Transcript From words to text

From words to text
Syntax
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Syntax is the study of the rules governing the
ways different constituents are combined to
form sentences in a language, or the study of
the interrelationships between elements in
sentence structures.
The dog bit the man.
The man bit the dog.
Syntactic relations
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Positional relation, or word order, refers to the
sequential arrangement of words in a language.
The teacher saw the student.
The students saw the teacher.
Den Lehrer sehe ich dort.
The teacher see I there.
Ich sehe den Lehrer dort.
Dort sehe ich den Lehrer.
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Positional relations are also the syntagmatic
relations, or Horizontal relations, or chain
relations.
Languages in the world can be classified by
their specific word order, or the positional
relations.
The are six possible types of languages.
SVO, VSO, SOV, OVS, OSV, VOS.
English is a SVO type.
Relation of substitutability (associative/
paradigmatic /vertical /choice relations)
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The relation of substitutability refers to classes or
sets of words substitutable for each other
grammatically in sentences with the same structure.
The man/ girl / teacher smiles.
The relation of substitutability also refers to
groups of more than one word which may be jointly
substitutable grammatically for a single word of a
particular set.
He went to Beijing yesterday / by plane / with his
best friend.
Relation of co-occurrence
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By co-occurrence one means that words of
different sets of clauses may permit, or require,
the occurrence of a word of another set or
class to form a sentence or a particular part of
a sentence.
The beautiful girl came in.
The best students have left.
Grammatical construction and its constituents
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Grammatical construction can be used to
mean any syntactic construct which is
assigned one or more conventional functions
in a language, together with whatever is
linguistically conventionalized about its
contribution to the meaning or use the
construct contains.
On the syntactic level we distinguish the
external and internal properties.
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The external syntax of a construction refers to
the properties of the construction as a whole.
Clause type, phrasal type.
The internal syntax of a construction is really a
description of the construction’s “make-up”,
with the terms such as “subject, predicate,
object, determiner, noun”.
Mary (subject) ate (verb) an apple (clausal
type).
This (determiner) book(noun): phrasal type
Immediate constituents
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Constituent is a part of a larger linguistic unit,
which is used to analyze the sentence structure
to indicate the linguistic unit.
S
NP
VP
Det
N
V
NP
Det N
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The
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boy
ate
the
apple
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Tree diagram. There are nodes in the diagram.
Mother nodes and daughter nodes as well as
sister nodes.
The analysis of a larger linguistic units into its
immediate constituents is called as Immediate
Constituents Analysis.
Another way to describe the analysis is
bracketing.
( (The) (boy) ) ( (ate) ( (the) (apple) ) ).
Endocentric constructions
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The construction whose distribution is
functionally equivalent to that of one or more
of its constituents, I.e., a word or a group of
words, which serves as a definable Center or
Head, usu. Noun/verb/adjective phrase.
Those important letters
Will be coming
Very beautiful
Exocentric construction
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A group of syntactically related words where
none of the words is functionally equivalent to
the group as a whole, that is, there is no
definable “center” or “head” inside the group,
usu. Basic sentence, prepositional phrase,
predicate construction.
The door opened.
From the house
Close the door
coordination
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A common syntactic pattern in English and
other language formed by grouping together
two or more categories of the same type with
the help of conjunction such as “and”, “nut”,
and “or”.
The boy and the girl
Go to the museum and visit the gallery
Down the stairs and through the field
Very important and quite urgent
subordination
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The process or result of linking linguistic
units so that they have different syntactic
status, one being dependent on the other, and
usually a constituent of the other. The
subordinate constituents are words which
modify the Head.
Two friends
My brother can drink wine.
Flying in the sky is the dream of men.
The coffee was hot beyond endurance.
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There are three types of subordinate
clauses
Complement clauses: He told me that he
was interviewed by the reporter that day.
Adjunct clauses: Tom finished his
homework before he went out for a rest.
Relative clauses: I never see that book that
your brother gave you as a present.
Syntactic function
It show the relationship between a linguistic form and
other parts of the linguistic pattern in which it is used.
