Syntactic categories/syntactic functions Flashcards
Syntax
how words combine into larger structures such as phrases and clauses.
Features of syntactic structure
- linear order
- constituency
- hierarchical structure
Linear order
- sentences, clauses, and phrases follow word order; words are pronounced one after another.
-linear order matters:
(1a) John criticizes Mary.
(1b) Mary criticizes John. - neighboring words don’t always belong
together and words that stay further away from each other
can belong together.
-Is not very important for interpretation.
Constituency
-words clump together and form building blocks of phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Means that sentences can become ambiguous:
(1a) Good girls and boys.
interpretation 1: [[Good girls] and [boys]]
interpretation 2: [Good [girls and boys]]
Hierarchical structure
linguistic units, e.g. clauses and phrases, can contain other clauses and phrases – linguistic units nest within one another.
(1a) The family fulfills [NP various functions].
(1b) The family fulfills [NP various functions that are
divided among many specialized institutions in modern
societies].
Syntactic categories
available syntactic units
Lexical categories
They are syntactically simple and consist of units that don’t have internal
syntactic structure (they have morphological structure).
noun (N)
pronoun (PRO)
verb (V)
adjective (ADJ)
adverb (ADV)
article (Art)
preposition (P)
auxiliary (AUX)
empty inflectional element (INFL)
complementizer (COMP)
Phrasal categories
phrasal categories have an internal syntactic structure.
noun phrase (NP)
verb phrase (VP)
adjective phrase (AdjP)
adverb phrase (AdvP)
determined noun phrase (DP)
prepositional phrase (PP)
inflected verb phrase (IP)
complement phrase (CP)
clause (S) – a special category
A clause (S)
a grammatical expression of a proposition
(a complete thought).
Syntactic functions
- the jobs that syntactic categories perform in a phrase, clause, or discourse.
- syntactic categories are like tools that can be employed to do a particular job (language is a toolkit).
Syntactic functions - head
every phrase has a syntactic head and most have a semantic head – most of the time it’s the same element.
- a noun is a syntactic and semantic head of an NP.
Syntactic head
determines the grammatical properties of the phrase.
Semantic head
expresses the main meaning of the phrase.
A determiner
- specifies, identifies, or quantifies the following NP.
- a determiner is the syntactic head of the DP.
Syntactic category serving as determiner
Articles: the, a/an
Example of DP: ‘a weird message’
Ø (zero article)
(Example of DP: They’re sending me ‘weird
messages’).
Demonstratives: this, that, these, those
(Example of DP: ‘That weird message’ you sent me….)
Quantifiers: each, every, many, much, any, some, (a) few, three
(Example of DP: I deleted ‘a few weird messages’.)
either, neither
(Example of DP: ‘Neither weird message’ was …)
genitive pronouns and phrases
(Examplem of DP: ‘Ron’s weird messages’ are…)
