“I sing because I’m happy. I am happy because
I sing.”
v Knowing
a language includes the ability to construct phrases out of morphemes and
words. The part of the grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of these structures
and their formation is called syntax.
v Part of
what we mean by structure is word order. As suggested by above cartoon, the
meaning of a sentence depends to a great extent on the order in which words
occur in a sentence.
Athens defeated
Sparta
does not have the same meaning as
Sparta defeated
Athens.
Sometimes, however, a change of word order has no effect on meaning.
The Chief Justice swore in the new President.
The Chief Justice swore the new President
in.
2.1
Grammatical or ungrammatical?
v The
syntactic rules of a grammar also account for the fact that even though the
following sequence is made up of meaningful words, it has no meaning.
Chief swore
president the Justice the in new
v In
English and in every language, every sentence is a sequence of words, but not
every sequence of words is a sentence. Sequences of words that conform to the
rules of syntax are said to be well
formed or grammatical and those
that violate the syntactic rules are therefore ill formed or ungrammatical.
2.2 What grammatically is based on?
Use your knowledge of English and place an asterisk (*) in front of the
ones that strike you as peculiar or funny in some way.
(a) The boy found the ball
(b) The boy found quickly
(c) The boy
found in the house
(d) The boy found the ball in the house
(e) Disa slept the baby
(f) Disa slept soundly
(g) Zack believes Robert to be a gentleman
(h) Zack believes to be a gentleman
(i) Zack tries Robert
to a gentleman
(j) Zack tries to be a
gentleman
(k) Zack wants to be a
gentleman
(l) Zack wants Robert
to be a gentleman
(m) Jack
and Jill ran up the hill
(n) Jack
and Jill ran up the bill
(o) Jack
and Jill ran the hill up
(p) Jack
and Jill ran the bill up
(q) Up
the hill ran Jack and Jill
(r) Up the bill ran Jack and Jill
The
speakers of English will “star” b, c, e, h, i, o, r. This shows that
grammatically judgments are not idiosyncratic or capricious
but are determined by rules that are shared by the speakers of a language.
The syntactic
rules that account for the ability to make these judgments include, in
addition to rules of word order, other constrains. For example:
ü The
rules specify that found must be followed directly by an expression like the ball
but not quickly or in the house as illustrated in a – d.
ü The
verb sleep
patterns differently than find in that it may be followed
solely by a word like soundly but not by other kinds of
phrases such as the baby as shown in e
and f.
ü Example
g – l show that believe and try
function in opposite fashion while want exhibit yet a third pattern.
ü Finally,
the word order rules that constrain phrases such as run up the hill differ
from those concerning run up the bill as seen in m – r.
v Sentences
are not random strings of words. Some strings of words that we can interpret
are not sentences.
2.3 What else do you know about syntax?
v Syntactic
knowledge goes beyond being able to decide which strings are grammatical and
which are not. It accounts for the double meaning , or ambiguity. For example
in ‘synthetic buffalo hides’ can be grouped in two ways:
-
synthetic buffalo hides which
means “buffalo hides that are synthetic,” or
“hides
of synthetic buffalo.”
Synthetic
(buffalo hides) à We can
get first meaning.
When we group like this:
(synthetic buffalo) hides à we get
the second meaning.
v Syntactic
knowledge also enables us to determine the grammatical relation in a sentence,
such as subject and direct object, and
how they are to be understood.
(1) Mary hired Bill
(2) Bill hired Mary
(3) Bill was hired by
Mary
ü In (1) Mary
is the subject and is understood to be the employee.
ü In (2) Bill
is the subject and Mary is the direct object, and as we would expect, the meaning
changes so that we understand Bill to be Mary’s employer.
ü In (3)
the grammatical relationships are the same as in (2), but we understand it to
have the same meaning as (1), despite the structural differences between (1)
and (3).
v Syntactic
rules permit speakers to produce and understand an unlimited number of
sentences never produced or heard before, the creative aspect of language use.
