The structure of sentences

Grammar
What is syntax?

Nida and Taber

Kernels
1) John ran quickly SVadv
2) John hit Bill SVobj
3) John gave Bill the ball SVinddirobj
4) John is in the house SVpredicate
5) John is sick SVcomplement
6) John is a boy SVnoun
7) John is my father SVpossessive
What is syntax?

Kernels
= not basis for direct translation

= clearest statements of relations

= forms most closely corresponding with
expression likely to occur in receptor language
What is syntax?
Leech
She is in London (now)
She is a student (in London) (now)
John heard the explosion (from his office)
(when he was locking the door)
Universities (gradually) became famous (in
Europe) (during the Middle Ages)
They ate the meat (hungrily) (in their hut)
(that night)
He offered (her) some chocolates (politely)
(outside the hall) (before the concert)
They elected him chairman (without
argument) (in Washington) (this morning)
The train has arrived (quietly) (at the
 britannica
 Synthetic language, any language in which syntactic relations
within sentences are expressed by inflection (the change in
the form of a word that indicates distinctions of tense, person,
gender, number, mood, voice, and case) or
by agglutination (word formation by means of morpheme, or
word unit, clustering).

 Analytic language, any language that uses specific

grammatical words, or particles, rather than inflection (q.v.), to
express syntactic relations within sentences.
An analytic language is commonly identified with an isolating
language (q.v.), since the two classes of language tend to
coincide.
 Þӕm scipum to the shippes
 SVO
 VSO
Questions
Should-clauses
Should the train be late,
 OVS
 Neither do I
 Not only was the house cold, it was also..
 There on the hill rose a church…..
Subject
 Objet of verb or proposition

Old dative form

 WORD
 PHRASE = SINTAGMA
 CLAUSE = proposizione
 SENTENCE = FRASE, periodo
The grammar of simple
phrases
Exercise
None of the following strings of words
follows the rules of English syntax.
Change the order of each so that it is
a grammatical sentence.
a. Has been eating the chocolate cake
the old man.
b. The old man the chocolate cake has
been eating.
c. Has been eating the old man the
chocolate cake.
Three ways to identify
phrases
 Movement
 Meaning
 Substitution
 1. Movement: What moves
together is a phrase.
a. The old man ate the chocolate cake.
b. What the old man ate was the chocolate cake.
c. It was the chocolate cake that the old man ate.
d. The chocolate cake was eaten by the old man.
MARKED OPTIONS
a. *It was man the chocolate cake which the old
ate.
b. *The the cake was eaten by chocolate old man.
2. Meaning: What means
together is a phrase.
Consider the following groups:
a. the the old
b. cake which the
c. the leathery
d. in the
e. cake ate
f. large evil
Can you figure out the meaning of
these sequences of words?
3. Substitution: What substitutes
for a phrase is also a phrase.

Exercise
Look at the following sentence:
a. Davina sold petrol yesterday at the corner store.
Substitute another phrase for each of the underlined
phrases.
The functional
constituents of
phrases
 Heads and modifiers
Phrases have heads.
Heads determine the grammatical
properties of the phrase.
Grammatical properties are
distributional properties,
i.e. where units come relative to one
another.
Exercise

Look at the distribution of in a train.

a. Granville met his beloved in a train.

b. You always get an odd range of
smells in a train.
c. The emergency cord in a train should
not be touched without good reason.
 Now look at the distribution of a train.
a. *Granville met his beloved a train.
b. *You always get an odd range of
smells a train.
c. *The emergency cord a train should
not be touched without good reason.
 Which grammatical category determines the
distribution of in a train?
More about heads

Heads are normally obligatory.

Heads are semantically central.
Non-heads are modifiers.
The structure of
noun phrases
Noun phrase

 Examples
 a. the dog
 b. a moderately short programme
 c. some very old cars
 d. six bags of wholemeal flour
 e. very dirty marks on the walls
Representing the structure of
noun phrases

noun phrase

noun

the dog
a moderately short programme

noun phrase

adjective phrase noun

adverb adjective
a moderately short programme
Constituents of noun phrases

 determiners
 articles
 the (definite article)
 a (indefinite article)
 demonstratives:
 this, that, these, those
 numerals
 Cardinal, e.g. 1, 2, 3
 Ordinal, e.g first, second, third
 quantifiers
 e.g. all, some, many, most, few
 All/Both the cars (*the both cars)
 *The some red boats
More constituents of noun
phrases

 adjective phrases
 e.g. the very red bicycle
 possessives
 the bishop's residences
 a singer's vocal cords
 the new committee's duties
 noun phrases in determiner position
 Note: the apostrophe
 a singer's vocal cords are functional
Representing the structure of
possessives

Possessive

Noun phrase 's/'

More constituents of noun
phrases
 prepositional phrases
 e.g. the man in the moon
Pronouns

 have noun phrases as antecedents.

