Transcript Powerpoint for syntax 1

SYNTAX 1
NOV 9, 2015 – DAY 31
Brain & Language
LING 4110-4890-5110-7960
NSCI 4110-4891-6110
Fall 2015
11/09/15
Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
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Course organization
• Schedule:
• http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/BrLg/t1-Intro.html#schedule-oftopics
• Today's chapter:
• http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/BrLg/t19-aIFG.html
• Fun with https://www.facebook.com/BrLg15/
• Quiz before Thanksgiving will be in class & on
Blackboard.
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Grades
Q1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Q5
Q6
Q7
MIN
6
5
5
4
7
3
4
AVG
9.0
8.8
8.8
8.4
9.2
7.5
8.7
MAX
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
COMBINATORIAL NET 2
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The lexical interface
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SYNTAX 1
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What are the parts of speech/syntactic
categories?
• Major/content categories
• noun
• verb
• adjective
• adverb
• preposition/postposition?
• Minor/functional categories
• determiner: article, quantifier, demonstrative
• pronoun
• negation
• conjunction: coordinating, subordinating
• auxiliary verb?
• Interjection
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Words group to together to form phrases
• What are the thematic roles of "Mary" and "John" in "Mary
kissed John"?
• Mary is Agent (and subject)
• John is Patient (and direct object)
• What goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John"?
• Mary kissed John.
• She kissed John.
• That girl kissed John.
• The tall girl kissed John.
• The girl over there kissed John.
• A girl that you don’t know kissed John.
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Restatement of subject data as NP
• Answer
• A word that is ‘nouny’, or a group of words that contain a noun; it
does not matter which one.
• We want a way to generalize over all of these possibilities, and the
infinite number of alternatives that we can think up.
• Let’s do this by calling it a noun phrase or NP.
• An NP goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John"
• [NP Mary] kissed John.
• [NP She] kissed John.
• [NP That girl] kissed John.
• [NP The tall girl] kissed John.
• [NP The girl over there] kissed John.
• [NP A girl that you don’t know] kissed John.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
Words to phrases 2
• What goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed"?
• John kissed Mary.
• John kissed her.
• John kissed that girl.
• John kissed the tall girl.
• John kissed the girl over there.
• John kissed a girl that you don’t know.
• Answer
• The same ‘nouny’ thing as before.
• So let’s also call it a NP.
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Restatement of object data as NP
• An NP goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed":
• John kissed [NP Mary].
• John kissed [NP her].
• John kissed [NP that girl].
• John kissed [NP the tall girl].
• John kissed [NP the girl over there].
• John kissed [NP a girl that you don’t know].
• The structure of our sentence now looks like this:
• NP kissed NP.
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NPs get around
• English treats NPs as units, in the sense that they can
appear in different parts of a sentence:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Which girl kissed John? ~ Which girl did John kiss __?
THAT girl kissed John. ~ THAT girl, John kissed __.
Not even Mary kissed John. ~ Not even Mary did John kiss __.
That girl is who kissed John. ~ That girl is who John kissed __.
Who kissed John is that girl. ~ Who John kissed __ is that girl.
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More phrases
• But it seems to be that ‘kissed NP’ is a unit, too:
1. Kiss Mary, I would never do.
2. *Kiss, I would never do Mary.
3. What John did was kiss Mary.
4. *What John did Mary was kiss.
5. What did John do? –– Kiss Mary.
6. *What did John do Mary? –– Kiss.
7. John said he would kiss Mary, and he did so.
8. #John said he would kiss, and he did Mary.
• Let’s call this new unit VP, so our sentence looks like this:
• NP [VP kissed NP]
• By the way, how do you know which ones are bad?
• Because you are an expert in the grammar of your native language.
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A bigger unit
• The structure that we just saw covers a whole sentence,
and it would be convenient to point this out in some way.
• So let us just make up a new unit, say ‘S’ for sentence:
• [S NP [VP kissed NP]]
• Many people find it hard to keep up with all the labels and
brackets, though, so linguists came up with an alternative,
the tree structure:
S
NP
VP
kissed
NP
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Compositionality
• Compare these next two sentences:
1. Mary kicked the mule.
2. Mary kicked the bucket.
• #2 has two readings
a. Mary applied force to the bucket with her foot.
b. Mary died.
• In the (a) reading, the sentence means what the sum of its
words mean; in the (b) reading, it means something special,
not predictable from the individual words.
• This happens in morphology, too:
a.
b.
the past tense of depart: departed
the past tense of go: *goed, went
• We call the (a) readings compositional, while the (b) readings
are non-compositional or lexical.
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More on kicking the bucket
• Almost any change, no matter how minor, makes "kick the
bucket" lose its non-compositional meaning:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Mary kicked the buckets.
Mary kicked a bucket.
Mary kicked that bucket.
Mary kicked the pail.
Mary kicked the big bucket.
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What is syntactic processing?
• “Narrowly defined, syntactic processing involves the
assignment of syntactic structure to word strings that
qualify as a ‘sentences’”.
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What is a sentence?
• Some definitions
• A complete thought.
•
•
•
•
•
Mary kissed John.
Mary kissed.
Mary.
Kissed.
Kissed John.
• A subject and a predicate.
• Mary kissed John.
• Mary kissed.
• Mary.
• Kissed.
• Kissed John.
• A string of words starting with a capital letter and ending with a
period.
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What we said at the beginning
• S = NP VP, or
• [S NP VP]
• [S Mary [VP kissed John]]
S
NP
Mary
V
kissed
VP
NP
John
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But …
• … we very often utter incomplete sentences:
a) Who kissed John?
b) Mary.
c) What did Mary do?
d) Kiss John.
• So the missing information can be filled in by the context:
a) Who kissed John?
b) [S Mary [VP Ø]]
c) What did Mary do?
d) [S [NP Ø] [VP kiss John]]
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What is a grammar?
• “A grammar is an explicit set of rules for distinguishing the
well-formed sentences of a language from those that are
ill-formed (ungrammatical).” We have already seen a
fragment of a grammar of English:
S → NP VP
② VP → V NP
①
• Which of these strings are ill-formed (ungrammatical),
according to this grammar?
•
•
•
•
•
Mary kissed John.
* Mary kissed.
* Mary.
* Kissed.
* Kissed John.
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Final project
• Improve a Wikipedia article about any of the topics
mentioned in class or any other topic broadly related to
neurolinguistics.
• Write a short essay explaining what you did and why
you did it.
• Print the article before you improve it, highlighting any
subtractions.
• Print the article after you improve it, highlighting your
additions.
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Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University
NEXT TIME
More syntax
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