LINGUIS 101 1st Edition Lecture 18 Syntax Syntax is the study of sentence formation How are words put together to form phrases How are phrases put together to form sentences What are the constraints on sentence formation Basic units words drawn form the lexicon and the morphology Ungrammatical sentences Sentences that are possible allowable strings of words are grammatical Sentences that are not possible strings of words are ungrammatical and marked with a o The student ate the pizza o The student the pizza ate Word order The word order of a sentence must obey syntactic rules These rules vary from language to language Phrases Phrase a group of one or more words that function as a syntactic unit A phrase is organized around a central word called its head Syntactic distribution Syntactic category is defined in terms of syntactic distribution expression of the same type can occur in the same position in the sentence Phrase structure rules A phrase structure rule or PS rule describes the internal content and structure of a phrase o What lexical categories can be included in the phrase o How are the items order English NPs These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute Simplest NP o Dogs hockey janet truth Determiners o The a this that these some my her NP with determiner o The book my friend some ideas NP with adjective o Provocative ideas my best friend NP rules o NP D Adj N Prepositional phrases PPs Prepositions o In on about of for to with at by P NP PP o In the movies by my house for posterity NP with PP inside o Books about tulips people from Wausau NP with both Det and PP o A vase of flower his long letter to Gary PS rule for PPs and NPs o Pp rule PP P NP o NP rule NP D Adj N PP Recursion The PP and NP rules introduce the possibility of recursion into our grammar Infinity recursion allows us to express an infinite number of ideas with limited resources Human specific the communication systems of non human species lack recursion as far as we know English VPs Simplest VP o Works fell slept sing VP with NP or PP o Kicked the ball eat fish slept until noon VP with Adv o Always manages never sleeps VP with lots of stuf o Suddenly hurt her ankle on Thursday PS rules for VPs o VP ADv V NP PP A basic sentence Sentence subject and predicate In a basic sentence the subject is a noun phrase NP and the predicate is a verb phrase VP S NP VP
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