1. How do you understand the concept of “grammar”? In the traditional sense of the term, what branches of study does grammar comprise?
2. What is a grammatical category? Name as many grammatical categories in English as you can.
3. Case (格) is familiar grammatical category. What grammatical functions does case indicate?
4. According to Lin Yutang (林语堂) (1982, p. 109), the distinction between number (数) and quantity is not made in the Chinese notions of “多” and “少”. Thus, one can say in Chinese “僧多粥少”, disregarding the fact that monks can be counted while congee cannot. How should the Chinese phrase Chinese “僧多粥少” be rendered in English then?
5. What major approaches are there to contrastive analysis on the syntactic level?
6. The analytic technique developed by the structuralists is known as Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis (直接成分分析法), whose feasibility hinges on two key notions: distribution (what naturally “goes with” what) and omissibility (whether the omission of an element from a construction would result in a non-construction). Judge the validity of this analytical procedure with reference to the following pair of sentences:
John is easy to please
John is eager to please.
7. In Transformational(-Generative) Grammar, grammar is defined as a mechanism that generates all and only grammatical sentences of a language. What do “mechanism” and “generate” mean in this definition?
8. Outline the three parts of grammar and their respective functions in the “standard theory” of Transformational Grammar.
9. What are the advantages of using a tree diagram to show the structure of a sentence?