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ESL Spring 25 HO 5 DPM

The document discusses the concept of syntax, likening the linguistic system of the brain to a 'Black Box' that processes language input and output. It explains the importance of word order and agreement in sentence structure, highlighting syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and how they can be identified through substitution and distribution. Additionally, it notes that different languages, like Indian languages, may have varying structures and distributions for these categories.

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24 views3 pages

ESL Spring 25 HO 5 DPM

The document discusses the concept of syntax, likening the linguistic system of the brain to a 'Black Box' that processes language input and output. It explains the importance of word order and agreement in sentence structure, highlighting syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and how they can be identified through substitution and distribution. Additionally, it notes that different languages, like Indian languages, may have varying structures and distributions for these categories.

Uploaded by

idk15639
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ESL/Spring 2025/DPM/HO#/6.2.

25

We did some modifications/experiments/discussions with English sentences yesterday.

Now let us discuss: What is syntax?

•The linguistic system of the brain is like a Black Box.


•We can put things into one side of the black box and see what is coming out from the other side.
•We can observe what is happening. We can begin theorizing about what has to be inside the
black box
•At some stage, we can start making predictions: If X goes into the black box, Y will come out.
If we find some generalizations wrong, we need to change our theory.

•By feeding test sentences to native speakers and obtaining their intuitive judgments, we
can understand what is there inside the black box.

●​ Do you remember the LAD? Language is innate, as generativists mentioned. Our

knowledge of language helps us to construct sentences.


●​ The order of words are relevant to the meaning conveyed by a sentence. The following
two sentences have the same words, but the meanings are different.
a.The cat is eating a fish.
b.The fish is eating a cat.
The forms of the words in a sentence has certain relationships

●​ Let us discuss the following examples: What do we understand here?


a. The monkey is eating a banana.
b. *The monkey are eating a banana.
•This is a problem of Agreement (certain relationship between words and phrases)
•A native speaker knows the right order of words and the right systems of agreement. Thus, they
can comment on the ungrammaticality or unacceptability.
●​ What are the Syntactice Categories?
Sentences have words, and words have Syntactic Categories (Parts of Speech) or Word Classes.
•Most common categories are Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs and Prepositions
•There are certain categories which are less common
•The categories tell us how the word is going to function in a sentence.

●​ Substitution as a test: we can easily check the categories.

We can substitute one word with another word of the same category. But we cannot substitute a
word with a word from a different category.

a.The girl went to the market.

b.The cat went to the market.

c.The teacher went to the market.

d. *walking went to the market.

•How do we determine a syntactic category?

•Based on their distribution

•Morphological distribution : affixes and other morphology appear on a word (any example?)

•Syntactic distribution: the other words that appear near the word. For example, Determiners
(articles) appear before the nouns

How do we determine the position of the different categories?

1.​ Nouns appear after the Determiners (the, those, these), appear after Adjectives (The red
balloon), and follow Prepositions (in school).
2.​ Verbs appear after auxiliaries (will, have, had, is, was, were)and modals (shall, should,
may, must). They appear after the special non-finite marker ‘to’, follow subjects, follow
adverbs, can be negated with ‘not’.
3.​ Adjectives: Occur between Determiners and Nouns (The green tree).
4.​ Adverbs: In the beginning and end of a sentence.
We have been talking about the structure of sentences in terms of the grammatical categories.

There are subcategories too! (we shall not discuss the details.)

Indian languages can have different structures and distributions for the categories.

We can draw trees for simple English sentences.

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