Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2-121C, group b Lecture 3

1
Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2-121C,
group bLecture 3

• Eleni Miltsakaki
• AUTH
• Spring 2006

2
Morphology review

• What is the subject matter of morphology?
• The study of the structure of words
• What is a word?
• An arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning
• What is a morpheme?
• Building blocks of complex words

3
Morphology review

• Explain the following distinctions
• Content words and function words
• Content? concepts, open class
• Function? grammatical function, closed class
• Bound and free morphemes
• Free independent words bound affixes
• Derivational morphology and inflectional
  morphology
• Derivational rootbound morphemenew word with
  new meaning
• Inflectional rootbound morpheme new word with
  marking of some grammatical aspect

4
Morphology review

• Word formation
• How are new words created? Give an example of
  each of the following categories
• Word formation rules (derivations)
• Coining
• Compounding
• Blending
• Acronyms
• Clippings
• Backformation
• Conversion

5
Morphology review

• The hierarchical structure of words
• Whats the evidence?
• How do we represent the hierarchical structure of
  words?
• Think of an ambiguous word and represent the
  meanings in tree diagrams

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Syntax

• What is syntax?
• The study of sentence structure
• Video linear order

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Grammaticality

• Grammatical sentences are sequences of words that
  conform to the rules of syntax.
• Ungrammatical sentences violate syntactic rules

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Grammaticality judgment

• Language speakers have intuitions about
  grammaticality
• The boy found the ball
• The boy found quickly
• The boy found in the house
• The boy found the ball in the house

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Grammaticality judgment

• The ability to make grammaticality judgments does
  NOT depend on
• Having heard the sentence before
• Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the
  prom
• Whether a sentence is meaningful or not
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
• The truth of sentences
• The earth is flat

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Grammaticality judgment

• Ungrammaticality
• You may understand the meaning of a sentence and
  still judge it to be ungrammatical
• The boy quickly in the house the ball found

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Ambiguity

• Syntax can also account for multiple meanings
  ---AMBIGUITY
• Like words, sentences have hierarchical structure

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Ambiguity

• The girl saw the man with the telescope.
• (The girl) (saw) (the man with the telescope)
• (The girl) (saw) (the man) (with the telescope)
• We can tree the ambiguity (will do so shortly
  after we look at sentence structure).

13
Practice

• Paraphrase to show the ambiguity
• The design has big squares and circles
• Terry loves his wife and so do I
• No smoking section available
• Dick finally decided on the boat
• The sheepdog is too hairy to eat

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Sentence structure

• Syntactic rules determine the order of words in a
  sentence and how the words are grouped
• The child found the puppy
• How many groupings are possible?

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Tree diagram
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Tree terminology

• Syntactic trees are upside down
• The root of the tree
• The leaves of the tree
• The nodes of the tree
• Mother-daughter relation
• Siblings sister-sister relation
• Dominate relation
• Immediately dominate relation

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Constituents

• The natural groupings of a sentence are
  constituents
• Our knowledge of the constituent structure can be
  represented with a tree

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Syntactic categories

• A family of expressions that can substitute for
  one another retaining grammaticality is called a
  syntactic category
• A police officer found the puppy in the garden
• Your neighbor found the puppy in the garden
• This yellow cat found the puppy in the garden
• They found the puppy in the garden
• What syntactic category is the subject in the
  above sentences?
• Can you think of other syntactic categories?

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Syntactic categories

• S sentence
• NP noun phrase
• VP verb phrase
• PP prepositional phrase
• AP adjective phrase
• Nnoun, V verb, Ppreposition, A adjective, D
  determiner, Adj adjective, Adv adverb, Aux
  auxiliary verb

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Diagnostics for constituents

• Diagnostics for phrasal constituents
• Substitution/Pronoun substitution
• Mary loves apples.
• My sister loves everything she sees.
• Black cats detest green beans. They detest them.
• Questions
• What do you love? The cats/Cats with
  long fluffy tails.
• Where did Ali Baba go? To New York/On a long
  journey.
• Relocation (movement)
• I fed the cats. The cats, I fed.
• It-cleft focus
• I fed the cats. It was the cats that I fed.

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Phrase structure trees

• Constituents can be represented graphically as
  nodes in a tree
• A tree diagram with syntactic category
  information is called a phrase structure tree
• They represent (encode) three aspects of
  speakers syntactic knowledge
• The linear order of words
• The groupings of words into syntactic categories
• The hierarchical structure of syntactic categories

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Practice

• Draw phrase structure trees for the following
  sentences
• The puppy found the child
• A frightened passenger landed the damaged plane
• The house on the hill collapsed in the wind
• The ice melted
• The children put the toy in the box
• The old tree swayed in the wind

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Are any strings represented as constituents that
shouldn't be? Are any strings not represented as
constituents that should be? Are any of the
trees misleading in other respects?
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Heads and complements

• Phrase structure rules show relations between the
  members of the phrase
• A VP, for example, contains a V which is the head
  of the phrase
• The VP may contain other categories but the
  entire phrase refers to what the head refers
• E.g. Put the puppy in the garden refers to the
  event of putting
• The other constituents in the phrase are
  complements

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Heads and complements

• Every phrasal category has a head of its same
  syntactic type
• VP V
• NP N
• PP P etc.

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Practice

• Find the head and the complements of the
  following NPs
• The man with the telescope
• The destruction of Rome
• A person worthy of praise
• A boy who pitched a perfect game

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Complement selection

• Whether a verb takes more than one complement
  depends on the properties of the verb
• The verb find is a transitive verb and requires
  an NP direct object complement
• This information, selection, is included in the
  lexical entry of the word and explains for the
  grammaticality judgment of the following
• The boy found the ball
• They boy found quickly
• The boy found in the house

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Complement selection

• Sleep is intransitive, it cannot take an NP
  complement
• Michael slept
• Michael slept a fish

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Complement selection

• Think takes (selects) a clausal complement. Tell
  selects for and NP and an S, feel selects an AP
  or an S
• I think that Sam won the race
• I told Sam that Michael was on the bicycle
• They felt strong as oxen
• They feel that they can win
• They feel

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Complement selection

• Its not only verbs that have selectional
  restrictions
• Belief selects a PP or an S
• Sympathy selects a PP
• Tired selects a PP etc

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The infinity of language

• aka recursion
• The number of sentences in a language is infinite
• This is because sentences can be lengthened by
  various means
• The heart of this linguistic property is the
  ability to generate recursive structures

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The infinity of language

• The is the farmer sowing the corn
• that kept the cock that crowned in the morn,
• that waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
• that married the man all tattered and torn,
• that kissed the maiden all forlorn,
• that milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
• that tossed the dog,
• that worried the cat,
• that killed the rat,
• that ate the malt,
• that lay in the house that Jack built

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Infinity of language

• The girl with the feather on the ribbon on the
  brim
• Tree

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Infinity of language

• The repetition of categories within categories is
  common in all languages and explains the infinity
  of language
• Our brain capacity is finite and able to store
  only a finite number of categories and rules for
  their combination
• These finite means place an infinite set of
  sentences at our disposal