Syntax

What the Syntax Rules Do?

.
1 The rules specify the correct word order for a language.
For example, English is a Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) language.

The sentence in (1) is grammatical because the words occur in the right order; the sentence in
(2) is ungrammatical because the word order is incorrect for English.

2. Describes the relationship between the meaning of a particular group of words and
the arrangement of those words
Alice’s companions show us that the word order of a sentence contributes crucially to its
meaning.
The sentences in (3) and (4) contain the
same words, but the meanings are quite
different, as the Mad Hatter points out.

3. Specifies 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.
The grammatical relations in (5) and (6)
are reversed, so the otherwise identical
sentences have very different meanings.

4. Syntactic rules also specify other constraints that sentences must adhere to.

• These phrases act differently because they have different syntactic structures associated
with them.
• In ran up the hill, the words up the hill form a unit, as follows:
He ran [up the hill]
• The whole unit can be moved to the beginning of the sentence, as in (10c),
• But we cannot rearrange its subparts, as shown in (10b).
• In ran up the bill, the words up the bill do not form a natural unit, so they cannot be
moved, and (10f) is ungrammatical.
Ambiguous Expressions
ex. The captain ordered all old men and women off the sinking ship.

This phrase “old men and women” is ambiguous, referring either to old men and to
women of any age or to old men and old women. The ambiguity arises because the words
old men and women can be grouped in two ways.

! A person’s ability to make grammaticality judgments does not depend on having heard the
sentence before. You may never have heard or read a sentence, but your syntactic knowledge
tells you that it is grammatical.

! People are able to understand, produce, and make judgments about an infinite range of
sentences. This ability illustrates that our knowledge of language is creative. Creative in the
sense that none of us is limited to a fixed repertoire of expressions. 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.

Sentence Structure & Tree Diagrams

Sentences have a hierarchal organisation. They are grouped into natural units.
The child found a puppy.

Constituents and Constituency Tests

The natural groupings or parts of a sentence are called constituents.

TEST 1: the “stand alone” test. If a group of words can stand alone, they form a constituent.

So, in answer to the question “What did you find?” a speaker might answer a puppy, but not
found a.
A puppy can stand alone while found a cannot.
TEST 2: “replacement by a pronoun” Pronouns can substitute for natural groups.
Q: “Where did you find a puppy?”
A: “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.

TEST 3: “move as a unit” If a group of words can be moved, they form a constituent.
Compare “The child found a puppy,” with:
It was a puppy that the child found.
A puppy was found by the child.
• The constituents a puppy and the child remain intact.
• Found a does not remain intact, because it is not a constituent.

Syntactic Categories
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality is
called a syntactic category.

Syntactic categories include;

• phrasal categories such as NP, VP, AdjP (adjective phrase), PP (prepositional phrase),
and AdvP (adverbial phrase)
• lexical categories such as noun (N), verb (V), preposition (P), adjective (Adj), and adverb
(Adv).
Each lexical category has a corresponding phrasal category.

! Less known Lexical categories

• Determiner (Det), which includes the articles a and the, as well as demonstratives such
as this, that, these, and those, and “counting words” such as each and every.
• Auxiliary (Aux), which includes the verbs have, had, be, was, and were, and the modals
may, might, can, could, must, shall, should, will, and would.
• Aux and Det are functional categories, because their members have a grammatical
function rather than a descriptive meaning.

Phrase Structure Trees

• 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.

The child found a puppy.

Structural Ambiguities
! These are only some examples. Various structures in English cannot be generated with these
rules.

Examples

1. The dog completely destroyed the house.

This sentence contains the adverb (Adv)

completely. (Adverbs are modifiers that
can specify how an event happens or when
it happens.)

2. The dog destroyed the house yesterday.

Temporal adverbs such as yesterday,

today, last week, and manner adverbs such
as quietly, violently, suddenly, carefully,
also occur to the right of VP:

3. Probably the dog has fleas

Adverbs also occur as sisters to S (which is

also a phrasal category, Tense Phrase).

4. The cat and the dog

This is a coordinate structure (when two

constituents of the same category are
joined with a conjunction such as and or
or)
Sentence Relatedness
The boy is sleeping. (declarative sentence)
Is the boy sleeping? (yes-no question)
One asserts a situation, the other asks for confirmation of a situation but both sentences use
the same words. So;
! The word order is different = different meaning
! This structural difference is systematic.
Transformation Rules

• Phrase structure rules account for much of our syntactic knowledge.

• Yet, they do not account for the fact that certain sentence types in the language relate
systematically to other sentence types.
• The related sentences come from a common underlying structure.
• The basic structures of sentences are also called deep structures or d-structures
• Derived structures are called surface structures or s-structures.
• The phonological rules of the language apply to s- structures.
• If no transformations apply, then d-structure and s-structure are the same.
• If transformations apply, then s-structure is the result after all transformations have had
their effect.
• Many sentence types are accounted for by transformations, which can alter phrase
structure trees by moving, adding, or deleting elements.

1. The «Move Aux» Rule:

(We can use this rule to generate a yes-no question. Auxiliaries are central to the
formation of yes-no questions. In yes-no questions, the auxiliary appears in the position
preceding the subject.)

Rule: Move the highest aux to adjoin

to (the root) S.
For example: The boy is sleeping. → Is the boy _ sleeping?
*The “__” shows the position from which the Aux is moved.

! The ungrammatical sentences show that to form a question, the rule that moves Aux
singles out the auxiliary dominated by the root S, and not simply the first auxiliary in
the sentence.

Ex. The boy who is sleeping was dreaming.

Was the boy who is sleeping dreaming? (different meaning)
Is the boy who sleeping was dreaming? (same meaning)

2. Active-Passive
The cat chased the mouse. → The mouse was chased by the cat.

3. There sentences
There was a man on the roof. → A man was on the roof.

4. PP preposing

! The transformational rule of PP preposing moves any PP as long as it is immediately

under the VP, as in;
The astronomer saw the quasar with the telescope. → With the telescope, the astronomer
saw the quasar.

5. That
the complementizer that is omitted when it precedes an embedded sentence but not a
sentence that appears in subject position:
I know that you know. I know you know.
That you know bothers me. *You know bothers me. (not the same meaning)
The Structural Dependency of Rules
Transformations act on phrase structures without paying attention to the particular words that
the structures contain. These rules are said to be structure dependent.
• Agreement rules are structure dependent.
• Structure dependency is a principle of Universal Grammar and is found in all languages.
• Languages that have subject-verb agreement, the dependency is between the verb and
the head noun.
• In many languages, including English, the verb must agree with the subject.
• The verb is marked with an –s when the subject is third-person singular.
This guy seems kind of cute. These guys seem kind of cute.
• The phrase structure tree explains why this is so:

* In the tree, “= = = = = =” represents the intervening structure.

Wh Questions
The following -wh questions illustrate another kind of dependency:
(a) What will Max chase? (c) Which dog do you think loves balls?
(b) Where has Pete put his bone?

• First, the verb chase in sentence (a) is transitive, yet there is no direct object following it.
There is a gap where the direct object should be.
• The verb put in sentence (b) selects a direct object and a prepositional phrase, yet there is
no PP following his bone.
• Finally, the embedded verb loves in sentence (c) bears the third-person -s morpheme, yet
there is no obvious subject to trigger this agreement.

We can explain the dependency between the wh phrase and the missing constituent if we
assume that in each case the wh phrase originated in the position of the gap in a sentence with
the corresponding declarative structure:
(a) Max will chase what? (c) You think (that) which dog loves balls?
(b) Pete has put his bone where?