Syntactic Theory Midterm Exam

what is syntax?

a speaker/hearer's knowledge that enables them to convert sound into meaning and vice versa

four levels of language structure

phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics

IPA

International phonetic alphabet; universal organization of sounds

phonetic form

- the most concrete form of the phrase

- syntax does not correspond to anything concrete in the string of sounds but is instead imposed

syntax is ________ from meaning

autonomous

grammar

- description of language that makes speakers' knowledge of the language explicit

- speakers of a language have unconscious intuitions about grammaticality

linguistic competence

A speaker's implicit, internalized knowledge of the rules of their native language.

linguistic performance

- actual language use, reflecting linguistic competence and the communication constraints

- what the speaker/hearer does in using the language

- for syntax, competence > performance

- intuitions are important evidence for syntactic principles

contemporary views of syntax

- syntax mediates sound and meaning

- cognitive psychological process

- core of linguistic knowledge is innate, or at least a uniquely human capacity (poverty of the stimulus)

category identification - substitution

- the result of substituting a word of a category C for a word of the same category does not change the grammaticality of the sentence

allomorphy

morpheme takes various phonetic forms based on the surrounding phonological environment

traditional syntactic categories

- members of the same category are marked for the same property, and are not substitutable for one another without the appropriate marking (phonological paradigms)

- S, V, P, Adj, Adv, D(et)

semantic anomaly

- a sentence/phrase is false because the property specified by the verb does not/cannot hold of t the thing referred to by the noun (s-selection!)

- not necessarily ungrammatical

ungrammaticality

- words arranged incorrectly according to their category and morphological form

- meaning determine by grammatical properties of the sentence, not equivalent to it

nouns

1) can appear immediately following a determiner

2) can appear immediately after adjectives

3) may participate in the singular/plural number paradigm

4) countable (quantifiable) or non-countable

intransitive verbs

- verbs that take only one argument

- grammatical subject

- no grammatical object

transitive verbs

- take two arguments

- grammatical subject

- grammatical object

ditransitive verbs

- take three arguments

- grammatical subject

- grammatical object

- grammatical indirect-object

zero argument verbs

-e.g., rain

rules for removing/inserting arguments

may omit an argument (often an object) in many cases, but can never insert additional arguments

auxiliary verbs

- Verbs used to support another verb in a sentence and have a grammatical function such as establishing tense, aspect, or person.

- e.g., have, be, will, can (and their variations)

finite verbs

A verb which changes ending to show person, number and tense

non-finite verbs

A secondary verb in a sentence that can always be used even if the tense, person or number in the sentence changes

- e.g., infinitive, gerund, etc.

attributive use of adjectives

adjectives directly precede the noun they modify

predicational use of adjectives

adjective appears as the complement of a form of be

Subject + Linking verb (be) + Predicate Adj

comparative adjective

e.g., taller, older, more tired

superlative adjective

e.g., tallest, oldest, most tired

- may be modified by intensifiers very or so

prepositions

express place, time, manner, etc.

- may be used predicatively in certain cases, e.g., 'the keys are on the table'

- come before the object

adverbs

individual lexical items used to modify VPs or sentences

- may express manner, direction, location, time, etc.

- PPs may act as adverbs, e.g., 'he slumped onto the table'

- may appear in a number of positions

articles

- a class of determiners

e.g., the, a, an

demonstratives

- a class of determiners

e.g., these, those, this, that

quantifiers

- a class of determiners

e.g., every, all, each, both

determiners

articles, demonstratives, quantifiers

conjuctions

coordinating and subordinating

coordinating conjunctions

for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so

subordinating conjunctions

although, while, if, since, because, etc.

morphosyntax

- the relationship between the form of a word and its function and distribution in a phrase/sentence

- have to distinguish between a word as an individual element in a sentence, and the collection of words that form a single paradigm

lexical entry

abstract object that has meaning and syntactic properties, such as category

word

the form a lexical entry takes in an actual syntactic context

inflectional morphology

morpheme alters a word to express a slightly different meaning

derivational morphology

- express morphologically defined relations between syntactic categories

- when a derivational morpheme is added, it typically changes the word's category

lexicon

includes both the lexical entities as well as paradigms in addition to syntactic properties and semantic meaning

constructions

syntactically complex expression whose meaning is not entirely predictable from the meaning of its parts

- e.g., idioms

regular forms

predictable from a morphological paradigm

irregular forms

- unpredictable from the paradigm

other morphosyntactic properties

- number

- case

- gender

Phrase head

the lexical item that determines the type of phrase

- e.g., N is head of NP, V is head of VP

syntactic phrases

- must be headed, meaning the category of a phrase is determined by one of the categories of its parts

- endo-/exocentric phrases

endocentric phrase

phrase of the same category as the head

exocentric phrase

don't contain heads of the same category or contain no head at all

major syntactic categories

N,, V, P, Adj, Adv

- express content, not relationships between them

minor syntactic categories

Det, Conj, Particles

- do not express content, express functional relations in the sentence

- more limited in number than major items

- used more frequently than major items

- closed class/semi-closed class; cannot create new ones

Adpositions

prepositions, postpositions, cicrumpositions, interpositions

postpositions

- come after the object, e.g., "Tom worked the whole week through"

