Nama : Siti Zulaecha

NIM : 2019260018
Kelas : PBI 4A

Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language

It is an astonishing fact that any speaker of any human language can produce and understand an
infinite number of sentences. Example:

The kindhearted boy had many girlfriends.

The kindhearted, intelligent boy had many girlfriends.
The kindhearted, intelligent, handsome boy had many girlfriends.

What the Syntax Rules Do

The rules of syntax combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences. Among
other things, the rules specify the correct word order for a language. For example,
English is a Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) language. A second important role of the
syntax is to describe the relationship between the meaning of a particular group of
words and the arrangement of those words. The rules of the syntax also specify the
grammatical relations of a sentence, such as subject and direct object. In other words,
they provide the information about who is doing what to whom. This information is
crucial to understanding the meaning of a sentence. Syntactic rules also specify other
constraints that sentences must adhere to. The syntax rules specify that a verb like found
must be followed by something, and that something cannot be an expression like
quickly or in the house but must be like the ball. The verb sleep patterns differently than
find in that it may be followed solely by a word like soundly but not by other kinds of
phrases such as the baby. That grammatical judgments are neither idiosyncratic nor
capricious, but are determined by rules that are shared by all speakers of a language.

When we group them like this, the adjective old modifies both men and women.

[old [men and women]]

 The rules of syntax allow both of these groupings, which is why the expression is ambiguous.
The following hierarchical diagrams illustrate the same point:

old men and

g
women old men and women

What the Syntax Rules Do

In the first structure old and men are under the same node and hence old modifies
men. In the second structure old shares a node with the entire conjunction men and
women, and so modifies both.
This is similar to what we find in morphology for ambiguous words such as
unlockable, which have two structures, corresponding to two meanings, as discussed in
chapter 3.
Many sentences exhibit such ambiguities, often leading to humorous results. Consider the
following two sentences, which appeared in classified ads:

For sale: an antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers.
We will oil your sewing machine and adjust tension in your home for $10.00.

In the first ad, the humorous reading comes from the grouping [a desk] [for lady with
thick legs and large drawers] as opposed to the intended [a desk for lady] [with thick
legs and large drawers], where the legs and drawers belong to the desk. The second case
is similar.
Because these ambiguities are a result of different structures, they are instances of
structural ambiguity.
Contrast these sentences with:

This will make you smart.

The two interpretations of this sentence are due to the two meanings of smart— “clever”
or “burning sensation.” Such lexical or word-meaning ambiguities, as opposed to
structural ambiguities, will be discussed in chapter 5.
What Grammaticality Is Not Based On
Importantly, a person’s ability to make grammaticality judgments does not depend on having
heard the sentence before. You may never have heard or read the sentence. Language is creative
—not creative in the sense that we are all poets, which we are not, but creative in that none of us
is limited to a fixed repertoire of expressions. Rather, we can exploit the resources of our
language and grammar to produce and understand a limitless number of sentences embodying a
limitless range of ideas and emotions.

We showed that the structure of a sentence contributes to its meaning. However,

grammaticality and meaningfulness are not the same thing, as shown by the following sentences:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. A verb crumpled the

milk.

Although these sentences do not make much sense, they are syntactically well formed. They
sound funny, but their funniness is different from what we find in the following strings of
words:

*Furiously sleep ideas green colorless. *Milk the crumpled verb

a.

There are also sentences that we understand even though they are not well formed according
to the rules of the syntax. For example, most English speakers could interpret

*The boy quickly in the house the ball found.

Although they know that the word order is incorrect

Some sentences are grammatical even though they are difficult to interpret because they
include nonsense words, that is, words with no agreed-on meaning. This is illustrated by the
following lines from the poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
 These lines are grammatical in the linguistic sense that they obey the word order and other
constraints of English. Such nonsense poetry is amusing precisely because the sentences comply
with syntactic rules and sound like good English. Ungrammatical strings of nonsense words are
not entertaining:

*Toves slithy the and brillig ’twas wabe the in gimble and
gyre did

Grammaticality also does not depend on the truth of sentences. If it did, lying would be
impossible.

The syntactic rules that permit us to produce, understand, and make grammaticality judgments
are unconscious rules. The grammar is a mental grammar, different from the prescriptive
grammar rules that we are taught in school.

Sentence Structure
Suppose we wanted to write a template that described the structure of an Eng lish sentence,
and more specifically, a template that gave the correct word order for English. We might come
up with something like the following:

Det—N—V—Det—N

Sentences have a hierarchical organization; that is, the words are grouped into natural units.

