Week 2 – Constituency, Distributional Analysis & Syntactic Categories

Week two lecture of Syntax course: focus shifts from individual words to larger structures (phrases/constituents) and to the reasoning tools syntacticians use.
Tutorials also begin this week; practical application of concepts is emphasized.
Central theme: constituency—how grammar groups words into units that behave together.
Methodology throughout the course: distributional analysis—classifying elements by where and how they appear (internally & externally).

Every lexical item belongs to a category (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, determiner, etc.).
Categories are language-specific; identical labels across languages mask different defining behaviors.
- E.g.
- English “noun” ≠ Ngongonbu “noun” in exact feature set.
- Some languages lack prepositions or determiners entirely.
As descriptive linguists we must discover the categories for each language; cannot assume the English inventory.
Key analytic tool: distributional analysis (internal vs. external evidence).

Look inside a word:
- Inflectional markings (number, tense, aspect, mood, gender, etc.).
- Presence of known derivational morphemes (suffixes/prefixes) that reliably change category (e.g. -ness → adjective → noun).
- Note: Internal evidence is language-specific; e.g. English plural \text{-s} appears only on nouns, but some nouns (sheep, ox) lack it, so absence ≠ non-noun.

Examine how the phrase headed by the word behaves in larger structures:
- Which syntactic functions can it fulfil? (subject, object, predicate, modifier, etc.).
- What dependents or modifiers can attach to it?
- Only NP’s or clauses serve as subjects in English → if X is subject, X is an NP or a clause.

Internal:
- possums bears plural \text{-s} ⇒ typical of English nouns.
External:
- Heads the subject phrase; only NP/clauses appear here ⇒ likely noun.
- Dependent words the, ferocious cannot remain when “possums” is removed → they depend on the noun.
Substitution test within category:
- Replace with cats/thieves/cyborgs/orangutans; grammaticality preserved → same category.
- Semantic oddities (e.g. “ferocious cars”) do not undermine grammatical distribution evidence.

Constituent: any group of words that grammar treats as a single unit.
Phrase: a constituent that possesses a head determining its category and licensing dependents.
- E.g. “the big dog” = NP → head dog.
Constituents nest recursively; phrases contain phrases, yielding hierarchical structure.

Movement (a metaphor)
- If a sequence can relocate as a block (or surface in parallel constructions) while preserving grammaticality, it is a constituent.
- English diagnostics:
  - Topicalisation: “At that strange little shop, Nimra bought a scarf.”
  - Passive alternation: “That lovely scarf was bought by Nimra.”
  - Clefts: “It was a book about linguistics that he read.”
- Incomplete movement (leaving word(s) behind) → ungrammatical.
Substitution / Replacement
- A constituent can be exchanged for a single pro-form without meaning change.
  - NP: it, them, demonstratives.
  - PP: there/then.
  - VP: do so, verb-phrase ellipsis.
- “He read a book about linguistics → He read it.”
- “She opened a restaurant and he did so too.”
Standalone / Answer-to-Question
- If a sequence can be uttered alone (e.g. short answer), it functions as a constituent.
- “What did Nimra buy?” → “That lovely scarf.”
Coordination
- Only like constituents (same structural type/function) may be joined by and/or.
- “We peeled [the potatoes] and [the carrots].” (NP + NP)
- “We [peeled the potatoes] and [chopped the herbs].” (VP + VP)
- Caution: coordination can yield false positives; always corroborate with other tests.

“John eats at really fancy restaurants.”
- Standalone Q-A: “What does John do on weekends?” → “Eat at really fancy restaurants.”
- Replacement: “John does so too.”
- Cleft: “It’s eating at really fancy restaurants that John loves to do.”
- Incomplete variants (e.g. John eats it really fancy restaurants) are ungrammatical → confirms constituency boundary.

Head: obligatory element; determines phrase category, selects dependents, dictates agreement/inflection.
- Removing head destroys phrase (the only on the spaceship – invalid without “dog”).
Dependents:
- Optional; can often be removed without violating grammar (“the dog” vs. “dog”).
- Type of dependents licensed varies by head (adjective permissible with nouns; adverb not).

Example: “The VC eats at fancy restaurants.”
- NP → [Det the] + [N VC]
- VP → [V eats] + [PP at fancy restaurants]
- PP → [P at] + [NP fancy restaurants]
- NP → [Adj fancy] + [N restaurants]
Each constituent nests within a larger one; recursion allows unlimited sentence length/complexity from finite rules.

When analyzing an unfamiliar language:
- Form hypotheses on constituency and category membership.
- Systematically apply multiple tests; one piece of evidence seldom decisive.
- Account for semantic oddities or pragmatic factors that may skew intuitions.
- Document both successful and failed test results to support conclusions.
In fieldwork/textual analysis:
- Elicit or search for parallel constructions (movement, clefts, passives, etc.).
- Use ellipsis and pronoun replacement to probe NP/VP/PP boundaries.

Grammar groups words into constituents; phrases have heads and dependents.
Four core diagnostics—movement, substitution, standalone, coordination—are essential analytic tools.
Categories are identified by distribution, not by meaning alone.
Evidence is cumulative; the more tests a proposed constituent passes, the more robust the analysis.
Understanding constituency (≈ 60\% of the course’s intellectual load) underpins all subsequent syntactic reasoning.