Immediate constituent analysis

Question

Practicing immediate constituent analysis using a "toy" context-free phrase structure grammar of English is a great way to introduce undergraduate students to syntactic analysis. In the context of a course in English syntax, the following sentence came up as controversial, with different plausible parses considered. Do community members have a consensus parse for this sentence?

Mysterious wizards concoct potions cleverly in the early morning if the sun rises.

The only ambiguity I can see is the scope of "cleverly". I.e. does it scope over the prepositional phrase or not? — acattle, Oct 08 '12 at 13:44
Either way, this sentence does not look very natural to me, at least not in prose... — Cerberus, Oct 08 '12 at 16:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · 2012-10-08T14:51:45.417

1

The sentence could have a few different possible parses, though not all of them will be obvious. If you plug the sentence into the LinGO English Resource Grammar (ERG), which is an HPSG-based automatic parser, you can see the possible parses. The first one is probably the most obvious one.

edited Oct 08 '12 at 14:51

answered Oct 08 '12 at 12:52

Would it be possible t provide these options in the answer? There are only four, but it might be a little difficult. – Danger Fourpence Apr 06 '13 at 20:31

Immediate constituent analysis

1 Answers1