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Syntax - Notes 1 - Words of English

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39 views

Syntax - Notes 1 - Words of English

Uploaded by

ahmad irfan
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ENG 312-Class 1-

Syntax and
Syntactic Categories

Words of English
• Linguist’s differentiate the two terms
• Grammar and Syntax
• - Grammar
• Grammar of a language includes all of its organising principals:
• - information about its sound system,
• - about the form of its words and how words are combined to form sentences,
• - how we adjust language according to context, etc.
•
•
• Syntax
• Syntax is only one part of Grammar.
• - Syntax refers to the system of rules and categories that underlies sentence
formation in human language
• Syntax is the part of grammar that represents speakers’ knowledge
• of sentences and their structures.
• - Just as speakers have knowledge about acceptable combinations of
morphemes to form words . . .
• (1) Detoxify
• (2) * Dehappy

• - they also have knowledge about acceptable combinations of


• words to form sentences . . .
• (3) David Cameron detoxified the Tory brand, but made the
• product radioactive.
• (4) * Detoxified David Cameron Tory the brand, but the
• radioactive made product.
• Just as words have internal morphological
structure . . .
• Unusable -
• Un
• use -able
• . . . phrases and sentences have internal
syntactic structure . . .
• S
•
• NP VP
• David Cameron
• V NP
• detoxified the Tory Brand
• Kersti Börjars & Kate Burridge (2010). Introducing English
Grammar (2nd ed.)
• Maggie Tallerman (2020) Understanding Syntax by (5th ed.).
Routledge.
•
• Syntax
• The structure of sentences and phrases.
• (a) determining what the structure of a sentence is; and (b)
describing the elements which make up the structure.
•

• Syntax can be defined as the study of the structure of sentences.


- Elements which make up the structure -
• Words – can be defined as the smallest free form
found in languages that can occur in isolation.
• Simple words, complex words

• The structure of words. Morphemes –


• Free and bound morphemes
• Morphology
• At some stage in your life you probably have come across
definitions like
• the following:
• ❑ A noun is the name of a person, place or thing;
• ❑ A verb is a doing word;
❑ An adjective is a describing word.

• These traditional semantic definitions are based on


meaning, and simple examples will illustrate just how
inadequate these sorts of notional descriptions are to
understand the category of a word.
• Compare the strings my love of linguistics and
I love linguistics.

• Both instances of love express the same


emotion of ‘fondness, deep attachment’;
• yet one is a noun (although not a person,
place or physical thing)
• and one is a verb (although not an action).
• we will use criteria based on structural
properties rather
• than meaning to distinguish categories.

• - Morphological components
• - Distribution in the context.
• Consider the following piece and try to answer the questions below it:

• They gulched and guttled. Mephitically alliaceous ventripotent fopdoodles and gotchy
slubberdegullions, she mussitated. She fibulated,
• piddling moliminously at the jejune and unsaporous grots tofore her.
• Fackins! Pabulous comessations were an ephialtes for the deipnetic. It
• was a niminy gulosity, she wiste it, but they begat swilk an increment in
• her recrement, a cupidity that was ineluctable – it was the flurch of postjentacular
flampoints and licious lozens. Thilke trogalions she yissed
• avidulously. She could but gorm esuriently at the ashet. She fimbled her
• falbala aganacticiously.

• 1. What type of fopdoodles are they?


• 2. How did she yiss?
• 3. What did she fimble?
• We rely on grammatical cues, not semantic cues to distinguish lexical
categories.
• We can classify all these items on the basis of their grammatical behaviour
• – in particular, two aspects of their grammatical behaviour: their shape
(i.e.
• their morphology) and their position in the sentence (i.e. their syntax).

• Let’s start with morphological behaviour . Words of the same class will
• typically show the same morphological possibilities; in other words, they’ll
• take the same sort of affixes. You may not know what gulched means, but
• the -ed ending here suggests we’re dealing with a verb. As a verb, gulch
• (meaning ‘to swallow greedily’) takes a characteristic range of grammatical
• endings (or inflections): gulch; gulches; gulched; gulching.
• Words of the same class will typically show
the same morphological possibilities; they will
take the same sort of affixes.
• “- ness” – noun, “-ly” adverb, “-y” adjective,
• “- ed” past tense for verbs, “-s” plural markers
for nouns.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

a tall waiter served the portly man at a nearby table

the nearby table devoured those delicious pastries in that famous restaurant

the gotchy gulcher guttled those gustful grots near the licious lozens
• Words that share inflectional possibilities in English
also appear to be able to fill the same slots in
sentences and other phrases. We can, then, say with
some confidence that categories such as nouns or
verbs have not been invented by linguists. It is in fact
the language itself organizes words into categories.
The speakers of the language can be said to
recognize these categories, although subconsciously.
Linguists are then responsible only for naming these
categories, not for having ‘invented’ them.
• We have established that words form
structural units or constituents.
• These are Phrases – a group of words that
have a grammatical relationship with one
another. They form -
• natural units – they show the same
distributional possibilities.
• Lexical categories – one-word categories

• Phrasal categories – a group of words that


have a grammatical relationship with one
another.
• These phrases are always named after
• the word which is the most important in the
string.
• - This word is called the Head.
• - It is the core of the phrase
• - It will determine the phrasal category.
• Lexical categories –
• Nouns
• Verbs
• Adjectives
• Adverbs
• prepositions
• Phrasal categories categories –
• Noun phrase NP
• Verb phrase VP
• Adjective phrase AP
• Adverb phrase AdvP
• preposition phrase PP
• Major categories -
• Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
• Open class – are large in number and have an ever-changing
membership. As the vocabulary needs of the society change,
so new members can be incorporated. Members of the major
classes are lexical in the sense that they are more contentful
than the functional categories. Minor classes, on the other
hand, consist of words with grammatical rather than lexical
meaning (closed class).

• Minor categories – prepositions, determiners, conjuntions,


articles, auxilary verbs, pronouns.
• General tests for determining category
membership

• Substitution
• Co-ordination

• Constituents and Phrases -

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