 Subject refers to one of the nouns in the nominative
case.
 Pater filium amat.
 Patrem filius amat.
 IN English, the subject of a sentence is often said to be
“ the doer of the action”, while the object is “the
person or thing acted upon by the doer”.
1. Mary slapped John.
2. A dog bit John.
3. John was bitten by a dog.
4. John underwent major heart surgery.
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Therefore, “the doer of the action or the person or thing
acted upon” identify particular semantic roles, namely,
agent and patient.
 Grammatical subject vs. logical subject.
 John was bitten by a dog.
 John: grammatical subject(what occupies the
grammatical space before a noun), a dog: logical
subject (what is the doer of the action).
 The traditional definition of the subject: “what the
sentence is about”: (what now is known as topic)
1. Bill is very smart.
2. Bill I don’t trust.
3. As for Bill, I don’t think he can do it.
4. 苹果我吃了。
5. 张三死了父亲。
Characteristic of subject
1. Word order: Subject ordinarily precedes the verb
in the statement.
---Sally collects stamps.
 2. Pro-form: the first and third person pronouns in
English appears in a special form when the pronoun is
a subject.
---He loves me. I love him
 3. Agreement with verb: In the simple present tense,
an -s is added to the verb when a third person subject
is singular.
---She angers him.
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4. Content questions: If the subject is replaced by a
question word, the rest of the sentence remains
unchanged.
---John stole the picture.
---Who stole the picture?
---What did John steal?
 5. Tag question ( a Tag Question is used to seek
confirmation of a statement. ) The Tag Question always
contains a pronoun which refers back to the subject,
and never to any other element in the sentence.
---John loves Mary, doesn’t he?
---* John loves Mary, doesn’t she?
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predicate
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It refers to a major constituent of sentence
structure in a binary analysis in which all
obligatory constituents other than the subject
were considered together.
The boy is running.
My teacher saw that thief yesterday.
A predicate includes constituents such as
verb(saw), object (that thief), complement
(yesterday), etc.
object
Object refers to the receiver of goal of an action.
 Direct object and indirect object.
--My mother bought a book.
--My mother bought me a book.
 Modern linguists(Chomsky, Halliday) suggest that
object refers to such an item that it can become
subject in a passive transformation.
--John broke the vase.
 However, there are some nouns which cannot be
transformed into passive.
--He died yesterday.
--John was happy.
--He climbed the mountain .
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The relation between classes and functions
Classes and functions determine each other, but not in a
one-to-one relation.
 A class can perform several functions.
--The boys are playing football. (sub. & obj.)
--The Summer Palace. (Modifier)
--He came here last month. (adv.)
--He changed trains at New York. (complement)
 Similarly, a function can be fulfilled by several classes.
--The dog is barking. (nominal phrase)
--We will arrive at five. (pronoun)
--Only two-third of the population are workers. (numeral)
--To run fast can be dangerous. (verbal phrase)
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The traditional approach
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The traditional approach sees a sentence as a
sequence of words. Therefore,t eh study of
sentence formation naturally involves the
study of words.
The classification of words in terms of part of
speech (词类）, such as verbs, nouns,
adjectives.
The identification of functions of words in
terms of subject, predicate, object and so on.
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The part of speech and functions are called
categories (范畴）
The category of nouns: number, gender,
case
The category of verbs: tense, aspect, voice
Number, gender, case
Number: category of noun and pronoun
－A book, some books
－I, we, he, they
 The number of nouns also influence English
verbs: therefore, 3rd person singular present
tense should be inflected: -s
－He speaks English.
－Two forms in English: singular, plural
Chinese:们 俩 仨， 桌子们，三个教师们
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Gender: a category of nouns and pronouns
English: on the whole natural: determined by
the biological sex of the creature: lion-lioness;
waiter-waitress.
In other languages, gender is not related to the
biological sex of the creature. German, French,
Latin
Case:Latin grammar
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Nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive,
dative, ablative.
Nominative: I am a student.
Vocative: 老师－教师
Accusative: him, her, them, us.
