Wil's Syntax Learning Endeavor Topic

Seems Wil has taken it upon himself to learn about the syntax of natural language using Penn's online textbook, found here:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/

You can use this topic to address any questions or interesting points from the book, Wil. Some interesting discussions might crop up so I figured I'd make this public.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.

Oh, I was actually going to make this topic when I got home. Which was now.

So I read through the first two chapters at work, and *most* of it made sense, although in general that was more of a workout than I expected. (It did not help that I also spent most of the day trying to debut a really elaborate excel spreadsheet only to discover that the whole problem was that Excel reads its own ****ing null operator as a data string, but I digress).

The big thing, I think, is that I'm not really clear on what exactly constitutes grammaticality, or rather, this particular book's stance seems to be "here are some things that are not grammaticality, and everything else you intuit is." A good example is this exercise from Chapter 1:

From: The Book in the OP

Exercise 1.5

Which, if any, of the sentences in (1)-(5) are ungrammatical? Which, if any, are semantically or otherwise anomalous? Briefly explain.

(1) a. They decided to go tomorrow yesterday.
b. They decided to go yesterday tomorrow.
(2) a. They decided yesterday to go tomorrow.
b. They decided tomorrow to go yesterday.
(3) a. Yesterday, they decided to go tomorrow.
b. Tomorrow, they decided to go yesterday.
(4) They decided to go yesterday yesterday.
(5) How long didn't Tom wait?

So 1a, 2a 3a and 4 seem to be grammatical and sensible if less than clear; I'm pretty sure sentence 5 is okay, because the unintelligibility hinges on the very specific relationship between "how long" and "wait," rather than a word order issue. But I can't decide on 1b, 2b and 3b because I'm not sure whether it's a grammatical or semantic issue that you need to use a future tense (or modal that implies futurity etc) to talk about something that will occur "tomorrow." They're grammatical in the sense that they don't have any wacky word order, and the anomaly deals with the sign for which a particular word stands, but the problem morphological.

My gut feeling is that they're all grammatical, and the exercise is designed to make you say "wow look at all the unintelligible crap that's grammatical!" but the subtle variations in word order between the first four sets make me wonder if I'm totally missing something.

(More coming, but I'm going to post because my computer dies randomly sometimes)

Also, I love the writing in this book. I was a little bit ready to lose it toward the end of the day/chapter 2, and then I happened upon this chestnut:

From: The Book in the OP

Chances are that you are a bit leery of the simplifying assumption just described. If so, think of it as comparable to taking out a loan. True, taking out a loan is risky, and taking out loans in a careless or irresponsible way can lead to financial disaster. Nevertheless, the credit market is a necessary and productive part of any modern economy. I

I don't know, I can't read it except as delightfully tongue-in-cheek. Sort of a slightly more unstable Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Anyway, my thing about the second chapter is sort of the exact opposite of the first: this seems entirely too intuitive for how they're making it sound. Are they belaboring the point, am I missing the point, or do the sorts of things these tests evaluate become really convoluted, say, when you're talking about language as such? It just doesn't seem like there's likely to be an occasion on which it will be troublesome to see that "in the garage" is a prepositional phrase with a noun phrase inside. Like, I don't want to brush this off if I'm missing something, but I just can't find the profundity.

I made this image macro to help express my consternation:
http://www.lessthanwomprat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Old-Woman.png
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You're absolutely right about Exercise 1.5. As for a lack of profundity, just wait. I'd suggest not doing more than one chapter a day from here on out, if that.

Glad you're making progress! I can relay any comments to Tony and Beatrice if you have feel they would be helpful.
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.

Right; I figure there's going to be a good lot of going and re-reading from here on in. I probably wouldn't have tried for the whole chapter if it weren't all introductory (although that intro chapter was less forgiving than many).
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(I'm still at it, but I've only finished like half a chapter today, and it largely made sense; more when perplexity)
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And people think mathematicians are weird.
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1].