Syntax and Sentence Structure Flashcards

A student consistently produces sentences like 'The boy who the girl likes runs fast,' omitting the relative pronoun's referential role within the embedded clause. According to Chomsky's Government and Binding theory, which syntactic deficit best characterizes this error pattern?

Answer: Breakdown in the movement of the wh-operator through SPEC-CP, leaving an ungoverned gap

In object-relative clauses like 'the boy who the girl likes,' the relative pronoun moves from the object position through SPEC-CP. When a student omits or misproduces the pronoun in this configuration, it reflects a breakdown in wh-movement through the complementizer phrase, leaving the extraction site without proper government. This is distinct from theta-role assignment (option A) or c-command relations (option D), which remain structurally intact in relative clause formation.

When analyzing a student's written language sample, an academic language therapist finds the student correctly uses all of the following EXCEPT one. Which sentence contains a subtle syntactic violation involving argument structure?

Answer: The teacher donated the shelter the supplies.

'Donate' is a verb that permits the prepositional dative ('donated X to Y') but does NOT allow the double-object dative ('donated Y X'). Unlike 'give' or 'send,' which freely alternate between both dative constructions, 'donate' is lexically specified to require the prepositional form. Sentences A, B, and D are all grammatically well-formed, but sentence C ('donated the shelter the supplies') violates the verb's argument structure constraints — a subtle error that often escapes surface-level detection.

A CALT is conducting a dynamic assessment with a student who has difficulty with complex sentence comprehension. The student interprets 'The horse that kicked the cow jumped the fence' by assigning the kicking action to the cow. This error pattern is MOST consistent with which processing strategy breakdown?

Answer: Overreliance on the minimal-distance principle, assigning agency to the most recently mentioned noun phrase

The minimal-distance principle (MDP), proposed by Chomsky, holds that listeners tend to assign a thematic role to the NP closest to the predicate. When a student misattributes the fence-jumping to the cow (the most recently mentioned noun before 'jumped'), it reflects an overreliance on recency/proximity rather than syntactic structure. The agent-first heuristic (A) would predict misassignment in passive sentences, and the canonical sentence strategy (C) would produce the NP1 + V + NP2 = agent + action + patient error — neither matches this specific error pattern.

In an academic writing intervention, a CALT targets the student's use of nominalization. Which sentence demonstrates a syntactically well-formed nominalization that also maintains the underlying argument structure of the base verb?

Answer: The committee's approval of the proposal surprised everyone.

Option A successfully nominalizes 'approve' to 'approval' while preserving the full argument structure: the agent (the committee's) appears as a genitive subject, and the theme (the proposal) is retained via the preposition 'of.' Option B scrambles the genitive/by-phrase assignment in a way that is grammatical but pragmatically marked. Option C uses a gerund rather than a true nominalization. Option D is syntactically malformed — the by-phrase is misplaced and the argument structure of 'approval' is not properly licensed.

A student with a language-based learning disability produces the following: 'Although the experiment failed, however, the scientists continued their research.' A CALT identifies this as a specific syntactic error. Which is the MOST precise characterization?

Answer: Connective pleonasm — simultaneous use of a subordinating conjunction and a conjunctive adverb to mark a single concessive relation

The error is connective pleonasm (also called conjunction redundancy at the discourse level): 'although' is a subordinating conjunction that already encodes the concessive relation, while 'however' is a conjunctive adverb that marks the same adversative contrast. Using both simultaneously creates a redundant marking of a single semantic relationship — a common error in developing academic writers that reflects incomplete understanding of how different connective types function syntactically and discursively. This is NOT simply a coordinate conjunction issue (A), misattachment (B), or a scope/logic violation (D).

During a morphosyntax intervention, a CALT targets aspectual verb phrases. A student writes: 'By the time she arrived, he has been waiting for two hours.' Which combination of tense-aspect errors is present?

Answer: Tense mismatch: present perfect 'has been' should be past perfect 'had been'; aspect (progressive) is correctly maintained

The sentence contains a tense error but NOT an aspect error. The temporal frame established by 'by the time she arrived' places the event prior to a past reference point, requiring the past perfect ('had been waiting'), not the present perfect ('has been waiting'). The progressive aspect is entirely appropriate here — it encodes an ongoing activity up to a reference time, which is semantically accurate for a waiting scenario. A CALT must distinguish between tense (anchoring to a temporal frame) and aspect (encoding event structure) to identify the precise locus of the student's difficulty.