Syntax (The Sentence Patterns

of Language) and Writing

System
 Syntax
q Any speaker of any human language can produce
and understand an infinite number of possible
sentences

q Thus, we c a n ’ t possibly have a mental dictionary

of all the possible sentences

q Rather, we have the rules for forming sentences

stored in our brains

– Syntax is the grammar that pertains to a speaker’s

knowledge of sentences and their structures
 What the Syntax Rules Do
q The rules of syntax combine words into phrases and
phrases into sentences

q They specify the correct word order for a language

– For example, English is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language

• The President nominated a new Supreme Court justice

q They also describe the relationship between the meaning of a

group of words and the arrangement of the words

– I mean what I say vs. I say what I mean

 What the Syntax Rules Do
q Syntax rules also tell us how words form groups and are
hierarchically ordered in a sentence

“ T h e captain ordered the old men and women off the s h i p ”

q This sentence has two possible meanings:

– 1. The captain ordered the old men and the old women off the ship
– 2. The captain ordered the old men and the women of any age off the
ship

q The meanings depend on how the words in the sentence are

grouped (specifically, to which words is the adjective
‘ o l d ’ applied?)

– 1. The captain ordered the [old [men and women]] off the ship
– 2. The captain ordered the [old men] and [women] off the ship
 What the Syntax Rules Do
q These groupings can be shown hierarchically in a tree

q These trees reveal the structural ambiguity in the phrase “ o l d men

and women”

– Each structure corresponds to a different meaning

q Structurally ambiguous sentences can often be humorous:

– Catcher: “ W a t c h out for this guy, h e ’ s a great fastball h itte r . ”

– Pitcher: “ N o problem. T h e r e ’ s no way I ’ v e got a great fastball. ”
 Sentence Structure
q We could say that the sentence “ T h e
child found the pu ppy ” is based on the
template:

Det—N—V—Det—N
 Constituents and
Constituency Tests
• Constituents are the natural groupings in a
sentence
• Tests for constituency include:
– 1. “ s t a nd alone t e st ” : if a group of words can
stand alone, they form a constituent
• A: “ W h a t did you find?”
• B: “ A puppy.”

– 2. “replacement by a pronoun”: pronouns can

replace constituents
• A: “ Wher e did you find a puppy?”
• B: “ I found him in the park.”
 Constituents and
Constituency Tests
– 3. “ m o v e as a u n i t ” test: If a group of
words can be moved together, they are a
constituent

• A: “ T h e child found a puppy.” è “ A puppy

was found by the child.”
 Constituents and
Constituency Tests
• Experimental evidence shows that people
perceive sentences in groupings
corresponding to constituents

• Every sentence has at least one constituent

structure

– If a sentence has more than one constituent

structure, then it is ambiguous and each
constituent structure corresponds to a different
meaning
 Syntactic Categories
• A syntactic category is a family of expressions that can substitute
for one another without loss of grammaticality

The child found a puppy. The child found a puppy.

A police officer found a puppy. The child ate the cake.
Your neighbor found a puppy. The child slept.

• All the underlined groups constitute a syntactic category known as a

noun phrase (NP)

– NPs may be a subject or an object of a sentence, may contain a

determiner, proper name, pronoun, or may be a noun alone

• All the bolded groups constitute a syntactic category known as a

verb phrase (VP)

– VPs must always contain a verb but may also contain other constituents
such as a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase (PP)
 Syntactic Categories
• Phrasal categories: NP, VP, PP, AdjP, AdvP

• Lexical categories:

– Noun: puppy, girl, soup, happiness, pillow

– Verb: find, run, sleep, realize, see, want
– Preposition: up, down, across, into, from, with
– Adjective: red, big, candid, lucky, large
– Adverb: again, carefully, luckily, very, fairly

• Functional categories:

– Auxiliary: verbs such as have, and be, and modals such as may,
can, will, shall, must
– Determiners: the, a, this, that, those, each, every
 Phrase Structure Trees
• The core of every phrase is its head
– In the VP walk the pugs, the verb walk is the head

• The phrasal category that may occur next to a head

and elaborates on the meaning of the head is a
complement
– In the PP over the river, the NP the river is the
complement

• Elements preceding the head are specifiers

– In the NP the fish, the determiner the is the specifier
 Phrase Structure Trees
Phrase structure (PS) trees show the
internal structure of a sentence along with
syntactic category information:
 Phrase Structure Trees
• In a PS tree, every higher node dominates all the categories beneath it

– S dominates everything

• A node immediately dominates

the categories directly below it

• Sisters are categories that are immediately dominated by the same node

– The V and the NP are sisters

 Phrase Structure Trees:
Selection
• Some heads require a certain type of complement
and some d o n ’ t

– The verb find requires an NP: Alex found the ball.