Thus
syntactic rules in a grammar must at least account for:
1. the
grammatically of sentences
2. word
order
3. structural
ambiguity
4. grammatical
relations
5. whether
different structures have differing meanings or the same meaning
6. the
creative aspect of language
v A major
goal of linguistic is to show clearly and explicitly how syntactic rules
account for this knowledge.
2.4 Sentence structure
v Syntactic
rules determine the order of words in a sentence, and how the words are
grouped. The words in the sentence
The child found the puppy
May be grouped into (the child) and (found the puppy), corresponding to
the subject and predicate of the sentence. It is easier to see the parts and
subparts of the sentence in a tree diagram:
v Other
sentences with the same meaning as the original sentence can be formed; for
example:
It was the puppy
the child found
The
puppy was found by the child
and in all such arrangements the puppy remains intact. Found
the does not remain intact, nor can the sentence be changed by moving found
the around. All these facts show that the puppy is a natural
structure whereas found the is not.
v Only
one tree representation consistent with an English speaker’s syntactic
knowledge can be drawn for the sentence the child found the puppy. But the
phrase synthetic buffalo hides has two such trees, one for each of its
two meanings:
Part of
the syntactic component of a grammar is the specification of the syntactic
categories in the language, since this constitutes part of speaker’s knowledge.
That is, speaker’s of English know that item a, b, c, f, g and i in
(2) are Noun Phrases even if they have never heard the term before.
(2)
(a) bird
(b)
the red banjo
(c)
have a nice day
(d)
with a balloon
(e)
the woman who was laughing
(f)
it
(g)
John
(h)
Went
(i)
That the earth is round
You can
test this claim by inserting each expression into the context Who discovered
________ ?” and “ _______ was seen by everyone.”
Only
those sentences in which NPs are inserted are grammatical, because only NPs can
function as subjects or objects.
v There
are other syntactic categories. The expression found the puppy is a verb
Phrase (VP). In (3), the Verb Phrases are those that can complete the
sentence “The child ________ “
(3) (a) saw a clown
(b)
a bird
(c)
slept
(d)
smart
(e)
smart
(f)
found the cake
(g)
found the cake in
the cupboard
(h)
realized that the
earth was round
v Inserting
a, c, e, f, g and h will produce grammatical sentences
whereas the insertion of b or d would result in an ungrammatical
string. Thus a, c, e, f, g and h are Verb Phrase.
v Other
syntactic categories are Sentence (S), Determiner (Det), Adjective
(Adj), Noun (N), Pronoun (Pro), Preposition (P), Prepositional
Phrase
(PP), Adverb (Adv), Auxiliary (Aux), and Verb
(V). some of these categories have been traditionally called “parts
of speech”
2.5 Phrase Structure Trees
v The
fact that The child found the puppy
belongs to the syntactic category of Sentence, that the child and the puppy
are Noun Phrases, that found the puppy
is a Verb Phrase,, and so on, can be illustrated in a tree diagram by supplying
the name of the syntactic category of each word grouping. These names are often
referred to as syntactic labels.
A tree
diagram with syntactic category information provided is called a phrase
structure tree. Three aspects of speakers’ syntactic knowledge of sentence
structure are disclosed in phrase structure trees:
1. the linear order of the words
in the sentence,
2. the grouping of words into
particular syntactic categories,
3.
the hierarchical structure of the syntactic categories (e.g. a Sentence is
composed of a Noun Phrase followed by a Noun Phrase followed by a Verb Phrase,
a Verb Phrase is composed of a Verb that
may be followed by a Noun Phrase, and do on).
The
phrase structure tree above is correct, but it is redundant. The word child is
repeated three times in the tree, puppy is repeated four times, and so on. We
can stream line the tree by writing the words only once at the bottom of the
diagram.
2.6
More Phrase Structure trees
v Every
language contains sentences of varying phrase structure. The phrase
structure tree below differs from the
previous tree not only in the words that terminate it but also in its syntactic
categories and structure.
v This
tree shows that a Verb Phrase may also consist of a Verb followed by a Noun
Phrase followed by a Prepositional Phrase (PP).
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