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Chapter 4
Syntax
What is syntax?
----a branch of linguistics that
studies how words are combined to form sentences
and the rules that govern
the
formation of sentences.
The term syntax is from the ancient
Greek word syntaxis, which literally means
“
arrangement
”
or
out together
”.
Traditionally, it refers to the branch
of grammar dealing with the ways in which words,
with or
without appropriate
inflections, are arranged to show connections of
meaning within the sentence.
Syntax is
a branch of
linguistics that analyzes the structure of
sentences
.
What
is a sentence?
Syntax is the analysis of sentence
structure. A sentence is a sequence of words
arranged in a
certain order in
accordance with grammatical rules.
A sequence can be either well-formed or
ill-formed. Native speakers of a language know
intuitively what
strings of words are
grammatical and what are ungrammatical.
Knowledge of sentence
structure
Structural ambiguity
Structural
ambiguity
is
one
or
more
string(s)
of
words
has/have
more
than
one
meaning.
For
example, the sentenceTom said he would
come yesterdaycan be interpreted in different
ways.
Word order
Different
arrangements of the same words have different
meanings. For example, with the words
Tom, loveand Mary, we may sayTom loves
Mary or Mary loves Tom.
Grammatical
relations
Native
speakers
know
what
element
relates
to
what
other
element
directly
or
indirectly.
For
example, in The boats are not big
enough and We don
’
t have
enough boats, the word enough is
related to different words in the two
sentences.
Recursion
The
same rule can be used repeatedly to create
infinite sentences. For example,I know that you
are
happy. He knows that I know that
you are happy. She knows that he knows that I know
that you are
happy.
Sentence
relatedness
Sentences may be
structurally variant but semantically related.
Syntactic categories
A
syntactic category is a class of words or phrases
that can substitute for one another without
loss of grammaticality. For example,
consider the following sentences:
The
child found the knife.
A policeman
found the knife.
The man who just left
herefound the knife.
He found the
knife.
All
the
italicized
parts
belong
to
the
same
syntactic
category
called
noun
phrase
(NP).
The
noun phrases in these
sentences function as subjectThe. knife, also a
noun phrase, functions as
object.
Traditional grammar
In traditional grammar, a sentence is
considered a sequence of words which are
classified into parts
of speech.
Sentences are analyzed in
terms of
grammatical
functions of words: subjects, objects, verbs
(predicates), predicatives,
?
Structural
grammar
Structural grammar
arose out of an attempt to deviate from
traditional grammar. It deals with
the
inter-relationships of different
grammatical units. In the concern of structural
grammar, words are
not just independent
grammatical units, but are inter-related to one
another.
Transformational-generative
(TG) grammar
Chomsky (1957)
–
grammar is the knowledge of
native speakers.
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Adequacy of observation
Adequacy of description
Adequacy of explanation
Writing a TG grammar means working out
two sets of rules
–
phrase
structure rules and
transformation
rules
–
which are followed by
speakers of the language.
TG grammar
must account for all and only grammatical
sentences.
TG grammar accounts for the
mental process of our speaking.
Systematic-functional
grammar
Background and the
goal of systemic-functional grammar M.
A. K. Halliday
Language is a
system of meaning potential and a network of
meaning as choices.
Meaning determines
form, not vice versa. Meaning is realized through
forms.
The goal of systemic-functional
grammar is to see how function and meaning are
realized
through forms.
The
three meta-functions of language
Ideational function
Interpersonal function
Textual function
Categories
Category refers to a group
of linguistic items which fulfill the same or
similar functions in a particular
language such as a sentence, a noun
phrase or a verb. The most central categories to
the syntactic study are the
word-level
categories (traditionally, parts of speech)
Word-level
categories
The criteria on which
categories are determined
Major lexical categories: N, V, Adj,
Prep.
Minor Lexical categories: Det,
Deg, Qual, Auxi, Conj.
Meaning
Inflection
Distribution
Note: The most
reliable criterion of determining a word
Phrase
categories and their structures
’
s category is
its distribution.
Phrase categories----
the syntactic units that are built around a
certain word category are called phrase
categories, such as NP(N), VP(V),
AP(A), PP(P).
The structure: specifier + head +
complement
Head---- the
word around which a phrase is formed
Specifier---- the words on the left
side of the heads
Complement---- the
words on the right side of the heads
Phrase structure
rules
The
grammatical mechanism that regulates the
arrangement of elements that make up a phrase is
called a
phrase structure rule, such
as:
NP
(Det) + N +(PP)
??
e.g. those people, the
fish on the plate, pretty girls.