– The verb put requires both an NP and a PP: Alex put the
ball in the toy box.
– The verb sleep cannot take a complement: Alex slept.
– The noun belief optionally selects a PP: the belief in
freedom of speech.
– The adjective proud optionally selects a PP: proud of
herself
Building Phrase Structure Trees
• Phrase structure rules specify the
well-formed structures of a sentence
– A tree must match the phrase structure
rules to be grammatical
 Transformational Analysis

• Recognizing that some sentences are related to each other is

another part of our syntactic competence

The boy is sleeping. Is the boy sleeping?

• The first sentence is a declarative sentence, meaning that it

asserts that a particular situation exists

• The second sentence is a y e s - no question, meaning that

asks for confirmation of a situation
 Transformational Rules
• Other sentence pairs that involve
transformational rules are:

– Active to passive
• The cat chased the mouse. è The mouse was chased
by the cat.

– there sentences
• There was a man on the roof. è A man was on the
roof.

– PP preposing
• The astronomer saw the quasar with the telescope. è
With the telescope, the astronomer saw the quasar.
Writing System
 History of Writing

q 3.200 Before Christ: It was developed by Sumerians scribes in

the ancient city state of Uruk which in present day Iraq, as a means
of recording transactrions. They used clay tablets. Note: Egyptian
writing also appeared around that time.
q 600 Before Christ: The Mesoamerican (North America to
Parcific coast of central America) system emerged around that
time.
q 1.200 Before Christ: The Chinese writing system appears in cast
bronzes and carved bones, and it was during the Shang Dynasty. It
also consist of oracle texts which are also engraved on animal
bones and turtle shell
q Writing systems can be divided into two main types:
those that presents consonants and vowels (alphabets), and
those which represnts syllable ( syllabaries), though some do
both. These are number of subdivisions of each type, and
there are different classifications of writing system in
different sources.
 Abjads/ Consonat Aphabets

q Abjads or consonant alphabets have independednt

letters which may indicate vowels using some of the
consonant letters. In Abjads such as Arabic and Hebrew
full indication (Vocalization) is only used in specific
contexts, such as in religious book and children’s
books.
q Many of the anciant alphabets used in West Africa and North Africa were
Abjads,as are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts.
 Alphabets

q Alphabets or phonemic alphabets are sets of letters that represent consonants and
vowels, each letter or cobination of letters represents one sound, while others such as
English letters might represent a variety of sounds, or the same sounds can be written in
different ways.
 Syllabic Alphabets/ Abugidas

q Syllabic alphabets, alphasyllabaries or abugadis are writing

system in which the main elements is the syllable. Syallables
are built up of consonants, each of which has an inherent vowel,
e.g. Ka, Kha, ga, gha. Diacritic symboils are used to change or
mute the inherent vowel, and separate vowel letters may be used
when occur at the beginning of a syllable or on their own.
 The most complex writing system in the
world…..

q Devanagari script
 First emerged during the 8th
century.

q Type of writing system: Alphasyllabary/ abugida

q Direction of writing: left to right horizontal lines.
q vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variaty of diacritical marks. This
feauture is common to most alphabets of South and South East Asia….
 Semanto-phonetic writing system

q The symbols used in semanto-phonetic writing system often represent both

sound and mening. As a result, such script generally include large number of
symbols: anything from several hundred to tens of thousand. In fact there is no
theoritical upper limit to the number of symbols in some scripts, such as Chinese.
These scripts could also be called logophonetic.
 Undeciphered writing systems

q Writing systems that have yet to be deciphered or have only

been parcially deciphered.
q Writing system is related with rules such as conventions of
spelling and puntuation. Also includes grapheme-phoneme
(letter-sound)
q English orthography is the alphabetic spelling used by the
English language. English orthography uses a set of rules that
governs how speech is represented in writing.
qIs perhaps the most problematic area for non-native speakers:
q Most sounds in English can be spelled in more than one way
and many spellings can be pronounced in more than one way.
qEnglish only uses the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet. For this
reason, a one to one correspondence between character and sound is not
possible to denote all the complex sounds.this means that the letters have to
multi-task.
q The same letters may indicate differents sounds in English. For example,
the diagraph ‘ch’ represents the first syllable in ‘church’ and ‘cheese’, but
when used in the words ‘character’ and ‘chorus’ the diagraph is pronounced
differently (a hard ‘c’ or ‘k’ sound).
q The English langauge has a quite weak connection between written form
of a word and the spoken form of that word. For example, the letter
combination ‘ough’ can be pronounced in many different ways depending on
the rest of the letters surrounding it. The words ‘bough’ trough’, ‘through’,
‘thorough’, ‘enough’ all contains the letters ‘ough’ yet have different
pronunciation. This can seem very confusing and illogical to ESL learners.
Thank you for listening