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._____________________________________________________________________________________Exercise 2.2Use the labelled bracketing technique to assign each word in each of the sentences below to agrammatical category which represents how it is being used in the position in which it occurs in thesentence concerned.Give reasons in support of your proposed categorisation, highlight any analyticproblems which arise, and comment on any interesting properties of the relevant words.1 He was feeling disappointed at only obtaining average grades in the morphology exercises2 Student counsellors know that money troubles can cause considerable stress3 Opposition politicians are pressing for election debates to receive better television coverage4 Seasoned press commentators doubt if the workers will ever fully accept that substantial pay rises leadto runaway inflation5 Students often complain to their high school teachers that the state education system promotes universalmediocrity6 Some scientists believe that climatic changes result from ozone depletion due to excessive carbondioxide emission7 Linguists have long suspected that peer group pressure shapes linguistic behaviour patterns in veryyoung children8 You don t seem to be too worried about the possibility that many of the shareholders may now voteagainst your revised takeover bidModel answer for 1(i) [PRN He] [T was] [V feeling] [A disappointed] [P at] [ADV only] [V obtaining] [A average] [N grades][P in] [D the] [N morphology] [N exercises]An issue of particular interest which arises in (i) relates to the status of the words average andmorphology.Are these nouns or adjectives and how can we tell? Since nouns used to modify othernouns are invariable in English (e.g.we say skate boards, not *skates boards), we can t rely onmorphological clues here.However, we can use syntactic evidence.If (as assumed here), the wordaverage functions as an adjective in 1, we should expect to find that it can be modified by the kind ofadverb like relatively which can be used to modify adjectives (cf.relatively good); by contrast, ifmorphology serves as a noun in 1, we should expect to find that it can be modified by the kind of adjective 49(e.g.inflectional) which can be used to modify such a noun.In the event, both predictions are correct:(ii) He was feeling disappointed at only obtaining relatively average grades in the inflectionalmorphology exercisesSome additional evidence that average can function as an adjective comes from the fact that it has the -lyadverb derivative averagely, and (for some speakers at least) the noun derivative averageness cf.Thevery averageness of his intellect made him the CIA s choice for president.Moreover (like mostadjectives), it can be used predicatively in sentences like His performance was average.(Note, however,that in structures such as morphology exercises, you will not always find it easy to determine whether thefirst word is a noun or adjective.Unless there is evidence to the contrary as with average in (ii) above assume that the relevant item is a noun if it clearly functions as a noun in other uses.)______________________________________________________________________________ 50|3Structure3.1 OverviewIn this chapter, we introduce the notion of syntactic structure, looking at how words arecombined together to form phrases and sentences.We shall argue that phrases and sentences are built upby a series of merger operations, each of which combines a pair of constituents together to form a largerconstituent.We show how the resulting structure can be represented in terms of a tree diagram, and welook at ways of testing the structure of phrases and sentences.3.2 PhrasesTo put our discussion on a concrete footing, let s consider how an elementary two-word phrasesuch as that produced by speaker B in the following mini-dialogue is formed:(1) SPEAKER A: What are you trying to do? SPEAKER B: Help youAs speaker B s utterance illustrates, the simplest way of forming a phrase is by merging (a technical termmeaning combining ) two words together: for example, by merging the word help with the word you in(1), we form the phrase help you.The resulting phrase help you seems to have verb-like rather thannoun-like properties, as we see from the fact that it can occupy much the same range of positions as thesimple verb help, and hence e.g
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