

(2) You've been asked to help develop a user interface at the grocery store that allows blind people to check what's in their cart (so they can compare to the contents of their shopping lists).  Your specific assignment is to implement the part of the speech production systems that formulates plural nouns.  (Two cans of chicken noodle soup, 5 bananas, 3 cabbages.)
(a) If your store had a relatively limited number of products (e.g. 100) how could you easily solve the problem?
(b) If your store had a large number of products and was getting new products all the time, how would you solve the problem?  Describe the representations and any rules you would code into your system.

(3) Design a finite state grammar that generates sentences that could appear in term papers in post-modern approaches to political science.  Be sure to use the following terminal elements: dialectical, defunctionalized, positivistic, predicative, multilateral, divergent, synchronous, differentiated, problematized, empowered, integrated, transfigurative, diversifying, representational, synthesis, epigenesis, constructivism, Marxist.  Feel free to add other terminal elements as you see fit.

(4) For each of the following sentences, show a parse tree.   For each of them explain what knowledge, in addition to the grammar of English, is necessary to produce the correct parse.

(a) John wanted to go to the movie with Sally.
(b) John wanted to go to the movie with Jackie Chan.

(5) Write a grammar that will generate:
Happily, the brave boy danced in the river.
but NOT
The brave boy danced happily in the river.

(6)
S -> ab
S -> aSb
(a) What are the terminal element(s) in this grammar?
(b) What are the nonterminal element(s) in this grammar?
(c) Which of the following strings cannot be generated by this grammar?
aab, aabb, aaabbb, bbaa, bbbaaa, baa, abb, ab, ba, aaabbb
(d) Explain why a finite state automaton could not recognize strings in this grammar.

(7) In the 1950s, many psychologists assumed that human languages could be described by finite state grammars -- with associations between words (e.g. "the") and very basic syntactic categories (e.g. nouns) that followed them. Explain why those psychologists were wrong.  (Hint: Chomsky had a pretty good argument.)

(8)
(a) What is a garden path sentence?
(b) Which of the following garden path sentences is more likely to mislead readers?
    i. Teachers taught by the Berlitz method passed the test.
    ii. Children taught by the Berlitz method passed the test.
(c) Why?
(d) If you picked i. in question (b), write a preceding sentence that might make i. easier to understand.  If you picked ii. in question (b), write a preceding sentence that might make ii. easier to understand.  In other words, construct a context in which it might make sense to say either i. or ii.
(e) Is there any empirical evidence (experimental study or studies) that suggest that the meaning of what has already been heard or read can affect the difficulty of understanding garden path sentences?

(9) Outline how the first three levels of Garrett's model of speech production would work to produce the sentence, "You have missed all my history lectures."  Describe the output of each of these 3 levels.  You may use something akin to predicate calculus to represent ideas, use capital letters to represent semantic forms, use lower-case letters to represent root morphemes, and instead of real phonological representations enclose "sounds-like" spelling in slashes, e.g. /yew/ for "You".

(10) Your patient has had a stroke which has caused him to have a great deal of trouble finding the right words for things.  Describing a picture of a kitchen scene where a girl and boy are eating biscuits, he says "it's a place, and it's a girl and a boy, and they've obviously got something which is made ... some ... some ... made ..." He apparently cannot produce the word "biscuits". (a) Which side of his brain has most likely been damaged by the stroke? (b) What is the name for this deficit?  (c) Your patient's deficit is reminiscent of what phenomenon in normal individuals? (d) Explain how your patient's deficit (and the phenomenon you name in (c)) support the existence of certain levels in Garrett's model.

(Extra Credit)  (a) Is a word exchange error between "apples" and "bread" more likely in sentence (i) or sentence (ii)?  (b) Justify your answer.
(i) The hikers ate the apples and the bread, but were anxious to continue their journey.
(ii) The hikers ate the apples, but the bread was saved for the return journey.