Constituents and Constituency Tests

The natural groupings or parts of a sentence are called constituents. Various linguistic tests
reveal the constituents of a sentence. The first test is the “stand alone” test. If a group of words
can stand alone, they form a constituent.
The second test is “replacement by a pronoun.” Pronouns can substitute for natural groups. In
answer to the question “Where did you find a puppy?” a speaker can say, “I found him in the
park.” Words such as do can also take the place of the entire predicate found a puppy, as in
“John found a puppy and Bill did too.” If a group of words can be replaced by a pronoun or a
word like do, it forms a constituent.
 A third test of constituency is the “move as a unit” test. If a group of words can be moved,
they form a constituent. For example, if we compare the following sentences to the sentence
“The child found a puppy,” we see that certain elements have moved:

As before, our knowledge of the constituent structure of a sentence may be graphically

represented by a tree diagram. The tree diagram for the sentence “The puppy played in the
garden” is as follows:

the puppy played

in

the garden

Speakers do not represent sentences as strings of words but rather in terms of

constituents. In these experiments, subjects listen to sentences that have clicking
noises inserted into them at random points. In some cases the click occurs at a
constituent boundary, and in other sentences the click is inserted in the middle of a
constituent. The subjects are then asked to report where the click occurred. There
were two important results: (1) Subjects noticed the click and recalled its location
best when it occurred at a major constituent boundary (e.g., between the subject and
predicate); and (2) clicks that occurred inside the constituent were reported to have
occurred between constituents. In other words, subjects displaced the clicks and put
them at constituent boundaries. These results show that speakers perceive sentences
in chunks corresponding to grammatical constituents.

Syntactic Categories
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality is
called a syntactic category. Syntactic categories are part of a speaker’s knowledge of syntax.

Lexical and Functional Categories

 Syntactic categories include both phrasal categories such as NP, VP, AdjP (adjective
phrase), PP (prepositional phrase), and AdvP (adverbial phrase), as well as lexical categories
such as noun (N), verb (V), preposition (P), adjective (Adj), and adverb (Adv). Each lexical
category has a corresponding phrasal category. Following is a list of lexical categories with
some examples of each type:

Lexical categories
Noun (N) puppy, boy, soup, happiness, fork, kiss, pillow,
cake, cupboard
Verb (V) find, run, sleep, throw, realize, see, try, want,
believe
Preposition (P) up, down, across, into, from, by, with
Adjective red, big, candid, hopeless, fair, idiotic, lucky
(Adj)
Adverb (Adv) again, carefully, luckily, never, very, fairly
Lexical categories typically have particular kinds of meanings associated with them. For
example, verbs usually refer to actions, events, and states (kick, marry, love); adjectives to
qualities or properties (lucky, old); common nouns to general entities (dog, elephant, house); and
proper nouns to particular individuals (Noam Chomsky) or places (Dodger Stadium) or other
things that people give names to, such as commercial products (Coca-Cola, Viagra). But the
relationship between grammatical categories and meaning is more complex than these few
examples suggest. For example, some nouns refer to events (marriage and destruction) and
others to states (happiness, loneliness). We can use abstract nouns such as honor and beauty,
rather than adjectives, to refer to properties and qualities. In the sentence “Seeing is believing,”
seeing and believing are nouns but are not entities. Prepositions are usually used to express
relationships between two entities involving a location (e.g., the boy is in the room, the cat is
under the bed), but this is not always the case; the prepositions of, by, about, and with are not
locational. Because of the difficulties involved in specifying the precise meaning of lexical
categories, we do not usually define categories in terms of their meanings, but rather on the basis
of their syntactic distribution (where they occur in a sentence) and morphological characteristics.
For example, we define a noun as a word that can occur with a determiner (the boy) and that can
take a plural marker (boys), among other properties.
Phrase Structure Trees and Rules
These labels show that the entire sentence belongs to the syntactic category of S (because the
S-node encompasses all the words). It also reveals that the child and a puppy belong to the
category NP, that is, they are noun phrases, and that found a puppy belongs to the category VP
or is a verb phrase, consisting of a verb and an NP. It also reveals the syntactic category of each
of the words in the sentence.

NP 2 VP

Det2 2N
NP

Theg childgfoundg Det2N

ag puppyg

A tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a phrase structure tree or a
constituent structure tree. This tree shows that a sentence is both a linear string of words and a
hierarchical structure with phrases nested in phrases. Phrase structure trees (PS trees, for short)
are explicit graphic representations of a speaker’s knowledge of the structure of the sentences of
his language. PS trees represent three aspects of a speaker’s syntactic knowledge: