Transcript John gave Mary a mink coat.

SYNTAX
(Sentences and Sentence Combining)
by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen
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Resolution of Ambiguities:
Punctuation in Writing; Pausing & Intonation in Speech
• The Czarina of Russia saw a note on the
desk of Alexander III that read:
• “Pardon impossible; to be sent to Siberia.”
She changed it to read:
• “Pardon; impossible to be sent to Siberia!”
(Smith & Wilhelm 131)
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Commas (Pauses) to Resolve Ambiguity
• Woman! Without her, man is nothing.
• Woman without her man is nothing.
• Beth, thinks her employer, is attractive.
• Beth thinks her employer is attractive.
• Mr. Smith, the superintendent came in.
• Mr. Smith, the superintendent, came in.
(Smith & Wilhelm 131-132)
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Quotation Marks, Hyphens, and
Periods to Resolve Ambiguities
• “Brad,” called Miles, “Come here!”
• Brad called, “Miles, come here!”
• The tight-rope walker almost fell.
• The tight rope-walker almost fell.
• No man can be happy.
• No. Man can be happy.
(Smith & Wilhelm 132)
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Hypercorrections
• Between you and I….
• I didn’t know whom was going to be there.
• In one episode of Seinfeld, “George decides
that the way for him to succeed with
women…is to decide what to do and then do
the opposite.”
(Smith & Wilhelm 133)
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Smith & Wilhelm’s
Important Syntactic Concepts
Subject & Predicate
Active & Passive
Sentence
Compound
Agreement (S-V, Pro-Ant)
Singular & Plural
Participle (present-past)
Phrase & Clause
Antecedent
(Smith & Wilhelm 15)
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Sentence Combining:
Explain the parallelism.
• The purpose of school is to help students
mature, to prepare them for work and life,
and to teach them to be democratic citizens.
• In the cross-country race, Fiona ran into the
woods, through the ditch, around a pile of
wood chips, in between two lakes, across a
river, up the hill, down the valley, and into the
finish chute, where she received her award.
(Smith & Wilhelm 42)
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Sentence Combining:
Explain the parallelism.
• Stealing the ball, feeding passes to her teammates,
grabbing loose balls and rebounds, and shooting the
clutch three-pointer, Sarah Palin led her team to
victory!
• He stirs, beats, and pours the batter into a perfect
silver-dollar pancake!
• Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a
locomotive, stronger than gravity…it’s a bird, it’s a
plane, it’s Superman!
(Smith & Wilhelm 43)
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Sentence Combining
• He likes tennis. He likes baseball. He
likes Johnny Cash. (Are the combined
terms parallel?)
• Combine two sentences with: and, but,
therefore, however, and nevertheless.
(Smith & Wilhelm 40-41)
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BASIC SENTENCES:
• John swims well. (Subject, Predicate, Adverb)
• John saw Mary. (Subject, Predicate, Direct Object)
• Obama became President. (Subject, Predicate,
Subject-Complement)
• John gave Mary a mink coat. (Subject, Predicate,
Indirect Object, Direct Object)
• The country elected Obama President. (Subject,
Predicate, Direct Object, Object Complement)
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BASIC TRANSFORMATIONS
• John gave Mary a mink coat.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Question:
Did John give Mary a mink coat?
Negative:
John didn’t give Mary a mink coat.
Negative Question:
Didn’t John give Mary a mink coat?
Information Question:
Who gave Mary a mink coat?
Tag Question:
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John gave Mary a mink
coat, didn’t he?
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Who’s on First?
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John gave Mary a mink coat.
• Passive:
• Mary was given a mink coat by John. A mink
coat was given to Mary by John.
• Imperative:
• Give Mary a mink coat!
• Negative Imperative:
• Don’t give Mary a mink coat!
• Contrastive Stress:
• John gave Mary a mink coat.
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SPECIAL PROBLEMS
• Whiz Deletion: I met the girl (who was) doing the
dishes.
• Extraposition: For John to be nice is very difficult 
It is very difficult for John to be nice.
• Expletive: Thirty-seven students are in the room 
There are thirty-seven students in the room.
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EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 1
• Relative Clause as Substantive:
• He didn’t know who had the bicycle.
• Relative Clause as Modifier:
• Bill is the boy who has the bicycle.
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EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 2
• Present-Participle as Substantive:
• The young girl’s watching the children
surprised everybody.
• Present-Participle as Modifier:
• I met the girl (who was) watching the
children.
