How would I answer the following programming exercise? It's trying to emphasize the difference between semantics and syntax.
Write an English sentence that has correct syntax but has semantic errors.
Learn English – Syntactically correct, semantically incorrect sentence
homeworksemanticssyntactic-analysis
Related Solutions
It's always a mistake to think of grammar as involving commas and words following them. Grammar is clauses and phrases and predicates; there are no commas in language, only in writing.
In this case, there are two clauses:
- ((Eric's) psychology class) was different from the other classes (that) (Eric) had taken
- (Eric) was unhappy with ((Eric's) psychology class)
The pieces in parentheses are either deletable markers (like relative that) or noun phrases that can be replaced by pronouns (like he, his, and it) in the appropriate circumstances.
The problem is what the appropriate circumstances are for pronominalization, and that's what this question tests.
Pronouns always refer to someone or something that's obvious in context. When the context consists of only one sentence, the word denoting the person or thing (called the "antecedent") must be in the same sentence as the pronoun in order to be obvious.
But not just anywhere in that sentence. As the word antecedent (Latin for 'going before') suggests, normally the antecedent is spoken before the pronoun.
- He likes Eric's psychology class
is a perfectly good sentence, provided he doesn't refer to Eric; otherwise it's garbage. Switch them and it's fine. But this sentence has two clauses: sentence 2 is the main clause, and sentence 1 is a subordinate clause; this makes a difference for pronoun usage.
If the antecedent is in the main clause, and the pronoun is in a clause subordinate to the main clause, then a pronoun can come before its antecedent. For example, consider some simpler sentences:
- Before Marilyn became president I knew her.
- I knew Marilyn before she became president.
- Before she became president I knew Marilyn.
- *I knew her before Marilyn became president.
The first three are fine; in the first two, the antecedent (Marilyn) comes before the pronoun (her or she). In the third, the antecedent is in the main clause but the pronoun is in a subordinate clause, so even though the pronoun precedes its antecedent, it's OK. That's the same structure as the SAT sentence, and that's why the answer says there is no mistake.
But the fourth one is ungrammatical (that's what the asterisk indicates), because the pronoun is in the main clause and it precedes its antecedent, which is in a subordinate clause. So the SAT question tests whether you know the rule that distinguishes the third OK case from the fourth ungrammatical case.
This extract may help:
is a stock phrase that has been used in some form since at least 1380 (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) in storytelling in the English language and has opened many oral narratives since 1600. These stories often then end with "and they all lived happily ever after," or, originally, "happily until their deaths." These are examples of the narrative form and occur most frequently in the narratives produced for children aged between 6 and 8.
- It was commonly used in the original translations of the stories of Charles Perrault as a translation for the French "il était une fois", of Hans Christian Andersen as a translation for the Danish "der var engang", (literally "there was once"), the Brothers Grimm as a translation for the German "es war einmal" (literally "it was once") and Joseph Jacobs in English translations and fairy tales.
Upon:
What’s bothering is the word upon in the phrase. We still use it in connection with time, though it often sounds formal (“we plan to meet upon another occasion”). It was once the done thing to attach it to any time-related term where we would now use on or at. Lord Dunsany wrote in Time and the Gods in 1905, “Upon an evening of the forgotten years the gods were seated on the hills.”
- Another phrase with similar meaning to once upon a time was upon a day, as in Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: “And it befell upon a day, that we came into a great wood of ferns.” Another was upon a time — an example is in Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Old Testament book of Job, dated 1535 (I’ve modernised the spelling): “Now upon a time ... the servants of God came and stood before the Lord.”
Source: www.worldwidewords.org
Best Answer
The syntax is correct: it relates an observation of a panda eating before shooting and leaving. However, the misplacement of the comma makes the sentence semantically incorrect, as the intention of the sentence should be that pandas eat shoots and leaves, not that this panda was shooting. (No offense to the Kung-Fu Panda, who may actually shoot.)