Syntax

• The study of how linguistic units are assembled to form larger, meaningful linguistic units.

• The aim is to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences within the language.

  • Note: Grammar is not meaning. Some sentences can be meaningless but grammatically correct (i.e., “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”).
  • There is a distinction between prescriptive grammar—that which has been taught to learners of the language, and descriptive grammar—how people actually use the language.
  • There is a distinction between competence — studying what a language speaker would say without any distractions, and performance — what people actually say in practice, including considerations of being interrupted mid-sentence or forgetfulness.

• Topicalization - a mechanism that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence.

  • Expressions that can be topicalized are constituents.
  • In a parse tree, we may only topicalize phrases and individual words that pass the test of having them appear at the front of the sentence.

Rules §

• Syntactical rules can be described by using a parse tree, which specifies how to assemble linguistic units to form larger units.

  • Some key units in the parse tree. These are determined by the function of the word or phrase, the latter is determinable through constituent words in the phrase.

    • Determiner - a unit that occurs together with a noun serving to express reference to the noun
    • Nouns - functions as the name of a specific object
    • Verbs - a unit that conveys an action
      • Transitive Verbs - verbs that require an object to act upon.
      • Intransitive Verb - verbs that do not act upon an object.
    • Adjective - a unit that describes a noun.
    • Adverb - a unit that describes a verb.
    • Pronoun - a unit that substitutes a noun or noun phrase in the sentence.
    • Adposition - used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark semantic relations for a word. This includes prepositions and postpositions.

  • In the parse tree, the order we merge the linguistic units matters with respect to topicalization, and thus the overall meaning of the sentence

  • The head of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of the phrase. Its sister in the tree is the complement.

  • Other categories

    • Complementizer - includes words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a sentence.
    • Argument - expressions that complete the meaning of a predicate.
    • Adjuncts - optional expressions that may be excluded without changing the meaning of a predicate.
      • Noun Adjunct / Modifier Noun - an optional noun that modifies another noun.
    • Modifier - an optional element in a phrase or clause which modifies the meaning of another element of the structure.
    • Copula - a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement.

• For each word in the language, we should specify its syntactical rules—which categories of words (or even which instances of words) can the word combine with to produce a syntactically correct constituent. This is called selection

  • Arguments are typically subject to selection rules where they tend to prefer to merge with certain word classes. Adjunct are not like this.
  • If a head has both an argument and an adjunct, the argument is closer to the head.
    • Thus, for a verb head, the argument is closer than any adjunct.

Relations §

• In a parse tree, we say that a node
  • If and are merged to common parent , we say that and are sisters and is the mother of its daughters.
  • immediately dominates if is the parent of .
  • dominates if is a part of the subtree where is the root (i.e., is anywhere below in the hierarchy)
  • is a constituent if all and only the words in are dominated by a single node (i.e., every word in is dominated and no more.)
  • A node c-commands its sister node , and all of its sister’s descendants.
    • Another way to say this is that and do not dominate each other, and every node that dominates , dominates .

Headedness §

• A head initial language always puts its heads before its complements.
• A head final language always puts its heads after its complements.
• A mixed-headed language will put its head either before or after its complements depending on other syntactical rules.
• This means that some languages place the verbs before objects while others would place objects before verbs.
• Some example pairings of this include
  • The order of subject, object and verb
  • The order of an adposition and its complement.
  • The order of adjectives and nouns
  • The order of adverbs and verbs.
  • The relationship between the order of object and verb.
  • The order of relative clauses and their head nouns
  • The order of possessives
  • Tenses

Rules §

• Projection Principle: If a head selects for an argument, merge the head with the argument first and make the argument a complement.

  • wh-movement - a phenomenon in many (but not all language) where certain words (in English, the interrogative pronouns who, what, where, etc…), can move to another part of the clause.
    • For example: “Did you put what on the table” becomes ”What did you put on the table”
    • The first sentence follows the Projection Principle (in terms of constructing the parse tree). We then perform a movement operation to get the second sentence.
    • Interesting phenomena observed in practice:
      • There is no wh-movement to the right of the sentence.
      • When dealing with multiple wh-words, we either move none, one, or all of them and not in between.

• Extended Projection Principle: Clauses must contain a noun phrase or determiner phrase in the subject position. Most verbs require meaningful subject.

  • In the absence of any words that can ordinarily satisfy EPP in the sentence, use an expletive like a dummy word (it)
  • This can force movements in sentences, particularly observed when transitioning between active and passive voice. This is called NP-movement, where noun phrases are moved so that the sentence will have a subject.
  • Idioms are always constituents. That said, because of NP movement, we can spread the words in the idiom apart.
  • VP-internal subject hypothesis - all subjects, even the subjects of active sentences, originate in the verb phrase and are moved to their surface position.

• Final-Over-Final Constraint - for certain parts of the tree. If has in its complement another head , and if follows its complement, must follow its complement.

• Verb Second (V2) Ordering - clauses with no complementizers must start with exactly one phrase followed by the verb.

  • There are no subject second or direct object second languages.

• Shortest Movement Heuristic - given various possible movements that can happen for a phrase, pick the one that requires the shortest path (nodes traversed up and down the tree from the initial position to the landing site.)

• Ellipsis - we can omit certain words in a sentence as they are implied by other synonymous words in the sentence.

  • Parallelism - two clauses should have parallel structures.

  • Sluicing - having an ellipsis at the end of a question. (i.e., “I ate something, but I don’t know what (I ate)”).

    • One theory why this happens is because create a complete sentence, and we can perform a wh-move, coupled with not pronouncing part of the sentence.
    • Another theory is that we form the incomplete sentence, and it is semantically implied what the complete sentence is.

  • Preposition stranding - having an option to move a prepositional phrase out or leave only the preposition at the end

    i.e., “Peter was talking with someone, but I don’t know (with) whom?” so that we can ask either

    Who was he talking with? With whom was he talking?

Links §

• Morphology - more on morphemes.

• Linguistics