Syntax

1. Syntax An overview

2. What is syntax? • The knowledge of sentences and their structure. • Syntactic rules include: • The grammaticality of sentences • Word order • Hierarchical organization of sentences • Grammatical relations such as subject and object • Whether different structures have different meanings or the same meanings

3. Grammaticality of sentences • The boy found the ball. • The boy found quickly. • The boy found in the house. • The boy found the ball in the house. • Lisa slept the baby. • Lisa slept soundly. Sentences are not random strings of words. They must conform to specific patterns.

4. What grammaticality is not based on • Grammaticality judgments do not depend on having heard the sentence before: Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the party. • Grammaticality judgments do not depend on meaning: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. *Furiously sleep ideas green colorless

5. Word classes • Major word classes • Nouns • Verbs • Adjectives • Adverbs • Sentence with only major word classes: I wrote song girlfriend I honoring relationship very much

6. Minor Word Classes • Determiners • A, the, this, my, three, several • Are used to “determine” a noun. • Which noun or how many nouns det N det Ndet Ndet N A student in my class visited the library for three hours

7. Minor Word Classes • Prepositions • In, on, by, with • Indicate some relationship between noun and some other element in sentence. P det N P detN The information is in the book on the table. Pdet N P N I’m thrilled with the book by Chomsky.

8. Minor Word Classes • Auxiliaries • Might, should, will, be, have, can etc. • Help or add meaning to a verb You might teach word classes someday, so you should know them well. We are enjoying linguistics because we have been studying word classes.

9. Minor Word Classes • Conjunctions • And, or, but, if, because • They connect (conjoin) nouns, phrases, clauses I like linguistics and grammar, but I don’t like the teacher nor my class mates.

10. Major word classes • Nouns and Noun phrases • Syntactic test how to identify nouns: • Her purple hair disgusted her mother. phrase det adj _______ NP

11. Noun Phrase exercise • For each sentence below, underline the NP that is the complete subject and circle the word that is the single subject. The pathetic team lost another game. Our players drink to much beer. The smartest exchange students come to MUIC.

12. Major word classes • Verbs and verb phrases • Meaning based: action • Syntactically: expresses what is said about the subject: Predicate • Her purple hairdisgusted her mother. VP NP

13. Phrases NP VP NP det adj N V det N The friendly person asked a question

14. Diagramming a Sentence S NP VP NP det adj N V det N The friendly person asked a question

15. Major word classes • Verbs and verb phrases Quick exercise • In each of the sentences below, underline the entire predicate (VP) and circle the head verb of that VP The pathetic team lost another game. Our players drink to much beer. The smartest exchange students come to MUIC.

16. Major word classes • Adjectives • Modify nouns My favorite dog is hungry. • Adjectives can have a predicative function or an attributive function.

17. Major word classes • For the most part any adjective can be used both predicatively and attributively. There are, however, exceptions. Create sentences to determine whether the adj. can be used in both or only one way: • Large • Asleep • previous

18. Major word classes • Adverbs • Often considered the ‘garbage’ category Unfortunately, some students drive very quickly and create extremely dangerous roads. • unfortunately: sentence adverb • quickly: manner adverbs • very: degree adverbs

19. Major word classes • Quick exercise • Using functional clues, determine the subcategory (type) of each of the underlined adverbs in the sentence below. Use SA, MA, DA • Hopefully, we’ll learn adverbs completely¹ by the time this highly difficult chapter is completely² finished. • hopefully completely¹ highly • completely²