An overview

 The knowledge of sentences and their structure.  Syntactic rules include: ◦ The grammaticality of sentences ◦ Word order ◦ Hierarchical organization of sentences ◦ Grammatical relations such as subject and object ◦ Whether different structures have different meanings or the same meanings

1. The boy found the ball. 2. The boy found quickly. 3. The boy found in the house. 4. The boy found the ball in the house. 5. Lisa slept the baby. 6. Lisa slept soundly. Sentences are not random strings of words. They must conform to specific patterns.

 Grammaticality judgments do not depend on having heard the sentence before: Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the party.  Grammaticality judgments do not depend on meaning: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. *Furiously sleep ideas green colorless

 Major word classes  Nouns  Verbs  Adjectives  Adverbs  Sentence with only major word classes: I wrote song girlfriend I honoring relationship very much

 Determiners  A, the, this, my, three, several ◦ Are used to “determine” a noun. ◦ Which noun or how many nouns detN det N det N det N A student in my class visited the library for three hours

 Prepositions  In, on, by, with  Indicate some relationship between noun and some other element in sentence. P det N P det N The information is in the book on the table. P det NP N I’m thrilled with the book by Chomsky.

 Auxiliaries  Might, should, will, be, have, can etc.  Help or add meaning to a verb You might teach word classes someday, so you should know them well. We are enjoying linguistics because we have been studying word classes.

 Conjunctions  And, or, but, if, because  They connect (conjoin) nouns, phrases, clauses I like linguistics and grammar, but I don’t like the teacher nor my class mates.

 Nouns and Noun phrases  Syntactic test how to identify nouns:  Her purple hair disgusted her mother. phrase detadj_______ NP

 For each sentence below, underline the NP that is the complete subject and circle the word that is the single subject. The pathetic team lost another game. Our players drink to much beer. The smartest exchange students come to MUIC.

 Verbs and verb phrases  Meaning based: action  Syntactically: expresses what is said about the subject: Predicate  Her purple hair disgusted her mother. NP VP

Phrasal categoryFormFunction NPHeaded by a nounSubject of sentence VPHeaded by a verbPredicate of sentence NP detadjN The friendly person V VP detN NP asked a question

NP detadjN The friendly person V VP detN NP asked a question S

 Verbs and verb phrases Quick exercise  In each of the sentences below, underline the entire predicate (VP) and circle the head verb of that VP The pathetic team lost another game. Our players drink to much beer. The smartest exchange students come to MUIC.

 Adjectives ◦ Modify nouns My favorite dog is hungry.  Adjectives can have a predicative function or an attributive function.

 For the most part any adjective can be used both predicatively and attributively. There are, however, exceptions. Create sentences to determine whether the adj. can be used in both or only one way:  Large  Asleep  previous

 Adverbs  Often considered the ‘garbage’ category Unfortunately, some students drive very quickly and create extremely dangerous roads.  unfortunately: sentence adverb  quickly: manner adverbs  very: degree adverbs

 Quick exercise  Using functional clues, determine the subcategory (type) of each of the underlined adverbs in the sentence below. Use SA, MA, DA  Hopefully, we’ll learn adverbs completely¹ by the time this highly difficult chapter is completely² finished.  hopefullycompletely¹highly  completely²