Introduction to Syntax

1
Introduction to Syntax

• Linear structure
• Hierarchical structure
• Ambiguity

2
Syntax is

• The study of sentence formation
• Subconscious grammatical knowledge
• Word order

3
Grammaticality Judgments

• We went to my grandmothers house.
• Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.
• The children might being sing.
• We fed her snail poison.
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• Me and Beth are watching a movie.
• Swedes like fish more than Italians.
• She aint got nothing to hide.

4
Grammaticality Judgments

• We went to my grandmothers house.
• Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.
• The children might being sing.
• We fed her snail poison.
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• Me and Beth are watching a movie.
• Swedes like fish more than Italians.
• She aint got nothing to hide.
• AMB ambiguous, ungrammatical,
• grammatical but nonsensical,
• grammatical in a non-standard v.

5
Ambiguous?

• I scratched the dog with a stick

I love linguistics!!!
Im a stick
Im a dog (I think!)
6
Do I mean this?

• I scratched (the dog with a stick)

Nice doggie!
7
Or do I mean this?

• I scratched (the dog) with a stick.

scratch
scratch
8
The two meanings are a result of
HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE Sentences are more than
just ordered sequences of words. They have
internal hierarchical structure as well.
scratched the dog with a stick scratched
the dog with a stick
dog has stick I have stick
9
Unavoidable Ambiguity

• Why cant we convey these internal hierarchical
  structures and avoid ambiguity?
• LINEAR ORDER
• Human verbal communication is limited by linear
  production. Consequently, sentences are
  organized linearly.

10
Two kinds of ambiguity

• She called her boyfriend from Australia.
• STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY
• We went down to the bank yesterday
• LEXICAL AMBIGUITY

11
Basic Word Order

• SVO (English, Chinese)
• The boy saw the man
• SOV (Russian, Turkish, Japanese)
• Pensive poets painful vigils keep (Pope)
• VSO (Irish, Arabic, Welsh)
• Govern thou my song (Milton)

12
Basic Word Order

• OSV (Jamamadi)
• When nine hundred years you reach, look as good
  you will not. (Yoda)
• OVS (Apalai - Amazon basin)
• VOS (Malagasy (Madagascar)

13
How would you say

• English (SVO)
• Susie brings coffee
• Japanese (SOV)
• sushi-ga cohi-o mottekuru
• Susie coffee bring
• Malagasy (VOS)
• Entin kafe Susie
• bring coffee Susie

14
Two principles of sentence organization

• 1. LINEAR ORDER
• not only a limitation, we actually make use of
  the linearity of the language
• In English, limited morphology forces us to use
  word order to distinguish subject from object.
• Tom chased Jerry.
• Jerry chased Tom.

15
Two principles of sentence organization

• 2. HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE
• As we saw with the ambiguous sentence, this
  structure is invisible upon first glance.
• However, there are tests we can perform to
  discover the hierarchical structure of sentences.

16
Constituency
CONSTITUENT a group of words in a sentence that
behave syntactically and semantically as a unit.
I have stick
dog has stick
scratched the dog with a stick scratched
the dog with a stick
17
How to determine constituency

• Semantic intuitions
• sometimes, we just know that certain strings of
  words go together as a unit.
• Constituency Tests (more reliable)
• tests that can be applied to string of words in a
  given sentence to determine if the string is a
  constituent or not.

18
Next Time

• Constituency tests
• Phrase Structure Rules