Genitive: Tom’s, the book of Tom
Dative: give him a book, give a book to him
Ablative: He opened the door with a key.
He went away from the theater.
Tense and aspect
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Time and tense:
Time: a universal concept, which every
language is capable of expressing.
Tense: a linguistic concept, which varies from
language to language.
Tense and aspect:
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Tense: deictic, indicating time relative to the
time of utterance. Therefore, only two tense
exist: past and present. Future does not use the
same ways of expression.
I see her. I saw her. I will /am going to see her.
Aspect: not deictic, the time indicated is not
relative to the time of utterance, but relative to
the time of another event described, or
implied, in the narrative
Aspect: reflect the perspective to view an event
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Perfect-imperfect
Perfect: the completion of an action
Imperfect: the duration without completion
I read a book.
I was reading a book.
The English perfect: the perspective to view
an event that happened outside of the event
The English imperfect: the perspective to
view the vent when it takes place.
Concord and government
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agreement (Concord): also known as agreement, is the
requirement that the forms of two or more words in a
syntactic relationship should agree with each other,
shall also be characterized by the same
paradigmatically marked category (categories).
Some book. a students. That men speaks Chinese.
Government: the control over the form of some words
by other words in certain syntactic constructions.
A word of a certain class determines the form of others
in terms of certain category. (Governor, governed)
The pronouns after a verb or a preposition should be in
the accusative form.
I saw her. I heard of her.
Phrase, clause, sentence
Phrase is a single element of structure containing more
than one word, and lacking the subject-predicate
structure typical of clauses.
1. A phrase must be a group of words which form a
constituent.
2. A phrase is lower on the grammatical hierarchy than
clauses.
--the three tallest girls (nominal phrase)
--has been doing (verbal phrase)
--to the beautiful door (prepositional phrase)
 Word group: the extension of word of a particular
class by way of modification with its main features of
the class unchanged.
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clause
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A constituent with its own subject and predicate, if it
is included in a larger sentence, is a Clause.
Finite clause and Infinite clause (infinitive phrase,
participial phrase, gerundial phrase).
It’s’s great for a man to be free.
Having finished his homework, Tom began to
clean his room.
John being away, Mary had to take up all the
housework.
All our savings gone, we had to look for jobs.
sentence
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Sentence is the minimum part of language that
expresses a complete thought.
Classification of sentences
Traditional approach:
simple Tom is a boy.
Non- complex
simple
compound
Tom is the boy that I
mentioned yesterday.
I have never seen him or
heard from him.
Functional approach
Indica- Interro- Yes- Do you know him?
tive
gative no
Wh- Where have you been?
Declara I have never seen him.
-tive
Impera jussive Leave!
-tive
optative God bless you!
May they get home safely!
Bolinger (1969)
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Nominal + intransitive verbal: Mother cried.
Nominal +copula+complement: Mother is
young.
Nominal + transitive verbal +nominal:
Mother loves dad.
Nominal + transitive verbal +nominal
+nominal: Mother gave a book.
There + existential +nominal: There is time.
Quirk et al. (1972)
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SVC: Mary is kind/ a student.
SVA: Mary is here/in the room.
SV: The child is smiling.
SVO: Somebody caught the ball.
SVOC: We have proved him wrong/ a fool.
SVOA: I put the plate on the table.
SVOO: She gives me expensive presents.
recursiveness
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It mainly means that a phrasal constituent can
be embedded within another constituent
having the same category. It includes
coordination, subordination, conjoining
(John bought a bag and his wife bought a
purse), embedding (I saw the man who had
visited the park last year.), hypotactic (The
man ran away when the dog barked.) and
paratactic (I came; I saw; I conquered.).
The core of creativity of language.
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Conjoining: the process where one clause is
coordinated or conjoined with another
John bought a bag and his wife bought a purse
Embedding: the means by which one clause is
included in the sentence in syntactic
subordination
The subordinate clauses are complement, adjunct
(adverbial), and relative clause
I saw the man who had visited you. (relative)
I don’t know whether I can do it. (complement)
If it rains tomorrow, I will not go there. (adverbial)
Beyond sentence