Syntactic Categories

Syntactic Analysis

• Structure
• Constituency
• Dependencies between word-level items

Syntactic categories can’t be defined by semantic criteria (person, place, thing, action)

semantic criteria isn’t always reliable

have to look at distributional properties

Nouns follow determiners (the, a, some, few)

Verbs take tense endings (-ed, -ing, -s)

Constructing Grammars with Tree Diagrams

• theory: speakers generate ‘syntactic templates’ through phrase structure rules
• ps rules create nodes / structure in the tree
• the structure is then supplied w word forms from the Lexicon
• tree diagrams can resolve cases of syntactic ambiguity (Robin decided on the train)
• also helpful for illustrating complex structures