3.3 A More Detailed Look At Transformations Inversion (revised): Move Infl to C. Do Insertion: Insert interrogative do into an empty Infl position. Wh Movement (revised): Move a wh phrase to the specifier position under CP.

Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Languages

1.Syntax: the rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that represent speakers’ knowledge of the structure of phrase and sentence. Sentences are not simple random strings or words; they conform to specific patterns determined by the syntactic rules of the language. Grammaticality judgments do not depend on whether the sentence is meaningful or not.

e.g. My father went to Taipei by bus at 8 this morning. My father took a bus to Taipei at 8 this morning.

3. Syntactic Categories: A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality is called a syntactic category. e.g. The child found the puppy. A police officer found the puppy. Your neighbor found the puppy. This yellow cat found the puppy. He found the puppy. The child, a police officer, your neighbor, this yellow cat, he belong to the syntactic category.

6. Phrasal categories: The categories that occur to the left of the arrow in a phrase structure rule are called phrase categories; categories that never occur on the left side of any rule are lexical categories.

8. Subcategorization: A transitive verb must be followed by a Noun Phrase, its “ directive object.” This additional specification is called subcategorization, and is also included in the lexical entry of each word. 9. complementizer: A syntactic category of words that precede the S in an S-bar. e.g. that in “I know that you know…” NP  Pronoun VP  VS’ S’  (Comp) S

12. Long-Distance Relationships In English, the verb in the present-simple tense has an “s” added whenever the subject is the third person singular. Such a relationship is called subject-verb agreement. And this agreement may take over a long distance; besides, there is no limit to how many words may intervene, as the following sentences illustrates:

e.g. The guy we met at the party next door seems kind of cute The guys we met at the party next door seem kind of cute The guys(guy) we met at the party next door that lasted until three A.M. and was finally broken up by the cops who were called by the neighbors seem(seems) kind of cute

13. A Summary Of All The Phrase Structure Rules Presented In This Chapter S  NP (Aux) VP S’  (Comp) S NP  Art (Adj)* N (PP) NP  Pronoun VP  V (NP) (PP) VP  V S’ PP  P NP These rules do not constitute all the rules that English speakers know. English speakers know many other rules of this kind, and produce many sentences and phrase structures using rules other than these.