Syntax

What syntax is

• How words and phrases are arranged
• How words and phrases are grouped (or tied ) together
• Syntactic categories: kinds of words and phrases (noun, verb, etc.)
• Syntactic relationships: how words and phrases relate to each other (subject, direct object, modifier, head)

Two views of syntax

• The generative view
  • Syntax can be studied in its own right. There are purely syntactic principles and constraints.
  • The overarching goal is to arrive at universal principles governing the structure of all languages and particular types of languages.
  • Seek explanations that relate (often highly abstract) underlying representations ("D-structure") to surface forms ("S-structure"). (But generativists may disagree on the degree of abstractness that is permissible.)
• The cognitive/functional view
  • Syntax can only be studied in terms of its communicative functions.
  • One important goal is to arrive at universal tendencies governing the ways in which languages or particular types of languages use grammar to package information.
  • Seek explanations that are based mainly or entirely on surface forms.

Generative syntax: overview

• Motivating independent syntax: semantic vs. syntactic well-formedness
• Syntactic categories: lexical and phrasal
• Order and constituent structure (or dependency relations)
• Relationships between sentences and transformations
• Constraints on structure and transformations

Semantic vs. syntactic well-formedness

• Semantically interpretable but syntactically anomolous
• Syntactically well-formed but semantically anomolous
• Implication: syntax and semantics can be dealt with separately.

Syntactic categories

• Lexical and phrasal categories, subcategories, subcategorization
• Nouns, noun phrases
• Verbs, verb phrases, clauses
• Adjectives, adjective phrases
• Adverbs, adverb phrases
• Adpositions (pre-, postpositions), adpositional phrases
• Conjunctions

Syntactic structure

• Constituent structure
• How do we know where the boundaries between constituents are?

Phrase structure and phrase structure rules

• Phrase stucture is
  • Generative
  • Hierarchical
  • Recursive

• A possible set of phrase structure rules for English

Phrase Structure: Another Example (Oromo)

Transformations

• Problem: how to generate a sentence such as what was Willard wearing? using phrase-structure rules?
• Transformation: structural description (conditions), structural change (actions)
• Movement, juxtaposition, insertion, deletion
• Deep and surface structure
• Relations between sentences
• Optional and obligatory transformations

Syntactic ambiguity

• A grammar should assign more than one structure to a syntactically ambiguous sentence. (It is the job of semantics or pragmatics to disambiguate.)
• Some syntactically ambiguous English sentences

Syntactic typology

• Heads of phrases
• Head-initial and head-final languages
• Specific orderings

Modern developments in generative syntax

• Opposition to transformations
• Elaborated phrase structure alternatives to transformations
• Attempt to constrain the sorts of phrase-structure rules that are possible
• Attempts to constrain the sorts of transformations that are possible

Syntax and semantics from a cognitive-functional perspective

• Some facts about what we need language to do for us
  • The world has lots of regularity in it, and our perceptual systems impose other regularity.
  • We categorize things in the world, and we attend differentially to different things. Language should distinguish different kinds of things from each other.
  • Our perceptual systems group things in the world: relations and the objects they relate, objects and their properties, similar objects into sets. Language should make the relationships between things clear.
  • We can construe situations in the world in more than one way. Language should offer the flexibility to refer to the same situation in different ways.
  • We have different purposes behind the utterances we produce. In many cases we will want produce some effect in an addressee.
  • To achieve our communicative purpose, the addressee must recognize our purpose and must be able to identify the objects that we refer to. Language should make the purpose clear and should offer ways to help the listener identify referents.
  • We may help the addressee by marking some aspects of our utterance as more informative than others. Language should have devices for marking prominence.
  • We tend to say several things about a single object, so we will often need to refer multiple times to the same object. Language should have devices for efficient multiple reference.
• Language and its functions
  • Function
    • Semantics: what language is about
    • Pragmatics: what language does
  • Form: carries meaning, indicates function
    • Syntax
    • Morphology
    • Intonation
• Kinds of things
  • Objects: individuals and types (categories)
  • Relations: atemporal (states), temporal (events)
  • Attributes of objects
• How things relate to each other
  • Coreference: pronouns
  • Objects playing roles within relations
  • Syntactic and semantic roles
  • Syntactic roles and pragmatic/psycholinguistic considerations
  • Modification
  • Nominalization: treating an event or state as an object