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EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 3
• Infinitive as Substantive:
• For John to be nice is very hard.
• Infinitive as Modifier:
• John came (in order) to be nice.
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EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 4
• That-Clause as Substantive:
• That John didn’t get angry was a
miracle.
• That-Clause as Modifier:
• I was surprised that John didn’t get
angry.
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• PRONOMINALIZATION AND DELETION:
• Possible only when information is
recoverable from linguistic context
(antecedant) or social context:
• John wanted Bill to buy the drinks.
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PARTS OF SPEECH
• Lexical Categories:
• Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb
• Grammatical Categories
• Preposition, Conjunction, Auxiliary, Expletive
• Pro-Form
• Relative Pronoun, Interrogative Pronoun,
Personal Pronoun, Indefinite Pronoun
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FUNCTIONS
• A Noun can function as a Subject,
Subject-Complement, Direct-Object,
Indirect-Object, Object-Complement
• A Verb can function as a Predicate
• A Verbal can function as a Modifier
• An Adjective and an Adverb can
function as a Modifier
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TENDENCIES OF LEXICAL VS.
GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES
• Can refer to things in the real world
• Can be stressed
• Cannot be guessed in a Cloze Test
• Can be inflected
• Can enter into compounds
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DO SUPPORT
• Look at the following English sentences:
•
•
•
•
John is doing his homework.
a. Is John doing his homework?
b. John isn’t doing his homework.
c. John is doing his homework.
• Notice that in each case something is happening to the
auxiliary verb. In sentence a, which is a question, the subject
and auxiliary are inverted. In sentence b, which is a negative,
“n’t” is attached to the auxiliary. And in sentence c, which is
stressed, the auxiliary is emphasized.
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• English has two regular auxiliary verbs:
• “have” (coming from perfect and passive
constructions)
• “be” (coming from progressive
constructions)
• When an English sentences has no auxiliary
verb, we need to provide one to form
questions, negatives, or stressed auxiliary.
• “Do” serves this function.
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• From the sentence “Michael read the
book.” we get:
• “Did Michael read the book.”
• “Michael didn’t read the book.”
• “Michael did read the book.”
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SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY
• Smoking grass can be nauseating.
• Dick finally decided on the boat.
• The professor’s appointment was shocking.
• The design has big squares and circles.
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• That sheepdog is too hairy to eat.
• Could this be the invisible man’s hair tonic?
• The governor is a dirty street fighter.
• I cannot recommend him too highly.
• Terry loves his wife and so do I.
• They said she would go yesterday.
• No smoking section available
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 164)
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TOPICALIZATION AND FOCUSING
TRANSFORMATIONS
• Sentences consist of Subjects and Predicates.
• The Subject is what we are talking about, and the
Predicate is what we say about it.
• Therefore the Subject contains old information (so
speakers will have something to talk about), and the
Predicate contains new information (so speakers will
be able to say something new).
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• Any transformation that moves a
constituent up into the Subject or
Topic position is called a
“Topicalization Transformation.”
• Any transformation that moves a
constituent down into the
Predicate position is called a
“Focusing Transformation.”
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• The Passive Transformation is both a Topicalization
Transformation and a Focusing Transformation.
• John saw the girl 
• The girl was seen by John
• “The girl” has undergone a Topicalization Transformation, and
“John” has undergone a Focusing Transformation.
• Note that this has not affected the truth value. “John saw the
girl” is true if and only if “The girl was seen by John.”
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• Notice that in a normal sentence the strongest stress
is on the last word. Because this is part of the
predicate or new information, it is important enough
to be stressed.
• But rather than moving the word to the end of the
sentence where it would be stressed, we can move
the stress (by voice or underlining) up to earlier
words in the sentence.
•
•
•
•
•
John saw ten girls on bicycles.
John saw ten girls on bicycles.
John saw ten girls on bicycles.
John saw ten girls on bicycles.
John saw ten girls on bicycles.
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THE INFINITY OF LANGUAGE
• This is the house that Jack built.
• This is the malt that lie in the house that Jack built.
• STUDENTS: Using embedded relative clauses
expand this sentence. Notice that this expansion
could go on until you run out of breath, run out of
daylight, or die.
• The same is true of adding “very” as a modifier.
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• Other examples of infinitely recursive sentences are “On the
tenth day of Christmas,” and “The Farmer in the Dell,” even
though these examples do end.