e.g. The snake slid though the grass as it tried to
escape.
 Pronouns agree with their antecedents in number
and gender.
e.g. grandmother ... she
uncle Jim ... he
the lawnmower ... it
the team ... they
 Pronouns take the case of their place in the syntax
of the sentence.
e.g. He saw her bike near them.
 Another linguistic phenomenon indicative towards
concision:
 string of adjectives and nouns or strings of just nouns
 form lexically–dense noun phrases.
 Asindeton on nouns in potentially infinitive sequence
are constrained by the Italian syntax into containing
verbs, adjectivals and complex adverbials and
prepositional phrases.
 Premodification of nouns in English;
 postmodification in Italian:
 •Environmental Department Air Pollution Report
Findings Scandal.
 Lo scandalo suscitato dai risultati del rapporto del
Ministero dell’Ambiente sull’inquinamento dell’aria.
 Pannello operatore = Operator panel
 Newspeper headlines and technical writing provides
endless examples of multivariate or unvariate strings:
 In multivariate strings, each element before the head
noun has a different function.
 • those [Dem. deitic] two [Numeral] beautiful [Adj
epithet] film N classifier stars N
 Those two beautiful film stars
 In univariate strings, each element before the head
noun has the same function,
 i.e. that of modifying the noun that follows it.
 1) Overseas (AdJ) immigrants entry limit controversy (4
Nouns)
 2) Opera donation scandal 3)
 Hospital doctors strike row
 In unvariate strings Noun jusxtaposed modifying one
another in succession.
 There is a recurrence of the same linguistic function.
The structure of
adjective phrases
Adjective phrase

 Examples
a. quite old
b. moderately expensive
c. quite moderately long in the arms
Representing the structure of
adjective phrases

adjective phrase

adverb phrase adjective

degree adverb

quite old
Constituents of adjective
phrases
 Modifiers
 adverb phrases (including degree adverbs)
 e.g. moderately expensive

 prepositional phrases
 e.g. long in the arm
Adjectives in attributive and
predicate position
 attributive position, e.g. the red sky
 sequencing restrictions
 predicate position, e.g. The sky is red.

 A small, blue car

 The car is small and blue
 Prepositional phrase = no in attributive position
 A very long in the arms warrior
 Application
The choice between attributive and
predicative adjectives can have an
impact on descriptive writing. Look, for
example, at the following description of
an Icelandic warrior.
...he was tall, strong, and skilled in arms, even-
tempered and very shrewd, ruthless with his
enemies and always reliable in matters of
importance.
from Njal's Saga
translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann
Pálsson
 Exercise

Identify the adjective phrases in the following passage and

underline their heads.
In other ways he was a very hard man. He was
big and rather clumsy-looking, with big heavy
bones and long flat muscles, and he had a big,
expressionless, broken-nosed face. Yet he
moved with surprising ease and silence as well
as having a gift for stillness.
from A Soldier's Tale
by M.K. Joseph
Adverb phrases

 adverb as head
 very similar to adjective phrases
 can together be called AP

 quite moderately
 very quickly
 fast
The structure of
prepositional phrases
Prepositional phrases

 prepositions as head
 modifiers
 noun phrases, e.g. in a room
 prepositional phrases, e.g. up on the plateau
 degree adverbs, e.g. just inside the door
Representing the structure of
prepositional phrases

prepositional phrase

preposition noun phrase

determiner noun

in the garden
Exercise

Find the prepositional phrases in the following extract.

At first it seemed there was no one
about. Then he saw a single figure, a girl,
far down the beach, close to where the
surf was breaking, sitting under a beach
umbrella. He went towards her. When he
was close enough to see her clearly he
sat down on the white sand.
From Smith's Dream
by C.K. Stead
The structure of
verb phrases
Verb phrases

 lexical verbs as head

 Examples
 a. gave Jill a book
 b. has given Jill a book
 c. will be giving Jill a book
Auxiliary verbs

 are constituents of the verb phrase

which precede the lexical verb.
 Modals: can, could, shall, should, will,
would, may, might, must
 Aspect auxiliaries:
 perfective has
 progressive be
 Passive auxiliary be
 Dummy auxiliary do
 Adverb phrases can also precede the
head.
 Do
 Before the main verb:
 Emphise = I do know you!
 Negative = I don’t know you
 Do you know?
Modals

 Before the main verb:

 I could open the window
 I can open the window
 I might be wrong!
 It must be true
 I cannot be true
Representing the structure of the
left hand side of the verb phrase

verb
phrase

auxiliary auxiliary lexical

auxiliary
verb verb verb
verb

could have been cut

VP structure after the head

 will be dealt with after the next section on functions in

a clause.
Subjunctive

 I asked that Peter be present at our meeting

 I wish I were ….
 I suggest that Peter open …
 God save the Queen
 May God with you Che Dio sia con te
 The European Guest House stood two hundred feet above
the water, on the crest of a rocky and wooded spur that
jutted from the jungle. By the time Aziz arrived, the water
had paled to a film of mauve-grey, and the boat vanished
entirely. A sentry slept in the Guest House porch, lamps
burned in the cruciform of the deserted rooms. He went
from one room to another, inquisitive, and malicious. Two
letters lying on the piano rewarded him, and he pounced
and read them promptly. He was not ashamed to do this.
The sanctity of private correspondence has never been
ratified by the East.