VP
(Qual) + V + (NP)
??
e.g. always play games,
finish assignments.
AP
(Deg)
+ A + (PP)
??
very handsome,
very pessimistic, familiar with, very close to
PP (Deg) + P + (NP)
??
on the shelf, in the
boat, quite near the station.
The XP rule
Note: The phrase structure
rules can be summed up as XP rule shown in the
diagram, in which X stands for N, V,
A
or P.
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Coordination rule
Coordination structures
-----the structures that are formed by joining two
or more elements of the same type
with
the help of a conjunction such as and, or, etc.
----Coordination has four
important properties:
no
limit on the number of coordinated categories
before the conjunction;
a category at
any level can be coordinated; the categories must
be of
the same type;
the category type of the coordinate
phrase is identical to the category type of the
elements being conjoined.
Phrase elements
Specifier
Head
Complement
Specifiers
----
Semantically, specifiers make more
precise the meaning of the head; syntactically,
they typically
mark a phrase boundary.
Specifiers can be determiners as in NP, qulifiers
as in VP and degree words as in AP.
Complements
---- Complements themselves can be a
phrase, they provide information about entities
and locations whose
existence is
implied by the meaning of the head, e.g. a story
about a sentimental girl;
There can be
no
complement, one
complement, or more than one complement in a
phrase, e.g. appear, break, put
?
;a
sentencelike- construction may also
function as a complement such as in I believed
that she
“
was innocent. I
doubt if she will come. They are keen
for you to show up.
”
That/if
/for are complementizers, the clauses
introduced by complementizers are
complement clause.
Modifiers
Sentences (the
S rule)
S
NP VP
S
NP infl VP
Many
linguists believe that sentences, like other
phrases, also have their own heads. Infl is an
abstract
category
inflection (dubbed
‘
Infl
’
) as their heads, which
indicates
t
ensehesentenceandagreement.
’
Infl realized by a tense label
Infl realized by an
auxiliary
Transformations
Auxiliary movement
(inversion)
Do insertion
Deep structure & surface
structure
Wh-movement
Move
α
and
constraints on transformations
Auxiliary movement
(inversion)
Inversion
Move Infl to the
left of the subject NP.
Inversion
(revised)
Move Infl to C.
Auxiliary movement
(inversion)
Do
insertion
Do insertion----
Insert interrogative do into an empty Infl
position.
---- Modifiers specify
optionally expressible properties of heads.
Deep structure
& surface structure
Consider the following pair of
sentences:
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John is easy to
please.
John is eager to please.
Structurally similar sentencesmight be
very different in their meanings, for they have
quite different deep
structures.
Flying planes can be
dangerous.
Consider one
more sentence:
It can mean either that
if you fly planes you are engaged in a dangerous
activity or Planes that are
flying are
dangerous.
Deep
structure----formed by the XP rule in accordance
with the
head
’
s
ub-
categorization properties; it
contains
all the units and relationships that are necessary
for interpreting the meaning of the sentence.
Surface structure----corresponding to
the final syntactic form of the sentence which
results from appropriate
transformations; it is that of the
sentence as it is pronounced or written.
D-structure and
S-structure
Two
levels of syntactic representation of a sentence
structure:
One that exists
before movement takes place
The other that occurs after movement
takes place
Formal
linguistic exploration:
D-structure: phrase structure rules +
lexicon
Sentence at the
level of D-structure
The
application of syntactic movement rules transforms
a sentence from
D-structure
level to S-structure level
Transformational-generative line of
analysis
The organization
of the syntactic component
Wh-movement
Consider the derivation of
the following sentences:
What languages can you speak?
What can you talk about?
These sentences may
originate as:
You can speak
what languages.
You can talk about
what.
What language can you
speak
?
What can you
talk about
?
Wh-movement---- Move a wh
phrase to the specifier position under CP.
(Revised)
Move
α
and constraints on
transformations
Inversion can move an auxiliary from
the Infl to the nearest C position, but not to a
more distant C position.
No element may
be removed from a coordinate structure.
Chapter 4
：
Syntax
I. Decide
whether each of the following statements is True
or False:
1.
Syntax is a
subfied of linguistics that studies the sentence
structure of language, including the
combination of morphemes into words.
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Wh-
movement---- Move a wh phrase to the beginning of
the sentence.
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