Syntactic Analysis

Question 1

Substitution

What is substitution

Answer 1

Replacing any sequence of words with one word is called substitution.

Ex: my brother went to Rome
He went to Rome
Substitution validates constituency of the string of words that undergoes substitution.

Substitution by a pronoun- determine phrase
Substitution by ‘one’ - noun phrase
Substitution by ‘do so’- verb phrase
Substitution by ‘there’ - prepositional phrase

Question 2

Ellipsis

Answer 2

Omission of one or more words from a sequence of words that should be supplied by the speaker in order to understand the sentence.

Halliday and Hassan 1976 calls ellipsis as substitution by zero

There are 3typed

Nominal ellipsis
Omission of the noun head from a nominal group. In the case of nominal ellipsis the function of the noun is taken by another element a determiner, numeral, adjective

Most commonly determiner or numeral takes up the function of the noun head.

These oranges seem so fresh, lets buy some
Both Stefan and Damon likes Nina, neither wants to give her up.

Verbal ellipsis
Ellipsis with in a verbal group
A verbal group that doesn’t fully represents its systematic features.

Has she been playing tennis: yes she had

There are 2 types
Lexical ellipsis - omission of the lexical verb from a verbal group.
The function of it is take up by a remaining operator
Ex : will you brother come to the wedding- he might.

Operator ellipsis- omission of operators in verbal groups while the lexical verb remain intact
Often the subject is also omitted when operator ellipsis
Has she been drawing lately no studying

CLAUSAL ELLIPSIS
Omission of a part of the clause or all of it
Quite common in speech where the subject pronoun is often omitted chiefly in response to questions or in dialogues
Ex: what have they doing
(They are ) Planing the wedding

2 types
Modal ellipsis- omission of the modal element
Propositional ellipsis- omission if the prepositional element.

Question 3

Coordination

Answer 3

Combination of two independent clauses of equal status is knows as coordination.

Ex: Rachel’s assistant is very young but he is a quick learner

The two independent clauses are called the coordinates
The conjunction is known as the coordinator
The final combination is called the coordination.

The two coordinates are clauses. But the second one is marked with a coordinator.
:) the 1st clause is called the bare coordinate
The 2nd - expanded coordinate

There are three ways of marking coordination
Unmarked coordination he was tired,sleepy depressed
Repetitive coordination- he was tired and sleepy and depressed
Correlative coordination- Neither sue not John went on the trip