- often can be moved to preposition

circumpositions

on either side of the object, e.g., 'from Friday on,' 'to the store and back'

interpositions

between two objects, e.g., 'brick by brick'

Substitution rule

The result of substituting a word of category C for another word of category C does not change the grammaticality of the phrase though it may render it odd in meaning or nonsensical (semantic anomaly), as long as the words contain the same grammatical marking and the substitution rule does not result in a selection restriction violation.

inflections substitution rule

can substitute words with the same grammatical markers

- number

- tense

- aspect

the inflection rule

changing the grammatical markings of a word does not change its lexical category

inflectional paradigm

a collection of words with similar inflection rules, or of rules with similar effects on words

- can be represented to show that the various word forms are forms of the same category

English Noun inflections

- for number and possession (genitive case)

- in other languages, may also be marked inflectionally for case and gender

English pronoun paradigm

inflectionally much richer than for nouns

- nominative, accusative, genitive, reflexive

english verb markings

reflect number, tense, and aspect; must have the same markings to be substitutable

- SG vs PL

- PAST vs PRES (no future)

- PROG VS PERF - how the action extends over time

English adjective paradigm

base form, superlatives (-est/most ___), comparatives (-er/more ___)

- some irregular forms

- must be of the same class to be substitutable

- may also apply to adverbs

morphosyntax of adverbs

- most adverbs are adverbs of manner and are created derivationally

- ONLY adverbs of manner can form comparative/superlative forms by adding more/most

- substitution rule fails for many adverbs, often because of count vs. noncount nouns

noun selection restriction violations

- certain nouns may not take the plural marker or follow number words or certain quantifiers

verb substitution selection restrictions

verbs must be of the same type (i.e., in transitive, transitive, ditransitive)

argument of a verb

a phrase that refers to some thing, person, place, etc. that participates in the relation expressed by the verb

argument positions

subject , direct object, indirect object

zero argument verb examples

it rained, it thundered

one argument verb examples

he/she died

two argument verb examples

it contains a lake, he threw the ball

three argument verb examples

I offered him a glass of champagne, Sean gave the book to Terry

syntax is _______ in nature

abstract; structure is not in the speech signal, it is in the mind

syntactic trees

a visual representation of constituency and phrase structure rules

- bracketing qualities can get hard to read with more complex sentences

- double line signifies the head of the phrase

phrase structure rules

general statements about the internal structure of constituents of each type

S →

In basic cases, S → NP VP

Also S → NP AUX (not) VP

proposition

a complete idea, expressed as a subject + predicate

subject

the main item doing something in the sentence

predicate

expresses the property that is attributed to the subject in the sentence

complements

non-head constituents of a phrase, particularly a VP

- satisfy certain semantic and syntactic requirements

of the verb

- complements are essential to the meaning of the verb

VP possible complements:

VP → V PP

VP → V S

VP → V NP PP

arguments

the complement(s) + subject in a VP

may not be omitted w/out making the sentence ungrammatical, whereas adjuncts may be omitted

adjuncts

express refinement in the meaning of a phrase, but are not an integral part of it

- when omitted, meaning of the sentence is not lost nor is there an issue with grammaticality

-many different syntactic categories may be used as a complement or adjunct; depends whether or not the phrase is required by the verb + semantic roles of the sentence

bootstrapping

take the paradigm cases of a syntactic category and modify from there

phrase

strings of words that may function as a unit

- head determines the phrase's grammatical behavior

- if head is inflected, the whole phrase has that inflection

phrase substitution rule

the result of substituting a word or phrase of category C for another word or phrase does not change the grammaticality of the sentence so long as it has the same inflections and does not result in a selection restriction violation.

simple sentences

- are about something, expressed as the subject

- what is said about the subject is expressed by the predicate; predicate may be single or multi-word

function of phrase structure rules

says what a possible make up of a phrase or sentence of a given category is in a language in terms of the words, phrases, or sentences that make it up

- determine structure from grammatical categories

grammatical functions

subject, object, indirect object, predicate; called an "argument"; governed by syntax

constituents

the phrases or sentences that make up a phrase/sentence

gerunds

a form derived from a verb and functioning as a noun

- textbook instead treats these as VPs that may serve as the subject

verb phrases and predicates

head V functions as the predicate of a sentence

- may or may not have a semantic role (typically none)

- a V may stand along within a VP (e.g., President Trump called."

PSRs of VPs

VP → V (NP)

VP → V PP

VP →V NP PP

VP → V NP NP

VP → V S

objects

transitive verbs - take one NP; NP serves as direct object

ditransitive verbs - take two NPs; one serves as direct object and the other in direct object

international distribution of word order

- SOV most frequent

- then SVO (english)

- OSV is least common

Tests for subjecthood

1) number agreement test

2) tag-question test

3) question inversion test

word order and subjecthood

English is an SVO language generally, meaning subject precedes the verb with the object following

- however, this may not always be the case, e.g., "Those students, Sandy is friendly with." (topicalization)

number agreement test for subjecthood

in English, the verb always agrees with the number specified by the subject

tag question test for subjecthood

pronoun in a tag question always agrees (in number and gender) with the subject NP

- however, the subject/object NPs may have the same number/gender values; shows that agreement in tag question test alone is necessary but may not be sufficient