7. Predicates, arguments, and clauses

Chapter 7 practice exercises

Data analysis

Exercise 1. Determine how many clauses are in each of the following sentences. Then identify the predicates in each clause. For each predicate, determine if it is verbal, nominal, adjectival, or prepositional. For verbal predicates, determine its transitivity.

a. The members of the other team were the winners.
b. The hockey player shot the puck.
c. Every player skated.
d. Most players were on the ice.
e. The losing team was sad.

Exercise 2. Identify the subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts to the verbs in the following sentences.

a. The player passed the puck to his teammate at the last second.
b. The players skated quickly towards the net.
c. The skates were sharp.
d. The coach celebrated because her team won the game.

Exercise 3. Determine whether the following sentences are simple, complex, compound, or both complex and compound.

a. It was very cold in the hockey arena.
b. The goalie blocked the puck and his team cheered.
c. You can become a good skater if you practice a lot.
d. The winning team won because they had better teamwork.
e. The people in the audience enjoy hockey but they dislike how cold the arena is.
f. The team that lost was sad.

Exercise 4. Put square brackets around the embedded clauses in the following sentences. Classify each embedded clause as a subject, object, or adjunct clause.

a. I knew that my favourite team won.
b. If the home team scored more than three goals, a local restaurant would give out free pizza.
c. That the teams went to a shootout didn’t surprise me.
d. Some people play hockey because it’s fun and other people play hockey because it’s good exercise.

Exercise 5. Determine whether each of the clauses in the following sentences are declaratives, polar questions, content questions, or imperatives.

a. Pass me the puck!
b. You should pass me the puck.
c. Why didn’t you pass me the puck?
d. Did you pass the puck to someone else?
e. Do you know why you passed the puck to someone else?
f. Why did you ask if I passed the puck to someone else?
g. The referee wondered if the puck went into the net.
h. How did the referee decide that the puck went in?

Exercise 6. Identify the relative clauses in the following sentences, if any. For each relative clause, circle the noun phrase that it modifies and put an underscore marking the gap.

a. We had never heard of the team that lost the game.
b. The team that had better teamwork won.
c. The player whom the team trained scored a goal.
d. The goalie whose team had the puck for most of the game didn’t move a lot.
e. She was the coach that the team was looking for.
f. The idea that they might win the tournament motivated the team to practice.
g. The player with whom the opposing goalie had a rivalry was always happy to score.
h. The team with better players does not always win.

Exercise 7. Identify the to-infinitives, gerund clauses, and small clauses in the following sentences. Note that sentences may contain clauses of more than one type.

a. We called him Puck McDuck.
b. The players needed to practice more.
c. Playing ball hockey is a way for people to play hockey in warmer weather.
d. We consider the coach the best in the city.
e. She encourages newcomers to improve by skating around the rink.

Communication and study skills

Exercise 8. Read WALS chapters 116 and and 92 about polar questions and write a paragraph describing the ways that polar questions can vary across languages.

Research and application

Exercise 9. Some languages put relative clauses before the noun they modify and other languages put relative clauses after the noun they modify, as shown in map 90A on WALS. Look at what other word order patterns are described by maps on WALS by going to the Chapters section then filtering for “Word Order” in the Area column. Make a hypothesis about whether another word order pattern might be correlated with the word order between nouns and relative clauses. Then cross-reference the two maps. Do you notice any patterns?

To cross-reference two maps on WALS, follow these steps:

  1. Open one of the two maps.
  2. Above the map, it should say, “You may combine this feature with another one. Start typing the feature name or number in the field below.” Below that, there should be a box with the map you’re looking at listed. Type the number of the second map you want to look at in the box, below the name of the first map.
  3. Click submit.

Here is an example of map 83A cross-referenced with map 90A.

Language Journal

Exercise 10. Does your language use overt or zero copulas? Give examples to back up your answer.

Exercise 11. Does your language use serial verb constructions? Give an example to back up your answer.

Exercise 12. How does your language form polar questions and content questions? Give examples to back up your answer.

Exercise 13. What do relative clauses look like in your language? Give examples to back up your answer.

Exercise 14. What do non-finite clauses look like in your language? Give examples to back up your answer.

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The Linguistic Analysis of Word and Sentence Structures Copyright © by Julianne Doner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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