1. Structure, Constituency & Movement
With Dr L.

2. Syntax is about the study of sentence structure.
The student loved his syntax assignments.
One way to describe this sentence is as a simple linear string of words.
We could describe the sentence as consisting of the words the, student, loved, his, syntax, assignments in that order.
The statement that sentence (1) consists of a linear string of words misses several important generalizations about the internal structure of sentences and how these structures are represented in our minds.
In point of fact we are going to claim that the words in sentence (1) are grouped into units (called constituents) and that these constituents are grouped into larger constituents, and so on until you get a sentence.

3. 2) a) The student loved his phonology readings.
b) The student hated his morphology professor.
Notice that on a purely intuitive level there is some notion that certain words are more closely related to one another.
For example, the word the seems to be tied more to the meaning of student than it is to loved or syntax.

4. Constituent Structure (Van Valin 2004; Adger 2002)
A constituent is a group of words that functions together as a unit. Consider a sentence like:
That bottle of water might have cracked open.
Intuitively, the string that bottle of water has a semantic cohesion that of water might doesn’t, even though both are just sequences of adjacent words in the sentence (one word is string adjacent, or just adjacent, to another if it is right next to it).
Constituents don’t float out in space. Instead they are embedded one inside another to form larger and larger constituents.
This is hierarchical structure.

6. [TP [NP [Det The][N Student]] [VP [V loved][NP [Det his][AdjP [A syntax]][N assignment]]]].

7. Notion of headedness and dependency
The notion of dependency is very important in our quest to understand constituent structure.
To make sense of a clause or sentence in written language or of a series of clauses in spontaneous speech, we have to pick out each head and the words that modify it.
There are two fundamental aspects that need emphasizing; (1) certain relationships hold between words whereby one word, the head, controls the other words, the modifiers.
(2) words are grouped into phrases and that groupings typically bring together heads and their modifiers.

8. Heads and modifiers tend to occur next to each other.
For instance, in English, nouns can be modified by various types of words and phrases – adjectives, prepositional phrases and relative clauses, not to mention words such as a, the, this and some. Examples are given below;
a. the house
b. the splendid house
c. the house on the hilltop
d. the house which they built out of reinforced concrete

9. Merger Operation (Radford et.al. 2009)
Speaker B: What is the government planning to do?
Speaker B: Reduce taxes.
the simplest way of forming a phrase is by joining two words together: for example, by combining the word reduce with the word taxes, we form the phrase reduce taxes.
Just as every compound word has a head, so too every syntactic phrase has a head word.
the head word of the phrase reduce taxes (above) is the verb reduce, and accordingly the overall phrase reduce taxes is said to be a verb phrase.
the phrase reduce taxes describes a particular kind of reduction activity (that of reducing taxes), not a particular kind of tax.

10. that the grammatical properties of a phrase like reduce taxes are determined by the verb reduce, and not by the noun taxes.
We can say that the verb reduce is the head of the phrase reduce taxes, and conversely that the phrase reduce taxes is a projection of the verb reduce (i.e. a larger expression whose head word is the verb reduce).
Since the head of the resulting phrase is the verb reduce, the phrase reduce taxes is a verb phrase: and in the same way that we abbreviate category labels like verb to V, we can abbreviate the category label verb phrase to VP.
The operation by which the two words are combined to form a phrase is called merger.

11. Recursion: Let’s return to consider the structure of to reduce taxes.
This is an infinitive phrase formed by merging the infinitival tense particle to with the verb phrase reduce taxes.
Using T as a convenient abbreviation for infinitival tense particle and TP as an abbreviation for infinitival tense phrase, we can say that the phrase to reduce taxes is a TP formed by merging the infinitival tense particle (T) to with the verb phrase (VP) reduce taxes and so has the structure:

14. What is implicit in our discussion up to this point is the idea that we can build up complex structures by successively merging pairs of categories to form ever larger phrases.
The resulting phrase try to reduce taxes is headed by the verb try, as we see from the fact that (like a typical verb phrase) it can be used after the infinitive particle to.

16. PRESENTATION
Constituency Tests

17. Movement Wh-Movement (Carnie 2006; Radford 1997; Mukaro 2012).
This is also generally referred to as question formation.
Radford (1997:18) defines this concept as a ‘parameter which determines whether expressions can be fronted (i.e moved to the front position of the overall interrogative structure containing them) or not.’
This is allowed and at times obligatory in English interrogative structures.

18. The wh-questions are the second type of questions after the yes/no questions.
a) Are you going to eat that bagel? *Pizza/ ✓yes
b) Do you drink whisky? *Scotch/ ✓no
c) Have you seen the spectrograph for that phoneme? *Syntactic tree/ ✓no
The answers to these questions cannot be other than yes, no, maybe or I don’t know.
Any other response sounds strange.

19. The other kind of question is called a wh-question.
These questions take their name from the fact that the words that introduce them (mostly) begin with the letters <wh> in English: who/whom, what, when, where, why, which, and how.
The responses to these kind of questions cannot be yes or no. Instead they must be informative phrases.
a) When did you do your syntax homework? *yes / ✓yesterday
b) What are you eating? *no/ ✓a bagel
c) How is Louise feeling? *yes/✓much better

20. There are two types of question formation operations, ie
There are two types of question formation operations, ie. wh- movement and wh- in situ.
Scholars argue that languages of the world are also classified according to this.
They also argue that a language can have either wh-movement or wh-in situ (cp Radford 1997).
This means that the notion of wh-movement is binary.

21. (a) What languages can you speak?
(b) Which one would you like?
(c) Who was she dating?
(d) Where are you going?
(e) You can speak what languages?
(f) You would like which one?
(g) She was dating who?
(h) You are going where?

22. In English, wh-in-situ questions are used primarily as echo questions, to echo and question something previously said by someone else.

23. She was dating Jack.
She was dating who?
Who was she dating?

27. Two different kinds of movement operation (indicated by the different colours) are involved above: the movement arrowed in (green) involves the familiar operation of head movement by which the bold-printed auxiliary was moves from the head T position of TP into the head C position of CP (T-to-C Movement);
(blue) involves movement of an italicised wh-expression from the complement position within VP into the specifier position in CP, and this very different kind of movement operation is known as wh-movement.