Part I: Basics and Constituency 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 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 NP kick 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. 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