OLD LING 2100H Exam 5 - Syntax and Language Variation

Dr. Mi-Ran Kim UGA 9:10 MWF

Syntactic Properties

Determine the behavior of expressions

Word Order

How are expressions allowed to be ordered with respect to one another?
English - Subject Verb Object

Co-Occurrence

Certain expressions must go with other expressions.

‘devoured’ needs both a subject and an object

Argument

required in sentence for grammaticality
complement needed for complete sentence
‘Polly and Sally had a party’ (Polly + Sally are both arguments of and)

Polly has {a/this/my} dog. (need to pick only one option)

Adjunct

if you take it out of the sentence, the sentence will still be grammatical.
Infinite Prepositional Phrases
Can generally be freely ordered within themselves (though adjectives technically have a preferred order)

Agreements

form of an expression that influences co-occurence requirements
*I likes him.
I like him.

Syntactic Constituents are

smaller expressions within a larger expression
more tightly combined than with other expressions
larger than individual words
Complements a verb of a sentence
Can be freely omitted from a sentence

Identifying Syntactic Constituents

The ball was rolling down the hill →
what was the ball doing?
Rolling down the hill
What/where/who can give you some expressions

Clefting

It was X that Y
It was the ball that was rolling down the hill

Pro-Form Substitution

Replace a constituent with one word or a simple phrase
The ball rolled down the hill.
The ball did so.
It rolled down the hill.

Non-Constituents

non-grammatical constituents
non-constituent construction- convey same idea (Kai ate, but my dog ignored, the bone)