Grammaticality Judgment Task..?

Question

I am a college student and my teacher gave us an assignment that looks like it would be very simple but in reality, its not!

We need to take the following sentinces, correct them and give an explination on why they are incorrect. I know they are wrong, and I know how to correct them, but WHY are they incorrect is what I am having the worst time with! HELP!

1.That Jane likes liver suprises.
2. Steve desn't know the meaning of the word, so he needs to look up it in a dictinary.
3. The fridge is empty; Pauls father left herself with nothing to eat.
4. The accident was occurred on Auburn and Adams.
5.The magician disappeared the coin.

example she gave us. John forced the cild go.
Reason for unacceptability: this entence is ungrammatical because the verb "force" much be followed by the word "to"
Correction: john forced the child to go.

I know how to correct the sentences. I just need specific reasons on why they are incorrect. I can't say "up and it should be switched" I need reasons, thats why i'm having such a hard time!

the spelling stuff was my fault, I typed it really fast and didn't check it before I posted, oops!

Answer 1

Okay...the first sentence is wrong because it is a SENTENCE FRAGMENT, not a complete sentence. There is no subject. To correct it, you would have to add a subject. Example: "John said that Jane likes liver surprises." (John being your subject)

The second one....DOESN'T and DICTIONARY are spelled wrong. Also, reverse the words "up" and it"...."needs to look it up in a dictionary." Just a note: Someone in an answer down below told you to replace the comma with a semicolon...don't do it. It's wrong. Keep your comma!

The third one...the word "herself" should be replaced with "him"
as it is a descriptive pronoun describing Paul. Also, the word "Pauls" needs an apostrophe because "Paul's father" is showing ownership....the father of Paul.

The fourth one...you can't have "was occurred" as they are both verbs....you can't have two verbs in a row...take out the "was"

The fifth one....wow, that's way wrong...the verb that follows "the magician" should describe the magician. Currently, the verb following "the magician" describes the coin which is *** backwards. "The magician made the coin disappear," with the verb "made" describing the magician, and the verb "disappear" describing the coin.

Hope I helped!

Answer 2

1. Sentence fragment. It doesn't make sense on it's own.
2. Improper comma, should be a ; (semi-colon) because each half of the sentence makes sense on it's own.
3. There's a few errors here: who is "herself?" You need to specify, and it should just be "her." Instead of a semi-colon it would sound better if you put the word "because" or something in there.
4. Get rid of the word "was" because "occurred is already in the past tense.
5. disappeared is not used in the correct context. The magician made the coin disappear.

Also, "ungrammatical" is not a word. It should say "grammatically incorrect." "Grammaticality" is not a word either. In that sense you would just use the word "grammatical."

Answer 3

I know #3 is wrong because you can't use "herself", it's a reflexive...uh, pronoun or something, lol. (just say it's reflexive, it shouldn't be.) Or rather, paul's father cannot be a "her". lol.

On #4, occured is in the past tense, you don't need the word "was".

On #5, dissapeared can't be used like that.....uh, it would have to be "made the coin disappear".

Sorry if that's super vague...try checking out dictionary.com.

Answer 4

I see several spelling errors.
For the rest I hope you can find a teacher.