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Syntax 1

Homework to be handed in on 19th or 26th December: Fromkin morphology exercises 6, 7, & 14. Also, do either 8 or 9, and only one of 15, 16 or 17.

So altogether you are doing five exercises.

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Morphology…the last word Affixation: hardly used in Chinese

– My son has 73 Ultramen– 我 (?的 )兒子有 73只鹹蛋超人 (*們 )

Compounding– rare in English: greenhouse, blackbird– productive in Chinese

» Verb-object compounds: 開車 , 幫忙» Resultative compounds: 來得及 , 跑不掉» Stump compounds: 交大

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我覺得這個教室太…冷 !

We can also say– 這個教室 ,我覺得太冷 !

I don’t think we can really say– ?我把這個教室覺得太冷 , because it sounds very strange

And we certainly can’t say something like– *我覺得太冷這個教室 , although we might understand it if some

one said it But if someone said

– *教室這個 ,太冷覺得我 , we would probably have no idea what they were talking about

This is because of syntactic rules governing Mandarin.

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Why study syntax? Some answers:

(It’s part of Linguistics) (Simon says we must) (There will be questions on it in the final exam) It’s part of the grammar of every language

(what’s the other part?) And the grammar of a language is part of a native

speaker’s linguistic knowledge (what’s the other part?)

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Here is another reason for studying syntax

Infinity of expressions– There is an infinite number of possible utterances in ev

ery language– It is obvious that all these utterances cannot be stored i

n our brains Our knowledge of a language consists of

– A finite number of words (the lexicon; the “dictionary in your head”), and

– Rules (the grammar of the language) It is the job of the syntactician (and the morpholo

gist) to find out what these rules are

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Language acquisition Everyone who can speak knows how to use

the rules– and it is amazing that children can do it so fast

But nobody can really state exactly what the rules are!

Understanding syntax (and morphology) can help researchers to understand how young children learn their native language

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Language acquisition device Put forward by Chomsky in the 1960s A physical part of the human brain All kids are born with the same LAD

– So any kid can learn any language LAD was an important part of psychological theor

y– “nature vs nurture”– Challenged behaviorist learning theory of Skinner

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Universal grammar Theory refined by Chomsky in 1981 UG has Principles, true of all languages

– All languages have the same underlying structure» e.g. all languages have nouns and verbs

and Parameters, whose setting varies from language to language– English and Chinese SVO; Japanese SOV– Spanish and Chinese pro-drop; English not pro-drop

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Remember “unlockable”?

That was a morphological ambiguity Syntactic ambiguity (figure out the two me

anings)– John saw the girl with the telescope– 爸爸給小明買鹹蛋超人

Can you draw trees for these two sentences?– If that’s too difficult, don’t worry!

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All languages have constituents Take a simple sentence

– John danced We can call the sentence S, and label the

syntactic categories N and VS

N

John

V

danced

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Phrase structure grammar N and V aren’t always

very good labels John is similar to the old

man, because they are both the same kind of constituent

– They are both Noun Phrases

– We can remove John and add the old man, and the sentence structure is still similar

S

NP

The old man

VP

danced

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Different sentence, same constituents

Now let’s add an object danced the lambada is the

sam kind of constituent as danced

– a VP You can swap danced for

danced the lambada and the basic structure is the same

S

NP

The old man

VP

danced the lambada

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Non-constituents

man danced is not a constituent – It’s not a VP or NP or anythingP– Because you can’t swap it for anything else

The old [man danced] the lambada *The old [man] the lambada *The old [danced] the lambada (remember what * means?)

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What are the NP and VP? The frog ate the lizard. The frog sat on the lilypad. The fat frog ate the long lizard slowly. The fat frog with a lizard in its mouth sat o

n the lilypad. The fat frog who was sitting on the lilypad

with a lizard in its mouth danced the lambada.

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Phrase structure rules

Now, you know this phrase structure rule:– S NP VP (a sentence comprises a noun phrase

followed by a verb phrase) Here are two more phrase structure rules:

– VP V NP– NP N

Think about that carefully Now, draw a tree with more detail

– For the sentence John drinks whisky

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Now let’s change the NP rule (First, DET means determiner

– Function words like the, a, this, several) NP (DET) N

– That means a noun phrase can have a determiner, and it must have a noun

Now you can diagram John danced the lambada in a bit more detail than I did on the other slide

(Remember:– S NP VP– VP V NP)

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Now let’s change the NP rule again

Such that we have– S NP VP– VP V NP – NP (DET) (ADJ) N

Now you can diagram this sentence– The unhappy book ate the green lambada– (The sentence is syntactically well-formed, by the wa

y)

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Reading 123 – 130 Don’t forget the morphology homework And that the essay deadline is 30th December The final exam will include questions on

– the topics covered before the mid-term exam– morphology, including some similar to the Fromkin ex

ercises– whatever we cover in syntax. You will certainly be ask

ed to draw trees!– something connected with the essay topics, maybe: mo

re info later