This test is worth 55 points. Make sure you read everything carefully before answering the questions. Bear in mind that using your own words, correct spelling, appropriate grammar and an acceptable writing style are part of your marks for this test.

1. Explain the concept of structural ambiguity. Give two examples and say why they are ambiguous. Remember to use your own words for this. Do not resort to the tasks you used during the course for this question.

It is easier to understand structural ambiguity studying surface structure and deep structure at the same time, and so, in my explanation, I am going to touch on these terms, too.
Surface structure can be the outcome of certain processes applied to a deep structure (Yule, 2010). From the latter we can obtain many sentences that share meaning, yet, they will look different at a superficial level. To generate these sentences, we make use of transformation rules. Take, for example:
You are a teacher VS are you a teacher?
Their underlying meaning (deep structure) is the same, however, their surface structure differs; the first one is a declarative statement, whereas the second is a question. In this case we can notice that a movement rule was applied.
Yule (2010) claims that a tree diagram can be regarded as static or dynamic representations. In the first case, each sentence is associated with only one tree diagram; in the second, this representation, by means of applying certain rules (phrase structure, lexical, movement, back to recursion) can generate a good deal of sentences. Likewise, the symbols used to label each node when drawing tree diagrams are taken from syntactical analysis, that is, the abbreviations for word level categories or syntactic constituents (NP, VP, N, V, etc.). To illustrate, let us see the following Tree