Introduction to Linguistics:

Syntax

Masoud Jasbi

LIN001

Week 5

What is Syntax?

Syntax is the study of rules, principles, and processes that combine words to construct sentences.

The way words are put together affect our interpretations.

The dog chased the cat.

The cat chased the dog.

It can also affect the available interpretations of a sentence.

Old women and men were invited.

Well-formedness

The dog is sleeping under the blanket.

The dogs are sleeping under the blanket.

The dog is sleeping below the blanket.

The dog are sleeping under the blanket.

Are sleeping the dog under the blanket.

Dog blanket is the the sleeping under.

Is the the under sleeping Dog blanket.

Linguistic Judgments

Basic Concepts

Grammaticality: Whether a sentence is constructed according to the grammatical rules of a language.

Interpretability: Whether a sentence can receive a coherent interpretation.

Felicity: whether a sentence is appropriate for the context that it was used in.

Acceptability: a broad term covering any linguistic ill/well-formedness.

Grammaticality vs. Interpretability

A sentence can be grammatical but not interpretable.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

* Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

A sentence can be ungrammatical but interpretable.

Chomsky’s idea are exciting.

​

Some Syntactic Properties

Word Order

Linguistic units are typically produced and processed linearly.

Therefore, the order of the units can matter.

Word order refers to the way a language requires the ordering of its words or phrases, especially the verb and its nominal arguments.

The squirrel bit the man.

The man bit the squirrel.

Basic Word Order

Basic word order refers to a language’s ordering of the verb, the subject and the object.

SVO: The squirrel ate the almond.

OVS: The almond ate the squirrel.

SOV: The squirrel the almond ate.

OSV: The almond the squirrel ate.

VSO: Ate the squirrel the almond.

VOS: Ate the almond the squirrel.

Word Order Typology

Agreement

The form of the verb may depend on properties of the subject or object.

Number (singular, plural, dual), person (1st, 2nd, 3rd), Gender

English Subject Verb Agreement for “be” (person and number):

I am happy - We/you/they are happy - she/he/it is happy.

Arabic subject verb agreement (number, person, gender)

​

https://arabic.desert-sky.net/g_conj.html

​

Grammatical Gender

Grammatical gender is related to but NOT the same as sociocultural gender.

It is a classification system for nouns that when it comes to people, can correlate with the notion of sociocultural gender.

But not always, e.g. German has three genders (feminine, masculine, neuter).

The noun mädchen (girl) is neuter and not feminine.

der/ein Mann die/eine Frau das/ein Mädchen

The syntactic rules of german require the suffix “-chen” to pattern as neuter.

Grammatical Gender

There are many other factors that affect this classification:

phonetics and phonology

Morphosyntactic properties of the language

semantic features like human, animate, type of object

processing and psycholinguistics

A few relevant charts:

Number of “Genders”: https://wals.info/feature/30A#2/26.8/149.0

Sex-based vs. non-sex based gender systems: https://wals.info/feature/31A#2/26.7/148.9

Systems of gender assignment: https://wals.info/feature/32A#2/26.7/148.9

Constituency Tests

Constituency

In a sentence, some words hang together more closely than others and form a unit called a constituent.

We can detect the constituents of a sentence by running constituency tests.

Pronominal Substitution

Answer Fragments

Movement

Coordination

​

Substitution

Constituents can be substituted with pronouns like s/he, they, it, that, them, then, there, do that, that way, …

A man with dark glasses (He) is following us.

I bought a few good looking mangos (them).

We watched a movie about cheese-making (did that) last week.

Annette went to Brazil (there).

Answer Fragments

Questions formed by wh-words like who, what, where, when, etc. can be answered by constituents.

That is my brother. → Who is that? My brother.

He is making a mess. → What’s he doing? Making a mess.

The keys are on the table. → Where are the keys? On the table.

Movement

Constituents can be moved as a group.

We had a lot of fun over the weekend. → Over the weekend, we had a lot of fun.

I’ve always enjoyed playing soccer. → Playing soccer, I’ve always enjoyed.

Coordination

Constituents can be coordinated using conjunction words like and, or, and but.

Her friends (and Mary) were playing tennis.

We peeled the onion (and poured them in the pot).

The car could go over the bridge (or through the tunnel).

How to use the tests

Failing to pass a single test does not mean that the test string is not a constituent.

Passing a single test does not necessarily mean the test string is a constituent.

It is best to apply as many tests as possible to a given string in order to show or to rule out its status as a constituent.

Example

Using constituency tests, determine which underlined parts are constituents.

Martha found a lovely pillow for the couch.

The light in this room is terrible.

I wonder whether Bonnie has finished packing her books.

Melissa slept in her class.

Pete and Max are fighting over the bone.

I gave a bone to Pete and to Max yesterday.

