What is Syntax?  The rules that govern the structure of utterances; also called grammar  The basic organization of sentences is around syntax  build sentences around syntactic constituents; not word meaning  nonsensical sentences & non-grammatical sentences colorless green ideas sleep furiously -vs- run boy the quickly to dog home the

More Proof  Nonsensical words/lexical gaps ‘Twas brilig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves and the mome raths outgrabe.  The grammatical constituency is clear even if you don't know what the word means

Two Levels of Structure  surface structure  final result of the grammar  deep structure  underlying structure, based upon grammatical categories and constructed by syntactic rules Most prescriptive grammars only deal with surface structure concerns. Why?  They address how we write, not how we speak. Also most deal with style concerns, ie effective language use, rather than true grammatical rules

Transformational Generative Grammar  Generative Grammar  rules that allow us to create any sentence  Transformational Grammar  uses “shortcuts” to change surface structures  Descriptive  not telling us how we should construct sentences, but trying to explain how we create sentences

Levels of Constituency  Word—smallest unit in syntax  N, V, Adj, Adv, Det, Pro, Prep, Comp, Conj  Phrase—consists of word level constituents  Consists of a head and compliments  NP, VP, PP, AP, CP  Sentence—consists of Aux, Phrases, and a few function word constituents

What is an Auxiliary?  Aux is the head of a sentence  Aux  Tense (modal) (have +en) (be +ing)  Tense  Past or Non-Past  Modal  can, do, will, may, etc  The “+en” and the “+ing” attach themselves to the main verb  have +en  eg. have written  be +ing  eg. is writing

Properties of Syntactic Rules  Grammatical—meet with native speaker’s linguistic competence  Open-ended—allow for endless productivity in language  Synonymy—allow to express idea in more than one way  Ambiguity—allow a sentence to have more than one meaning

A Few Notes About the Rules  Simplified rules  Hierarchical: follow L to R  Parenthesizes mark optional components  An arrow [  ] means “consists of”  A superscript n [ n ] means this component can be repeated  More than one rule means more than one choice