Syntax 1

In your free time Look at the diagram again, and try to understand it. Linguistics Sounds of language Grammar Meaning Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Pragmatics

我覺得這個教室太…冷! We can also say I don’t think we can really say 這個教室,我覺得太冷! I don’t think we can really say ?我把這個教室覺得太冷, because it sounds very strange And we certainly can’t say something like *我覺得太冷這個教室, although we might understand it if someone said it But if someone said *教室這個,太冷覺得我, we would probably have no idea what they were talking about This is because of syntactic rules governing Mandarin.

Why study syntax? Some answers: (It’s part of Linguistics) (Simon says we must) (There will be questions on it in the final exam) It’s part of the grammar of every language (what’s the other part?) And the grammar of a language is part of a native speaker’s linguistic knowledge (what’s the other part?)

Here is another reason for studying syntax Infinity of expressions There is an infinite number of possible utterances in every language It is obvious that all these utterances cannot be stored in our brains Our knowledge of a language consists of A finite number of words (the lexicon; the “dictionary in your head”), and Rules (the grammar of the language) It is the job of the syntactician (and the morphologist) to find out what these rules are

Language acquisition Everyone who can speak knows how to use the rules and it is amazing that children can do it so fast But nobody can really state exactly what the rules are! Understanding syntax (and morphology) can help researchers to understand how young children learn their native language

Universal grammar Theory of Chomsky UG has Principles, true of all languages All languages have the same underlying structure e.g. all languages have nouns and verbs and Parameters, whose setting varies from language to language English and Chinese SVO; Japanese SOV Spanish and Chinese pro-drop; English not pro-drop

All languages have constituents Take a simple sentence Johnny danced We can call the sentence S, and label the syntactic categories N and V S N Johnny V danced

Phrase structure grammar N and V aren’t always very good labels Johnny is similar to the handsome student, because they are both the same kind of constituent They are both Noun Phrases We can remove Johnny and add the handsome student, and the sentence structure is still similar S NP The handsome student VP danced

Different sentence, same constituents Now let’s add an object danced the lambada is the same kind of constituent as danced a VP You can swap danced for danced the lambada and the basic structure is the same NP The handsome student VP danced the lambada

What are the NP and VP? The frog ate the lizard. The frog sat on the lilypad. The fat frog ate the long lizard slowly. The fat frog with a lizard in its mouth sat on the lilypad. The fat frog who was sitting on the lilypad with a lizard in its mouth danced the lambada.

Phrase structure rules Now, you know this phrase structure rule: S  NP VP (a Sentence comprises a Noun Phrase followed by a Verb Phrase) Draw a tree for the phrase Emma drinks Here are two more phrase structure rules: VP  V NP NP  N Think about that carefully Now, draw a tree with more detail For the sentence Emma drinks whisky

Now let’s change the NP rule (First, DET means determiner Function words like the, a, this, several) NP  (DET) N That means a noun phrase can have a determiner, and it must have a noun Now you can diagram Johnny danced the lambada in a bit more detail than I did on the other slide (Remember: S  NP VP VP  V NP)

Now let’s change the NP rule again Such that we have S  NP VP VP  V NP NP  (DET) (ADJ) N Now you can diagram this sentence The unhappy book ate the green lambada (The sentence is syntactically well-formed, by the way)