Syntactic Categories

Syntactic Category: Definition

Each word/constituent belongs to a syntactic category.

Words/constituents belonging to the same syntactic category can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality.

Syntactic categories are defined in terms of their distributional properties in a sentence.

Words that belong to the same category show similar distribution.

Lexical Categories

Noun: book, Jill, giraffe, liberty, ...

Verb: run, swim, eat, see, introduce, ...

Adjective: red, happy, afraid, big, fake, ...

Adverb: again, always, often, slowly, …

Functional Categories

Determiner: this, that, these, those, the, a, every, some, …

Preposition: for, on, in, under, at, with, …

Complementizer: whether, if, that, …

Conjunction: and, or, but, …

Neg: not

Tense / Aux: am, is, are, were, was, can, had, has, have, do, to, can, must, should, …

​

Phrasal Categories

Noun Phrase: the book, Jill, a giraffe with a very long neck, ...

Verb Phrase: run, eat a carrot, swim fast, give money to charity, ...

Adjective Phrase: red, happy and excited, afraid of snakes, ...

Preposition Phrase: for the sake of argument, about the issue, on the table, ...

Adverbial Phrase: slowly, more slowly, more slowly than me, ...

Example

Determine the syntactic category of the words in the following paragraph:

Martha found a lovely pillow for the couch.

The light in this room is terrible.

I wonder whether Bonnie has finished packing her books.

Melissa slept in her class.

Pet and Max are fighting over the bone.

I gave a bone to Pete and to Max yesterday.

​

Grammars

Definition of a Grammar

Grammars are formal and theoretical models that determine what is structurally allowed/included in a language and what is not.

There are many types of grammars:

Generative Grammars

Constraint-based Grammars

Functional Grammars

Dependency Grammars

Generative Grammar

Formal Languages & Grammars

A language L can be defined as a set of sentences.

Eng = {They are happy, Bob is in the room, The cat ran, …}

Not-Eng = {*is happy he, cat the ran, in is Bob the room, ...}

A Generative Grammar for L is a system of rules that generate (the sentences of) L; and only L.

Phrase Structure Grammars

Phrase Structure Grammars

In phrase structure grammars we typically group words into phrases and assign structure in a tree-like format.

Trees, Brackets, or Boxes

Trees are just one way of showing the syntactic grouping of words.

[_s [_NP [_N Alice] ] [_VP [_V eats] [_NP [_N cake] ] ] ]

Trees and Derivations

Trees can also be described by a set of rules that generate them.

S → NP VP

NP → N

VP → V NP

N → Alice, cake

V → eats

Rules

Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar

A context free phrase structure grammar can be defined mathematically as a 4-tuple G = <S, NT, T, R>.

S is the start symbol.

the set of non-terminal symbols NT.

the set of terminal symbols T; the words.

the rules R that generate the language.

S → NP VP

NP → N

VP → V (NP)

N → Alice

V → runs

Context Free Grammar: Example 1

G₁ = <S,

{NP, VP, N, V},

{Bob, Sally, runs, works},

R = {S → NP VP,

NP→ N,

VP → V

N → Bob, Sally

V → runs, works}

>

What sentences does this grammar generate?

What sentences does it not generate?

CFG: Example 2

G₂= <S,

{NP, VP, N, V, ADV},

{Bob, Sally, runs, works, hard, fast},

R = {S → NP VP,

NP→ N,

VP → V

VP → VP ADV

N → Bob, Sally

V → runs, works

ADV → hard, fast}

>

CFG: Example 3

G₃ = <S,

{NP, VP, D, N, PP, V, P}

{the, a, dog, cat, hat, chased, saw, on, in, with}

R = {S → NP VP, N → dog, cat, hat

NP→ N, D → a, the

NP→ D N (PP), V → saw, chased

VP → V P → in, on, with

VP → V NP (PP)

PP→ P NP}

>

Does grammar G₃ generate:

The dog chased the cat in a hat.

How?

Does it generate a sentence it should not?

Syntactic Ambiguity

Syntactic Ambiguity

Sometimes the same sentence can receive different syntactic analyses.

In other words, the grammar can assign at least two structures to the sentence.

And sometimes these two different structures correspond to different interpretations.

Syntactic Ambiguity

black coffee drinkers

Syntactic Ambiguity

I saw the man in my car

 S

NP

VP

N

I

V

saw

NP

NP

PP

D

N

man

the

P

NP

D

N

in

my

car

Exercise

Create a grammar that would generate the following sentence:

Abe bought the book about the man with the money

Draw two trees that capture the structural ambiguity in it.

G₃ = <S,

{NP, VP, D, N, PP, V, P}

{Abe, man, money, book, the, about, with}

R = {S → NP VP, N → Abe, man, money, book

NP→ (D) N (PP), D → the

VP → V (NP) (PP), V → saw, chased

PP→ P NP P → about, with}

>