syntax hw stuff

[tsukikage]

"I've just eaten the last piece of chocolate cake."
Identify the main parts of speech in the following sentences. Treat hyphenated words as single words.
What is the syntactic category of "I've" - or do I need to split it into "I have"?

***


`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!


For each underlined word, indicate its part of speech, and explain the distributional criteria by which you came up with that classification. You will need to figure out what part of speech they are based upon what suffixes and prefixes they take, along with where they appear relative to other words.

outgrabe: I assume this is a noun, as in "the borogoves were mimsy, and so were the outgrabe", but it could also be a verb...
were: How do I show, distributionally, that this is a verb?
Jubjib and Tumtum are adjectives, right?
whiffling: Is this a verb or an adverb modifying "came"?

***

a) Mamu:k-ma qu:?as-?i.
working-PRES man-DEF
"The man is working."
b) Qu:?as-ma mamu:k-?i.
man-PRES working-DEF
"The working one is a man.
In this problem I have to say whether mamu:k and qu:?as are verbs or nouns in each sentence. Is a word being modified by a tense (auxilliary) universally enough to consider a word as verb?

Comments

[skiing-mouse.livejournal.com]

I think that perhaps it is, I have, if you want to break it down to the simple parts. Hope that helps and is right. Good luck on the rest...

[arcmorality.livejournal.com]

my boyfriend on the phone

That a Boy George song?

[tiwonge.livejournal.com]

I'd say outgrabe is a verb. "...and the mome raths outgrabe." The -s on the word raths indicate to me that it's a plural noun. Mome is an adjective modifying it.

Something like "..and the bright beams sparkled." Especially with the "were" in the previous part of the sentence, it looks like it's passively describing a scene. But I think your analysis also works. The sentence, to me, is a bit clunkier with it as a noun. (Especially if it's written as a poem. Since it's on a line by itself, I'd guess it's a whole clause, and not just the second half of a noun conjunction thing.)

I'd call whiffling a verb, too.
"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling..." reads sort of like something like "The panther, with a low growl, came stalking..." The -ing is reminiscint of a verb, and I think it works like that.

[hitokiri-neko.livejournal.com]

Didn't we do that "Jabberwocky" thing in TOK?

The way I see it, outgrabe isn't a noun but describes how the mome raths are, thus making the sentence read something like "the borogroves were mimsy; the mome raths were outgrabe". Jubjub and Tumtum are kinda like species names, i.e "elm tree" or "firebird". Whifflling is probably akin to "snorting", describing what the Jabberwock was doing as it came through the woods.