SYNTAX
• The scientific study of sentence structures
• How words are assembled to form
meaningful and grammatical utterances
• Syntactic rules in a grammar account for
the grammaticality of sentences, and the
ordering of words and morphemes.
WHAT IS SYNTAX?
• A hierarchically organized structure of
words that maps sound to meaning
and vice versa.
What is a sentence?
• A group of rules is called a Grammar.
• A grammar in the linguistic sense is a
cognitive structure. It is the part of
mind that generates and understands
language.
Rules: A kind of
hypothesis
• English word order
• Subject Verb Object (SVO)
• The boy kicked the ball
• ?The ball kicked the boy
• Ahmad hired Ah Seng
• Ah Seng hired Ahmad
• *book the
• *Men are
• *Talked in
The role of words in a
sentence
Visiting cousins ARE boring.
vs
Visiting cousins IS boring.
Subject verb agreement allows us to disambiguate here.
• Rules can be applied more than once in
generating sentences
• E.g. repeat prepositional phrase more than
once
• The gun was on the table near the window in the
bedroom in the pink house
• Put sentences inside sentences
• This is the cat that ate the rat that ate the cheese
that was sold by the man that lived in the city
that was on the river…
• No end to recursion- produce longer
complex sentences
Recursion
• Humans can understand & produce an infinite
number of sentences they never heard before
• “Some dragonflies are starting to tango in the garden”
• Our grammar can understand and produce long
sentences
• “John said that he thought that the esteemed leader of
the house had it in mind to tell the unfortunate vice
president that the calls that he made from the office in
the White House that he thought was private…..”
Syntactical knowledge
• Non-sense sentences with clear syntax
•
•
•
•
•
•
Colorless red ideas eat furiously.
A noun crumpled the milk.
I gave the question a scuba-diving bottle.
*Furiously eat ideas red colorless.
*Milk the crumpled
*the question I a bottle scuba-diving gave.
• Sentences are composed of discrete units that
are combined by rules. These rules explain how
speakers can store infinite knowledge in a finite
space- brain.
Syntax and meaning
• Noam Chomsky 1950s
• Generative = a very explicit system of rules
specifying what combinations of basic elements
result in well-formed sentences.
• Generative Grammar = a group of rules that
generate the sentences of a language
• Defines the syntactic structure of a language.
Generative Grammar
• Phrase structure rules
• Transformational rules
Productivity of
language
• One aspect of the syntactic structure of sentences is the
division of a sentence into phrases, and those phrases into
further phrases, and so forth.
• Another aspect of the syntactic structure of a sentence is
"movement" relations that hold between one syntactic
position in a sentence and another.
Sentence Structure
• Some words seem to belong together:
• {The man} {is reading a book}
• Groups of words that belong together are
called constituents
• The component that determines the
properties of the constituent is the head,
and the constituent can be referred to as a
phrase: e.g. noun phrase
Phrase structure
rules
• If we look at phrases, some patterns emerge:
Det
N
• the instructor = NP
Det N
• a friend = NP
Det
N
• some homework = NP
Det
N
• two classes = NP
Phrase Structure Rules
• some more patterns:
V
Det N
• call the instructor= VP
V
Det N
• meet a friend = VP
V
Det N
• do some homework = VP
V
Det
N
• skip two classes = VP
Phrase Structure Rules
• and yet more patterns:
Prep Det
N
• with the instructor= PP
Prep Det N
• from a friend = PP
Prep Det
N
• with some homework = PP
Prep Det
N
• after two classes = PP
Phrase Structure Rules
• Rules for determining the structure of
phrases
• Generate a lot of sentences from a small
number of rules.
• The structure of a phrase will consist of one
or more constituents in a certain order.
• What does a NP consist of?
• “noun phrases have a Det and a N”
NP
Det N
Phrase Structure Rules
• We need lexical rules to specify which words can be
used when we rewrite constituents such as N.
•
•
•
•
PN
N
Art
Pro
{Mary, George}
{girl, boy, dog}
Lexical Rules
• V
Det
N
V Det N
V
Det N
run a marathon eat the food read the book
• V Prep Det N
go to the store
V
Det
N
V Prep Det N
talk with a teacher
Prep Det N
take your sister to the library
• “Verb phrases have a V, (sometimes) an NP, and
(sometimes) a PP”
• VP -> V (NP) (PP)
Phrase Structure Rules
1. S  NP VP
2. NP  {Det N, Pro, PN}
3. VP  V (NP) (PP) (Adv)
4. PP  P NP
5. AP  A (PP)
Phrase Structure Rules
Phrase Structure Rules & tree diagrams
•
•
NP  (Det) N
PP  P NP
The boy (NP)
Det
N
The
boy
the boy in the yard
NP
Det
N
PP
P
NP
Det
N
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The
boy
in the
yard
Phrase Structure Rules
• VP  V (NP) (PP)
• S  NP VP
took the money (VP)
V
NP
Det
took
the
took the money from the bank
VP
V
N
NP
Det
money
PP
N
P
NP
Det
N
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took
the money from the
bank
Example (1)
The old tree swayed in the wind
S
NP
Det
Adj
VP
N
V
PP
P
NP
Det
The
old
tree
swayed
in the
N
wind
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Example (2)
The children put the toy in the box
S
NP
Det
VP
N
V
NP
Det
PP
N
P
NP
Det
The
children
put
the
toy
in the
N
box
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Example 3
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• The deep structure is an abstract level of
structural organization in which all the
elements determining structural
interpretation are represented.
• Sentences that have alternative interpretations
• Sentences that have different surface forms but
have the same underlying meaning.
• Surface structure= how the sentence is
actually represented
Deep and surface
structure
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• Surface structure is the actually produced structure. In
Bussman's (1996: 465-466) words, it is the directly
observable actual form of sentences as they are used in
communication, and from the perspective of
transformational grammar, surface structure is a relatively
abstract sentence structure resulting from the application
of base rules and transformational rules.
• The relationship between deep structure and surface
structure is that of transformation. Since the relationship
is usually a complicated one, we can best use
transformational rules in the total process of relating deep
structure to surface structures.
• How superficially different sentences are closely
related?
• Charlie broke the window.
• The window was broken by Charlie
• Charlie who broke the window.
• Was the window broken by Charlie?
 Difference in their surface structure = difference
in syntactic forms
 BUT they have the same ‘deep’ or underlying
structure
Deep and surface
structure
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Structural Ambiguity (1)
The boy saw the man with the telescope
S
NP
Det
VP
N
V
NP
Det
PP
N
P
NP
Det
The
boy
saw the
N
man with the telescope
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Meaning: Using the telescope, the boy saw the man
Structural Ambiguity (1)
The boy saw the man with the telescope
S
NP
Det
VP
N
V
NP
Det
PP
N
P
NP
Det
The
boy
saw the
N
man with the telescope
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Meaning: Using the telescope, the boy saw the man
Transformational Rules
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• In what way are these sentences
ambiguous?
• We met an English history teacher
• Flying planes can be dangerous
Exercises
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