Chapter 8 Syntax

Chapter 8 Syntax

1 Syntactic rules

To analyze a language's syntax, we try to adhere to the

“all and only” criterion. This means all the analysis must  account for all the grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases

and sentences

A Generative Grammar

Def: a set of rules defining the possible sentences in a language

An effective rule such as “a prepositional phrase in English consists of a preposition followed by a noun phrase,” we can imagine a huge number of English phrases that could be produced using this rule

2 Deep and Surface Structure

Def: 

• Surface structure: the structure of individual sentences in contrast to deep structure 

• Deep structure: the underlying structure ( NP+V+NP) of sentences as represented by phrase structure rules

Structural Ambiguity

Def: a situation in which a single phrase or sentence has two (or more) different underlying structures and interpretations

E.g: “Annie bumped into a man with an umbrella” ( surface structure) 

there are 2 deep structure meanings to express in this surface structure form: 

1.  “Annie had an umbrella and she bumped into a man with it.” (deep structure)

2. Annie bumped into a man and the man happened to be carrying an umbrella.”(deep structure)

3 Syntactic Analysis

In syntactic analysis, we use some conventional abbreviations for the parts of speech

E.g: N (= noun), Art (= article), Adj (= adjective), V(= verb), 

NP (= noun phrase), VP (= verb phrase),Pro(=pronoun), 

PN( proper noun)

 

We would like to be able to represent the same syntactic information in a more dynamic format. a noun phrase (NP) such as the dog consists of or rewrites as (→) an article (the) and a noun (dog) or we can include an (adj) optionally . This simple formula is the underlying structure of millions of different English phrases.

NP → Art N  or  NP → Art (Adj) N

Another common symbol is in the form of curly brackets {}. These indicate that only one of the elements enclosed within the curly brackets must be selected

4 Phrase Structure Rules

Def: rules stating that the structure of a phrase of a specific type consists of one or more constituents in a particular order

First rule: “a sentence (S) rewrites as a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP).”

Second rule: “a noun phrase rewrites as either an article plus an optional adjective plus a noun, or apronoun, or a proper noun.”

Third rule: “a verb phrase rewrites as a verb plus a noun

phrase.”

S → NP VP

NP → {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN}

VP → V NP

5 Lexical Rules

Def: rules stating which words can be used for constituents generated by phrase structure rules

when we rewrite constituents such as PN. The first rule in the following set states that “a proper noun rewrites as John or Mary.” (It is a very small world)

We can rely on these rules to generate the grammatical sentences shown below in (1)–(6), but not the ungrammatical sentences shown in (7)–(12).

6 Tree Diagrams

Def: a diagram with branches showing the hierarchical organization of structures

NP:

VP:

Tree Diagrams of English Sentences

7Just Scratching the Surface

we inevitably need a larger analytic framework to develop

better ways of analyzing the syntactic structure of complex sentences (We have barely scratched the surface structures.)