Moths to the Flame of Meaning

By Geoffrey Pullum. At the end of the English-syntax course I co-taught last semester, my colleague and I set a number of examination questions designed to test students ability to argue points about syntactic structure. This one will serve as an example:
Although the following two sentences exhibit a superficial similarity, they contrast sharply in syntactic terms:
[1] I saw Jane with her new boyfriend in the bar.
[2] I saw Jane and her new boyfriend in the bar.
Show that these two sentences have radically different syntactic structures, using at least two different syntactic arguments. Getting students to answer questions of that kind involves changing the whole way they think about language. Read more...