Ch. 8 Syntax - Linguistics 150 (ENG 150)

Palomar College ENG 150

Categories

noun, verb, adjective, adverb, article, preposition, pronoun, conjunction

Agreement

in number, person, tense, voice, gender

Prescriptive

rules of proper English (no split infinitives, no ending with preposition)

Descriptive

describes actual usage of speakers

Prescriptivism

useful for recording patterns at a time

typology 1

linguistics: study and classification of languages based on shared structural features, rather than historical origins

typology 2

aims to discover common ling. Patterns (language universals) & understand the extend & nature of ling. Diversity by comparing thousands of lang. to id similarities & diff. in their phonology (sounds), morphology (word structure), and syntax (sentence structure)

English typology

 SVO (Subject-Verb-Object)

Relative Clauses

Introduced with who, which, that (ex. that you sent)

Adjective Order in English

opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material

Syntax

study of structure and ordering of components within sentences (arrangement)

Structural Ambiguity

Same sentence can have multiple interpretations 

phrase structure rule 1

Formal linguistic guidelines that define how sentences are built by breaking them down into hierarchical components such as words and phrases

phrase structure rule 2

"rewrite rules" show how smaller constituents combine to form larger, grammatical strucutres, similar to how a syntctactic tree visually represents sentence structure by illustrating the relationship bt words and phrases in a sentence

 simplified phrase structure

S -> NP VP

Constituency (psr)

core concept behind PS rules

constituent

any word or group of words that functions as a single unit within a sentence's hierarchical structure

Hierarchical structure

psr show nested, hierarchical structure; represented visually using tree diagrams, where main sentence node branches down into smaller phrasal and lexical categories

categorical rules

show how phrasal categories are expanded into other phrasal categories (ex. vp to v + np)

lexical rules

connect a category to an actual word (lexical item) (ex. n to girl)

recursion

rules can be reapplied within their own output, allows infinite sentence creation

generative grammar

Pioneered by Noam Chomsky, generative grammar uses psr to generate all the possible grammatical sentences in a language; demonstrates that our innate grammatical knowledge allows us to construct complex sentences following these underlying patterns

PSR (NP)

 {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN (proper noun)

PSR (VP)

V + NP

PSR (S)

NP + VP

PSR

Provides the deep structure of sentences

Sentence Structure

Illustrates NP + VP structure in English sentences

Tree Diagrams

Visual representation of phrase structure rules, show hierarchical structure of language, NP, VP, and S represented at different levels

Tense

 category T (past, present, modal)

Movement

'Move T' transforms statements into questions

T

{present, past, modal}

Modal

{can, will should}