1. Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2-121C, group b Lecture 3
Eleni Miltsakaki
AUTH
Spring 2006

2. Morphology review What is the subject matter of morphology?
The study of the structure of words
What is a word?
An arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning
What is a morpheme?
Building blocks of complex words

3. Morphology review Explain the following distinctions:
Content words and function words
Content concepts, open class
Function grammatical function, closed class
Bound and free morphemes
Free: independent words bound: affixes
Derivational morphology and inflectional morphology
Derivational: root+bound morpheme=new word with new meaning
Inflectional: root+bound morpheme= new word with marking of some grammatical aspect

4. Morphology review Word formation
How are new words created? Give an example of each of the following categories
Word formation rules (derivations)
Coining
Compounding
Blending
Acronyms
Clippings
Backformation
Conversion

5. Morphology review The hierarchical structure of words
What’s the evidence?
How do we represent the hierarchical structure of words?
Think of an ambiguous word and represent the meanings in tree diagrams

6. Syntax What is syntax? The study of sentence structure
Video: linear order

7. Grammaticality
Grammatical sentences are sequences of words that conform to the rules of syntax.
Ungrammatical sentences violate syntactic rules

8. Grammaticality judgment
Language speakers have intuitions about grammaticality
The boy found the ball
The boy found quickly
The boy found in the house
The boy found the ball in the house

9. Grammaticality judgment
The ability to make grammaticality judgments does NOT depend on:
Having heard the sentence before
Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the prom
Whether a sentence is meaningful or not
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
The truth of sentences
The earth is flat

10. Grammaticality judgment
Ungrammaticality
You may understand the meaning of a sentence and still judge it to be ungrammatical
*The boy quickly in the house the ball found

11. Ambiguity Syntax can also account for multiple meanings ---AMBIGUITY
Like words, sentences have hierarchical structure

12. Ambiguity The girl saw the man with the telescope.
We can “tree” the ambiguity (will do so shortly after we look at sentence structure).

13. Practice Paraphrase to show the ambiguity
The design has big squares and circles
Terry loves his wife and so do I
No smoking section available
Dick finally decided on the boat
The sheepdog is too hairy to eat

14. Sentence structure
Syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence and how the words are grouped
The child found the puppy
How many groupings are possible?

15. Tree diagram

16. Tree terminology Syntactic trees are upside down The root of the tree
The leaves of the tree
The nodes of the tree
Mother-daughter relation
Siblings: sister-sister relation
Dominate relation
Immediately dominate relation

17. Constituents The natural groupings of a sentence are constituents
Our knowledge of the constituent structure can be represented with a tree

18. Syntactic categories
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another retaining grammaticality is called a syntactic category
A police officer found the puppy in the garden
Your neighbor found the puppy in the garden
This yellow cat found the puppy in the garden
They found the puppy in the garden
What syntactic category is the subject in the above sentences?
Can you think of other syntactic categories?

19. Syntactic categories S: sentence NP: noun phrase VP: verb phrase
PP: prepositional phrase
AP: adjective phrase
N:noun, V: verb, P:preposition, A: adjective, D: determiner, Adj: adjective, Adv: adverb, Aux: auxiliary verb

20. Diagnostics for constituents
Diagnostics for phrasal constituents
Substitution/Pronoun substitution
Mary loves apples.
My sister loves everything she sees.
Black cats detest green beans. They detest them.
Questions
What do you love? The cats/Cats with long fluffy tails.
Where did Ali Baba go? To New York/On a long journey.
Relocation (movement)
I fed the cats. The cats, I fed.
It-cleft focus
I fed the cats. It was the cats that I fed.

21. Phrase structure trees
Constituents can be represented graphically as nodes in a tree
A tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a phrase structure tree
They represent (encode) three aspects of speakers’ syntactic knowledge:
The linear order of words
The groupings of words into syntactic categories
The hierarchical structure of syntactic categories

22. Practice Draw phrase structure trees for the following sentences:
The puppy found the child
A frightened passenger landed the damaged plane
The house on the hill collapsed in the wind
The ice melted
The children put the toy in the box
The old tree swayed in the wind

23. Are any strings represented as constituents that shouldn't be?
Are any strings not represented as constituents that should be?
Are any of the trees misleading in other respects?

24. Heads and complements
Phrase structure rules show relations between the members of the phrase
A VP, for example, contains a V which is the head of the phrase
The VP may contain other categories but the entire phrase refers to what the head refers
E.g. Put the puppy in the garden refers to the event of ‘putting’
The other constituents in the phrase are complements

25. Heads and complements
Every phrasal category has a head of its same syntactic type:
VP: V
NP: N
PP: P etc.

26. Practice Find the head and the complements of the following NPs
The man with the telescope
The destruction of Rome
A person worthy of praise
A boy who pitched a perfect game

27. Complement selection
Whether a verb takes more than one complement depends on the properties of the verb
The verb find is a transitive verb and requires an NP direct object complement
This information, selection, is included in the lexical entry of the word and explains for the grammaticality judgment of the following:
The boy found the ball
*They boy found quickly
*The boy found in the house

28. Complement selection
Sleep is intransitive, it cannot take an NP complement
Michael slept
*Michael slept a fish

29. Complement selection
Think takes (selects) a clausal complement. Tell selects for and NP and an S, feel selects an AP or an S
I think that Sam won the race
I told Sam that Michael was on the bicycle
They felt strong as oxen
They feel that they can win
*They feel

30. Complement selection
It’s not only verbs that have selectional restrictions
Belief selects a PP or an S
Sympathy selects a PP
Tired selects a PP etc

31. The infinity of language
aka recursion
The number of sentences in a language is infinite
This is because sentences can be lengthened by various means
The heart of this linguistic property is the ability to generate recursive structures

32. The infinity of language
The is the farmer sowing the corn
that kept the cock that crowned in the morn,
that waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
that married the man all tattered and torn,
that kissed the maiden all forlorn,
that milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
that tossed the dog,
that worried the cat,
that killed the rat,
that ate the malt,
that lay in the house that Jack built

33. Infinity of language
The girl with the feather on the ribbon on the brim
Tree

34. Infinity of language
The repetition of categories within categories is common in all languages and explains the infinity of language
Our brain capacity is finite and able to store only a finite number of categories and rules for their combination
These finite means place an infinite set of sentences at our disposal