• “The Farmer in the Dell” example ends with “The cheese
stands alone.”
• This is the basis for Robert Cormier’s novel, I Am the Cheese,
which is about the Farmer family that is in the witness
protection program and has no friends.
• As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “And so it goes…” (NOTE: No
Final Period)
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NONSENSE IS NOT NONSENSE
• Grammars must be able to parse nonsense
sentences.
• Otherwise they must conclude that nonsense
sentences don’t have any meaning.
• Since all nonsense sentences have the same
meaning, zero, then they all mean the same
thing.
• However, the following sentences do not
mean the same thing:
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• *I never saw a horse smoke a dozen oranges.
(Martin Joos’s example)
• *Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at
the prom.
• *A verb crumpled the milk.
• *Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Noam
Chomsky’s example).
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 120)
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• Such sentences mean very different
things and have very different
functions in the English language.
• For example only “*Colorless green
ideas sleep furiously” is a
grammatically well formed sentence,
although all of the sentences
demonstrate incompatibilities of certain
words with other words in the same
sentence.
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• The asterisk in front of *”Colorless
green ideas sleep furiously” means that
the grammar doesn’t generate this
sentence. It should not occur in
English.
• Ironically, this “non-occurring”
sentence is the sentence most likely to
occur in many linguistics classrooms.
• Furthermore, it’s very poetic.
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SEMANTIC VS. SYNTACTIC PARSING
• You may have been told that a word gets its
meaning from its linguistic context.
• This is both true and not true. Words out of
context tend to be very ambiguous.
• What the linguistic context does is to
disambiguate a word. Social and cultural
contexts do the same thing.
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• As an example, consider the word
“ball.” The fact that this word is written
rather than spoken already disallows
another word that sounds the same
“bawl” meaning “to cry loudly.”
• If we add a “the” (more linguistic
context) we know the word is a noun
and not the verb “ball” meaning “to roll
paper or mud into a ball”
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• As we add more linguistic context we make the
word less and less ambiguous, so that “the beach
ball” is different from “the basketball” or “the
harvest ball” which is a dance.
• In the case of “Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously,” we’ve disambiguated the meanings down
to zero, because of feature incompatibilities.
• Something “colorless” can’t be “green.” Abstract
things like “ideas” can’t be any color, and can’t
sleep. “Sleeping” is usually not done “furiously,”
etc.
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• Like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” “‘Twas
brillig, and the slithy toves / Did Gire and gimble in
the wabe” is also syntactically well formed but
semantically anomalous.
• In the “Colorless green…” example the words are
incompatible; however in the “’Twas brillig” example
the content words don’t even exist.
• The function words “it,” “was” “and” “did,” and “in”
exist, but the content words “brillig,” “slithy”
“toves,” “gyre,” “gimble” and “wabe” are not
English words, and therefore their compatibility with
each other is a moot point.
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 121)
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!TOM SWIFTIES
• People who used to read the Tom Swift
novels invented a new type of joke:
• “My name is Tom, he said Swiftly.”
• This pattern is extended to:
• “I’d like my egg boiled,” she whispered
softly.”
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• !!
• “Get to the back of the boat!” he
shouted sternly.
• “Would you like another pancake?”
she asked flippantly.
• “She works in the mines,” he roared
ironically.
• (Nilsen & Nilsen 176)
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!!!The Whitest Kids Grammar
Lesson
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1G
yY3ZezA
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References # 1:
Chomsky, Noam. “Degrees of Grammaticalness.”
Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader, Eds. Bas Aarts, et. al.,
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004, 321325.
Clark, Virginia, Paul Eschholz, and Alfred Rosa.
Language: Readings in Language and Culture, 6th
Edition. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams.
“Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language.” An
Introduction to Language, 8th Edition. Boston, MA:
Thomson Wadsworth, 2007, 115-172.
Heny, Frank. “Syntax: The Structure of Sentences”
(Clark 189-224).
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References # 2:
Langacker, Ronald W. “Siscreteness.” Fuzzy Grammar:
A Reader, Eds. Bas Aarts, et. al., New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2004, 131-137.
Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen. Encyclopedia
of 20th Century American Humor. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 2000.
Truss, Lynne. Eats(,) Shoots & Leaves: The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation!. Aukland, New
Zealand: Gotham Books, 2004.
Smith, Michael W., and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. Getting It
Right: Fresh Approaches to Teaching Grammar,
Usage, and Correctness. New York, NY: Scholastic,
2007.
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