SYNTAX

Infinite Use of Finite Means

DEFINITION
DEFINITION
The part of grammar that represents a speaker’s
knowledge of sentences and their structures is called
syntax.

A sentence is grammatical if speakers judge it to be a

possible sentence of their language.

Example:

House painted student a the.

A student painted the house.

WHAT THE SYNTAX RULES DO
The rules of syntax combines words into phrases and
phrases into sentences.

1. They define the correct word order for a language.

E.g.

The President nominated a new Supreme Court justice.

President the Supreme new justice Court a nominated.

WHAT THE SYNTAX RULES DO
2. They specify the grammatical relations of sentences,
such as subject and direct object.

E.g.

Your dog chased my cat My cat chased your dog

I mean what I say I say what I mean

WHAT THE SYNTAX RULES DO
Some sentences are syntacticallly well-formed, but it’s
hard to find their meanings

E.g. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

WHAT THE SYNTAX RULES DO
There are also some sentences that we understand
even though they are not well-formed according to the
rules of syntax.

E.g. “…when gone I am…the last of the Jedi will you

be”
SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
Each grouping in the tree diagrams of “The child found a
puppy” is a member of a large family of similar expressions.
For example, the child belongs to a family that includes the
police officer, your neighbor, this yellow cat, he, John, and
countless others. We can substitute any member of this
family for the child without affecting the grammaticality of
the sentence, although the meaning of course would change.
A police officer found a puppy.
Your neighbor found a puppy.
This yellow cat found a puppy.
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another
without loss of grammaticality is called a syntactic
category.
 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
The child, a police officer, John, and so on belong to the
syntactic category noun phrase (NP), one of several syntactic
categories in English and all languages. NPs may function as
subjects or as objects in sentences. An NP often contains a
determiner (like a or the) and a noun, but it may also consist
of a proper name, a pronoun, a noun without a determiner, or
even a clause or a sentence. Even though a proper noun like
John and pronouns such as he and him are single words, they
are technically NPs, because they pattern like NPs in being able
to fill a subject or object or other NP slots.

John found the puppy.

He found the puppy.
Boys love puppies.
The puppy loved him.
The puppy loved John.
 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
NPs can be more complex, as illustrated by the sentence:
The girl that Professor Snape loved married the man of her
dreams.
The NP subject of this sentence is the girl
that Professor Snape loved, and the NP object
is the man of her dreams.
SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
Syntactic categories are part of a speaker’s
knowledge of syntax. That is, speakers of English
know that only items (a), (b), (e), (f), and (g) in the
fol- lowing list are NPs even if they have never
heard the term noun phrase before.
(a) a bird
(b) the red banjo
(c) have a nice day
(d) with a balloon
(e) the woman who was laughing
(f) it
(g) John
(h) went
SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
You can test this claim by inserting each expression
into three contexts:
What/who I heard was ,
Who found ? and was seen by everyone.
For example, *Who found with a balloon? is
ungrammatical, as is *Went was seen by everyone, as
opposed to Who found it? or John was seen by
everyone.
Only NPs fit into these contexts because only NPs
can function as subjects and objects.
 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
There are other syntactic categories. The expression found a puppy
is a verb phrase (VP). A verb phrase always contains a verb (V), and
it may contain other categories, such as a noun phrase or
prepositional phrase (PP), which is a preposition followed by an
NP, such as in the park, on the roof, with a balloon. In (2) the VPs are
those phrases that can complete the sentence “The child .”
(a)saw a clown
(b)a bird
(c)Slept
(d)Smart
(e)ate the cake
(f) found the cake in the cupboard
(g)realized that the Earth was round
Inserting (a), (c), (e), (f), and (g) will produce grammatical sentences,
whereas the insertion of (b) or (d) would result in an ungrammatical
sentence. Thus, (a), (c), (e), (f), and (g) are verb phrases.
 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
Syntactic categories include both phrasal categories such as NP, VP,
AP (adjective phrase), PP (prepositional phrase), and AdvP
(adverbial phrase), as well as lexical categories such as noun (N),
verb (V), preposition (P), adjective (A), and adverb (Adv). Each
lexical category has a corresponding phrasal category. Following is
a list of phrasal categories and lexical categories with some
examples of each type:
Phrasal categories
Noun Phrase (NP) men, the man, the man with a telescope
Verb Phrase (VP) sees, always sees, rarely sees the man,
often sees the man with a telescope
Adjective Phrase (AP) happy, very happy, very happy about
winning
Prepositional Phrase (PP) over, nearly over, nearly over the hill
Adverbial Phrase (AdvP) brightly, more brightly, more brightly than
the Sun
SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES

Lexical categories
Noun (N) puppy, boy, man, soup, happiness, fork,
kiss, pillow
Verb (V) find, run, sleep, throw, realize, see, try,
want, believe
Preposition (P) up, down, across, into, from, by, with, over
Adjective (A) red, big, happy, candid, hopeless, fair,
idiotic, lucky
Adverb (Adv) again, always, brightly, often, never, very, fairly
 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
Many of these categories may already be familiar to you. As
mentioned ear- lier, some of them are traditionally referred
to as parts of speech. Other catego- ries may be less familiar,
for example, the category determiner (Det), which includes
the articles a and the, as well as demonstratives such as this,
that, these, and those, and “quantifiers” such as each and
every.

Another less familiar category is T(ense), which includes the modal

auxiliaries may, might, can, could, must, shall, should, will, and would,
and abstract tense morphemes that we discuss below. T and Det are
functional categories, so called because their members have
grammatical functions rather than descriptive meanings.
SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
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 often have other than locational meanings.
 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
- Each lexical category typically has a particular kind of
meaning associated with it. For example, verbs usually refer
to actions, events, and states (kick, marry, love); adjectives to
qualities or properties (lucky, old); common nouns togeneral
entities (dog, elephant, house); and proper nouns to
particular individu- als (Noam Chomsky) or places (Dodger
Stadium) or other things that people give names to, such as
commercial products (Coca-Cola, Viagra).
- 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).
 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
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 where they occur in a sentence, what categories
co-occur with them, and what their morphological
characteristics are.
For example, we define a noun as a word that can
occur with a determiner (the boy) and that can (ordinarily)
take a plural marker (boys); a verb as a word that can occur
with an adverb (run fast) or modal (may go, will dance); an
adjective as a word that can occur with a degree word (very
hungry) or a morphological marker (hungrier), among other
properties.
PHRASAL CATEGORIES
Phrasal Categories Examples

Noun Phrase (NP) the car, a clever student

Verb Phrase (VP) study hard, play the guitar

Adjective Phrase (AP) very tall, quite certain

Prepositional Phrase (PP) in the class, above the earth

Adverbial Phrase (AdvP) quite happily

WORD-CLASS CATEGORIES
Lexical Categories Examples

Noun (N) Harry, boy, wheat, policy, moisture, bravery

Verb (V) arrive, discuss, melt, hear, remain, dislike
Adjective (A) good, tall, old, intelligent, beautiful, fond
Preposition (P) to, in, on, near, at, by
Adverb (Adv) silently, slowly, quietly, quickly, now
Non-lexical Categories Examples

Determiner (Det) the, a, these, this

Degree word (Deg) too, so, very, more, quite
Qualifier (Qual) always, perhaps, often, never, almost
Auxiliary (Aux) will, can, may, must, should, could
Conjunction (Con) and, or, but