Syntax Nuha AlWadaani

When we concentrate on the structure and ordering of comoponants within a sentence, we are studying the syntax of a language. The word “syntax” comes originally from Greek and literally means “a putting together” or “arrangements.” Syntax is the study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form grammatical sentences. Our syntactic analysis must account for “all and only” criterion (all the grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases and sentences in whatever language we are analyzing.

Generative Grammar When we have an effective rule “a prepositional phrase in English consists of a preposition followed by a noun phrase,” we can imagine an extremly large number of English phrases that could be produced using this rule. The goal of the syntactic analysis is to have a finite (limited/small) set of rules that will be capable of producing a large potentially infinite (unlimited) sets of well-formed structures. This finite and limited set of rules is sometimes described as a generative grammar because it can be used to “generate” or produce sentence structures and not just describe them.

Deep and surface structure Generative grammar is capable of revealing the basis of: 1. how some superficially different sentences are closely related. 2. how some superficially similar sentences are in fact different.

Charlie broke the window. The window was broken by Charlie.

Based on the traditional grammar, these two sentences are superficially different. The first one is active and the second is passive. There is a superficial difference in form disguises the fact that the two different sentences are very closely related in the deep/underlying structure. The deep structure is an abstract level of structural organization in which all the elements determining structural interpretation are represented. In the underlying level, we have basic components (Noun Phrase +Verb+ Noun Phrase).

This deep structure can be the source of many other surface structures such as: Was the window broken by Charlie? It was Charlie who broke the window. The grammar must be capable of showing how a single underlying abstract representation can become different surface structures.

Structural Ambiguity Structural ambiguity can happen in phrases and sentences when two underlying interpretations are represented differently in the deep structure. For example, Annie bumped into a man with an umbrella. Small boys and girls.

Recursion It is a property of grammar. Recursive rules(repeatable any number of times) have the capacity to be applied more than once in generating a structure. For example, The gun was on the table near the window in the bedroom. Also, it accounts for putting sentences inside other sentences. For example, John believed that Cathy knew that Mary helped George. There is no end to the recursion that would produce ever longer versions of complex sentences with this structure.

Tree Diagrams symbols used in the syntactic analysis Open page 101.

Phrase Structure Rules Phrase structure rules generate structures and rules. These rules state that the structure of a phrase of a specific type will consist of one or more constituents in a particular order. We can use the phrase structure rules to present the information of the tree diagram in another format. For example, NP NP Art N Art N

Phrase Structure Rules S  NP VP NP  {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN} VP  V NP (PP) (Adv) PP  Prep NP

Lexical Rules Lexical rules specify which words can be used when we rewrite constituents such as N. The first rule in the following set states that “ aproper noun rewrites as “Mary or George.” PN  {Mary, George} N  {girl, dog, boy} Art  {a, the} Pro  {it, you} V  { followed, helped, saw}

Movement rules The rules discussed earlier can be treated as a representation of the underlying or deep structures of sentences with a fixed word order (declarative sentences) such as, You will help Mary. What about interrogative forms? In making the questions like Will you help Mary?, we move on part of the structure to a different position. This process is based on a movement rule. Therefore, we need to include an auxiliary verb--helping verbs--(Aux) to the phrase structure rules as part of the sentence.

S  NP Aux VP Aux  {can, could, should, will, would} V  {follow, help, see} To form questions, we use a simple movement rule: NP Aux VP  Aux NP VP Draw tree diagrams of the sentences below: Can you see the dog? Would Mary help George?

Complement phrases Back to recursion, we need to be able to include sentence structures within other sentence structures. For example, John believed that Cathy knew that Mary helped George. The word that is called complementizer (C). The rule of (C) is to introduce a complement phrase (CP). The rules would be: S  NP VP VP  V CP CP  C S We can use these rules to create an endless sentence containing other sentence structures.