Syntax Flashcards
Syntactic Categories
From 1A
Major: Noun, Verb, Adjective, Preposition, Adverb
Minor: Determiners, Auxiliary Verbs, Pronouns, Conjunctions
Other subcategories
* common vs proper nouns
* mass vs count nouns
* intransitive, transitive and ditransitive verbs
Syntactic Distribution
How a word can combine with other words
Different syntactic categories have different distributions.
eg: distribution of AUX is different from main V
* subject / AUX inversions in questions (and do support for main V)
Phrase, Constituents, Hierarchy
Sentences have hierarchical structures
Parts of sentences are grouped into phrases / constituents.
* Syntax is about uncovering the rules behind how languages combine words into such groups
Constituency Tests (from 1A)
- Coordination
- Substitution
- Fragment
- Focus / Cleft
- Movement
- Ellipsis
Coordination
Usually applicable to NP.
If the coordinated structure can function as an NP, the individual coordinated elements are NPs as well.
I like Bill’s sister’s dog and his brother.
* [Bill’s sister’s dog] and [his brother] are constituents
Substitution
- Proform substitution for NP
I like [Bill’s sister’s dog] but it has fleas. - Proform substitution for VP
I said I’d [mail the letter], and I’ll do so.
Fragment
If a phrase can be used as an answer to a question, it is a constituent.
What do you like?
* Bill’s cooking
What did you do?
* Eat an entire pie
The fragment can be seen as a proform substitution after Wh-movement.
Focus / Clefting
Forming clefts and pseudo clefts via the it was / what structure.
Original sentence: The big mean dog bit me.
It was the big mean dog that bit me.
What the big mean dog did was bite me
What bit me was the big mean dog
Movement
Only constituents can undergo movement.
I never did mail the letter.
Mail the letter, I never did.
*Never did, I mail the letter.
Ellipsis
VP ellipsis:
I was supposed to mail the letter, but I never did ___.
NP ellipsis:
not common in English
Recursion
When a constituent of one type XP contains another constituent of the same type XP, this is a case of recursion
Recursion =/= iteration (iteration is not a containment relationship)
Syntactic Ambiguity
eg: I hit the man with the ball on his head.
Different interpretations can arise depending on the different constituent structures.
Structure of Language
Language has a hierarchical (phrases can contain other phrases) recursive (phrases can contain other phrases of the same type.
Finite-State Machines (FSM)
Also known as N-gram models:
Predict the next word on the basis of the previous N-1 words.
* estimates transition probabilities from a large corpus
Limitations:
1. Long distance dependencies
* In English, dependencies (S-V Agreement, If…then structures etc) can occur over arbitrarily long distances.
* FSMs have no “memory” of such dependencies. (An infinite number of chains would need to be stored to consider all dependencies)
* These dependencies also need to be nested.
- Patterning
* Complex FSMs are made of repeating identical subnetworks
* This suggests that we process language as a set of schema
Context Free Grammars (CFG)
CFG Rules:
A ==> X, where X is any sequence
A ‘can be rewritten’ as X
These rules should apply everywhere.
Context free: Does not depend on the context of A
Two jobs of grammars
- Generation: starting with a symbol, generate a grammatical string via a legal sequence of moves.
- Parsing: starting with a string, see if you can assign it a structure via a legal sequence of moves.
Nonfactors:
1. Phonological / semantic interpretation
2. Pragmatics
Grammaticality wrt CFG
In Formal Grammar, a string is grammatical iff a legal sequence of moves can get you from S to the string.
Conversely it is ungrammatical if no legal sequences of moves can get you from S to the string.
Dependencies wrt CFG
CFGs automatically nest dependencies
eg Rule:
S ==> either S or S
Example of CFG structurality
eg: Purple Ball and Big Giraffe
* Purple Giraffe and Big Ball come with these two items
* not * purple big or * ball giraffe (no legal sequences of moves can produce these)
Rule:
AP ==> A N
A = {purple, big}
N = {ball, giraffe}
Word Order Typology
Consider cross-linguistic variation of word order, and their similarities / differences with Eng
Head / Complement structure
Every phrase has a head: the element that gives a phrase its category
Less obvious heads/categories:
1. that his head hurts: head is that, category is complementiser phrase (CP)
2. the dog: head is the, category is determiner phrase (DP)
SVO
Eng basic word order: Subject-Verb-Object
* SV: subject immediately precedes the verb and its complements
* VO: the object (if applicable) immediately follows the verb.
Eng occassionally allows other structures:
1. [Discourse-neutral SVO]: Maria has read the newspaper already.
2. [Topicalisation OSV]: The newspaper, Maria has read already.
SOV [Japanese]
Japanese is head-final (heads follow their complements)
eg:
PP ==> NP P
Chiba-ni = Chiba-to
Complement clauses precede the embedding noun or verb.
Head-complement order [comparing Eng and Jap]
Understanding the sentence as a tense phrase (tense is the head of the sentence)
ie Eng: Head is tense
* S / TP => NP T VP
ie Jap: Head is verb (maintaining head-final structure)
* S => NP TP VP
cf: Head-directionality parameter
