• 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 are found in here. These are determined by the function of the word or phrase, the latter is determinable through constituent words in the phrase.

    • 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.

  • 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