Transcript Linguistics 001: Syntax

Linguistics 001: Syntax
Part I: Basics and Constituency
Background
• There are two basic components of language:
– Words/Morphemes: A set of basic units with
different meanings or grammatical functions
– Rules/Principles: The rules that allow the
morphemes to be combined into larger objects
• Syntax is the study of these rules at the level
of the creation of phrases and larger units
(clauses and sentences)
• Note: You need to be able to identify nouns,
verbs, adjectives, prepositions,etc. to get
through this unit.
Structure (Again)
• As we saw in our discussion of words, the
structure of a complex word is critical for its
meaning:
[[un lock] able]
[un [lock able]]
– Now we’ll talk about larger structures. What is
the difference between morphology and
syntax? Hard question…
Now syntax…
First: creativity
• Consider the nature of the problem:
– Humans are capable of producing and
understanding an infinite set of sentences
– They can’t do this by having heard the
sentences before, in most cases
– What is the nature of the rule system that
allows words to be combined in this way?
• Is there a longest sentence? Clearly
no… Mary said that John said that…
Plan
• Structure is critical in syntax; we will examine
two major points this week
– The notion of constituency; why is [the dog that is
eating an apple] a single unit in
Is [the dog that is eating an apple] in the garden?
– Movement: how do we understand the object of
the verb in the following sentences:
John ate several apples.
What did John eat?
• We’ll also look at some basic rule systems for
generating sentences
Constituency and Linear
Order
• Two notions that are important to distinguish
from one another:
– Constituency: How syntactic objects are
grouped together to form larger objects; based on
brackets or trees (like in our unlockable example)
– Order: How objects within a constituent are
ordered with respect to one another, and how
constituents are ordered with respect to one
another
Constituency: A first illustration
• At a first glance, question formation in English
appears to involve a rule like ‘move the
auxiliary to the front of the sentence’:
The cat is on the balcony.
Is the cat on the balcony?
• That is,
– there is a rule that moves auxiliaries to the front of
the sentence
– Based on this example, you might think the rule is
“move the first auxiliary to the front of the
sentence”
Note
• Pay close attention to what it means to
describe the auxiliary as moving. This
descrption covers a wide range of things that
happen in English:
– John is eating. --> Is John eating?
– Mary can surf. --> Can Mary surf?
– The twins were arrested. --> Were the twins
arrested?
• Let’s go back to what happens when these
questions are generated. Does the syntactic
system scan the declarative sentences from
left to right, and simply put the first auxiliary it
finds at the front of the sentence?
Questions, cont.
• But the linear rule doesn’t work…. Look;
here I added a relative clause on the
subject:
The cat that is on the balcony is chasing the mouse
Moving the first:
*Is the cat that on the balcony is chasing the mouse?
Moving the second:
Is the cat that is on the balcony chasing the mouse?
Complex structures
•
1.
2.
3.
4.

In examples of this type, the point was that the
auxiliary cannot be one that is ‘inside’ a complex
subject. What does this mean? Consider the
following sentences:
John is in the garden.
The woman is in the garden.
The woman with the red hat is in the garden.
The woman with the red hat that John was talking
to yesterday when he went to the store to buy
some batteries for his camera is in the garden
Notice that the Subject of the sentence may consist
of more than one word. The question formation rule
fronts the auxiliary that is in a special relation to the
subject.
Subjects, cont.
• The subjects in the sentences above are all
different from each other
• However, for the purposes of question
formation, they behave in exactly the same
way
• The rule for questions of this type ignores
subjects and their internal structure, treating
them all the same
• the rule isn’t stated linearly; it has to be
stated in terms of a complex organization of
the sentence
That is• The rule for fronting auxiliaries in questions
ignores auxiliaries that are inside the subject
• Rather, it picks out an auxiliary that is in a
special position in the constituent structure of
the sentence
• This is an example of how syntactic rules
care about that kind of structure, not linear
order
• We’ll see later how to point to the auxiliary
that gets moved
Phrases (and their heads)
• Consider again the subjects from the
examples above:
–
–
–
–
John
The woman
The woman with the red hat
The woman with the red hat that John was talking
to yesterday when he went to buy some batteries
for his camera
• In terms of sentence structure, each of these behaves in the
same way. They are grouped under the heading ‘NP’ for ‘Noun
Phrase’
• The idea here is that they are phrases that have properties of
the head (John, woman, woman, woman), independently of
other things that might be there
Other Phrases from Lexical
Categories
• The term lexical category is used in
syntax to describe the syntax of our
content words, + prepositions
• Thus we have for each lexical category
a phrase like the Noun Phrase ‘NP’:
– VP: verb phrase
– AP: adjective phrase
– PP: prepositional phrase
Phrases, cont.
• Each of these phrases has a head,
where the head is the important lexical
category that determines the properties
of the phrase:
– Sample VP: [ kick the ball]
– Sample AP: [ proud of his daughter]
– Sample PP: [ in the garden]
Phrases and other phrases
• Phrases can contain other phrases; this is the
property of language that allows us to start
with morphemes and assemble them into
larger and larger objects
• Example: Verb Phrase: [kick the ball]
– This VP is headed by the V(erb) kick
– Along with the V kick, we have the NP [the ball]:
VP
V
kick
NP
the ball
Constituency
• The organization of words and phrases into
larger units involves the notion of
constituency
• In the example above, we can represent this
either with tree diagrams or with brackets:
• [vp kick [np the ball] ]
(we can label the brackets)
• Constituents are things that can behave as
single units with respect to syntactic
processes
• Syntax cares about these phrases; it thus
deals with generalities about categories (not
individual words per se)
Tests
• Let’s take NPs, which we think are constituents
based on the question example. One test for
constituency involves substitution with pronouns; a
pronoun may only substitute for a constituent:
– Ok:
• The boy fed the cat.
• He fed her
– Not OK
• The boy from next door fed the cat with no tail.
• *He from next door fed her with no tail.
• In the bad example, the pronoun substitutes for a
subpart of the NP, not the entire NP
• [The boy from next door] is the subject
Substitution, again
• The substitution test can be used for other
cases as well; take the prepositional phrases:
• Ok:
– He put it on the table.
– He put it there.
• Not Ok:
– He put it on the table that’s by the door.
– *He put it there that’s by the door.
• The PP in the second example is [on the
table that’s by the door]. Thus there cannot
be substituted for the subpart on the table
Movement
• In the next lecture we will look at movement
in detail. For right now, note that movement is
another way of diagnosing constituent
structure:
• Ok:
– I like these apples.
– These apples, I like
• Not Ok:
– I like the apples that John bought.
– *The apples I like
that John bought.
• Ok:
– The apples that John bought I like
Movement and Constituency II
• The movement diagnostic applies to other
categories; here we take VPs
• Let’s take
– John fixed the car with a wrench
• Here we think that the VP is fix the car with a
wrench; the PP tells us how the action
described by the VP occurred
• Now consider:
– John said he would fix the car with a wrench
and…
• …[fix the car with a wrench] he did
Structure of larger units
• To this point, we have concentrated on
establishing that morphemes are
assembled into phrases
• Larger units like clauses and sentences
involve hierarchical structures as well
• They involve the arrangement of these
phrases with respect to one another
A simple sentence
• Consider:
The boy kicked the ball
• We have three lexical categories here;
the nouns boy, ball, and the verb kick
• This gives us three phrases
• Determining how these phrases are
organized into the sentence involves the
same reasoning we applied above