Web Activity 6.6 Natural and unnatural rules

Consider the following data set of German sentences and answer the questions below.

The soldier kissed her.
Der Soldat hat sie geküsst.

The soldier kissed the woman.
Der Soldat hat die Frau geküsst.

The dog bit her.
Der Hund hat sie gebissen.

She bought the dog.
Sie hat den Hund gekauft.

She saw the cat.
Sie hat die Katze gesehen.

The cat she saw is sleeping.
Die Katze, die sie gesehen hat, schläft.

She bought the pen.
Sie hat den Stift gekauft.

The soldier who kissed her is rich.
Der Soldat, der sie geküsst hat, ist reich.

The woman he kissed is rich.
Die Frau, die er geküsst hat, ist reich.

The woman with the soldier who kissed her is rich.
Die Frau mit dem Soldat, der sie küsste hat, ist reich.

The woman who kissed her is rich.
Die Frau, die sie geküsst hat, ist reich.

The woman he kissed is rich.
Die Frau, die er geküsst hat, ist reich.

The cat she fed is nice.
Die Katze, die sie geführt hat, ist schön.

I see the cat she bought
Ich sehe die Katze, die sie gekauft hat.

The musician who has charmed her is rich.
Der Musiker, der sie bezaubert hat, ist reich.

The dog she fed is nice.
Der Hund, den sie geführt hat, ist schön.

The spider that bit her is nasty.
Die Spinne, die sie gebissen hat, ist böse.

Questions

1. Evaluate the generalizations in a–e below. For each of these, check the generalization against the above data set to see if it is consistent with the example sentences.
1. The embedded relative clause is introduced by a word that bears the same gender marking as the head noun (der, den for masculine nouns, die for feminine nouns).
2. The embedded relative clause is introduced by der if the preceding noun ends in a single consonant, den if the head noun ends in a consonant cluster, and dieif the head noun ends in a vowel.
3. The word that introduces the relative clause reflects the grammatical role of the element that is referentially linked to the head noun: if the head noun is linked to the subject of the relative clause, this word is der or die, and if it is linked to the object of the relative clause, the word is den or die.
4. In a main clause, the longest element of the verb phrase is placed at the end of the phrase; in an embedded clause, the longest element appears second to last, just before hat.
5. In a main clause, the main verb appears at the end of the phrase; in an embedded clause, the auxiliary verb, if there is one, appears at the end.
2. Of the generalizations that are consistent with the data, identify those that strike you as plausible “natural” rules of syntax and those that strike you as implausible rules, even though they may be consistent with the above data set. What criteria did you use to assess the naturalness of the rules?
3. Even though the sentences above may be consistent with both natural and unnatural rules in a–e, additional examples could eventually disconfirm the unnatural generalizations. Based on your choice of natural rules, predict the correct German translation for these English sentences.

                    The dog that bit her is nasty.

                    The musician she kissed is rich.

                    I see the pen she bought.

4. Do you think that a child who was confronted with this data set would be more likely to draw the “natural” generalizations over the “unnatural” ones? Why or why not? How would you test for this? And what would such a result tell you about the mechanisms that drive a child’s acquisition of syntactic structure?