10/9

  • turns out yes

  • these rules are sytematic and form framework into ehich speakers put their word

  • meaniing is irrelevant at the syntactic level

  • we can talk about a synctactic strucutews form and a syntactice structues function

Case

  • Finissh has a very complex case system

Forms of words change depending on their role in the sentence

The more morphological markings language usesn, the more flexible the the word order

Every sentence is a string of words, but the converse isn’t true

Grammaticality

*    doesn’t occure in the languar

For a sentence to be grammatical it doesn’t need to be:

  • true

  • meaningful

  • appropriate

  • prescriptively accurate

    • I tried to quickly do the hw

  • elecebt

Ungrammatical is to be understood as ungrammatical in a langauge or a dialect

It’s giving

Constituency

  • describe how words are described

  • Syntactic Unites are made up of elements which are grammatically coherent

  • Constituents function as a unit in the syntax

  • They follow language-specific principles regarding how theyre orderd, what they can do

  • constituents are components of ___

Noun Phrase (NP)

  • syntactic constituent consisting of a noun or pronoun (the head) and its modifiers (the dependents)

  • What are dependents of NPs

    • Determiners (demonstratives, articles, possessors, quantifiers, numerals, adjectives, prepositional phrases, relative clauses

    • the guy in the movie

Constituents hierarchical structure

  • constituents have other constituents embedded within them

  • this

  • whihc contas a pp

    • I saw [those flowers [in your garden]_PP]_NP

Verb Phrase

  • needs head verb, and its dependents, but may also contain

    • preceding auxiliary: might go

    • direct object noun phrases: eat peaches’

    • indirect object in a PP, give money to Sean

    • Adverbials of various types: furiously, next, Thursday

    • Prepositional phrases in the dining room, to the store

    • Markers of negation didn’t go

Preposiitonal Phrase (PP

  • preposition (the head) followed by a noun phrase (the dependent)

The clause (S)

  • Whats the min constituent

  • Are there fixed orders? not really

Tests for constituency

  • Fixed orders

  • Replacable

    • By a proform

  • Deletion

  • Movement

  • N V PP P

Example: The black cat ran up the tree

can replace cat with ‘it’ —> constituent

 

Some construction allow deletion