Chapter 7 - SENTENCE PATTERNS

LINKING WORDS TOGETHER

Different languages use different devices for showing the relationship of one word to another.

WORD ORDER

The device use most frequently in English is word order:

The large spider frightened Aunt Matilda

Aunt Matilda frightened the large spider.

Languages which rely heavily on word order are know as configurational languages.

INFLECTIONS

In a language such as Latin, word endings or inflections, indicate the relationship between words:

Magna aranea perterruit Matildam amitam.

In linguistic terminology, Latin is a non-configurational language. Word order is not critical, though
some word order preferences are found.

FUNCTION WORDS

These are words such as, of, by, that, which indicate relationship between parts of the sentence:

Aunt Matilda was terrified by a spider.

The Queen of Sheba

I know that Penelope will come.

There is some disagreement English words, such as to, can be used both as a function word, and as
a content word (one which intrinsic meaning).

Paul wants to go home. (function word)

Paul wants to go home. (content words ‘twoards’, “as far as”.

CONSTITUENT ANALYSIS

English has a limited number of recurring sentence patterns.

The linguistic procedure which divides sentences into their component parts or constituents in this
way is know as constituent analysis.

TREE DIAGRAMS
The succesive layers of constituents which make up a sentence can be shown on a tree diagram. In
this diagram, a basic sentence type at the top branches downwards in ever-increasing complexity.
A family metaphor is used to refer to the relationships on a tree. A higher node is a mother, and
the nodes on the branches immediately beneath her are her daughters. Daughters of the same
mother are known as sisters. A mother is said to dominate the nodes beneath her. She
immediately dominates her daughters, but she also dominates her granddaughters, and great-
granddaughters, as it were.

REWRITE RULES

A rewrite rule is a replacement rule, in which the symbol to the left or an arrow is replaced by an
expanded form written to the rigth of the arrow

The great advantageof rewrite rules is that they are perfectly explicit. By following them, yoy could
produce a perfect english sentence  even if you did not know any english, since the rules are
applied mechanically, step-by-step, one symbol at a time
The rewrite rules are there to tell us what is a well-formed english sentence, not to give us
information about the probable behaviour of burglars.

IDENTIFYING CONSTITUENTS
The groups of words in question belong together as a constituent elsewhere, since words that are
grouped together in one sentence are likely to recur as a single constituent in other sentences. One
way of checking this is to construct sentences in which the original words occur in a different order.

NP TESTS
English NPs (noun phrases) recur on certain specifiable positions. Some of the main places in which
they occur are:
At the beginning of a sentence before the verb.
At the end of a sentence after the verb.
After 'by' in a passive sentence.
After an auxiliary verb in questions.

ADDING IN EXTRA PATTERNS

The pp is not an essential part of the structure, it is an optional extra. Keep the rewrite rules fairly
simple, and to use them in conjuntion with a diccionary which especifies the estructure associated
with each V, for example:

            bit        V  [ -NP]

first, the item in question is listed, the the fact that it is a verb. The verb in question must be
followed by an NP.

if more data had been cosidered, the rules and the lexicon would have to be complicated further,
we set out to write rules for the sentence patterns in question, and we have done this as
economically as possible.
LAYERS OF BRANCHES

In layers of branches, the use of bars has one further major advantage: they can be used with
adjectives (A), verbs (V), and prepositions (P), as well as with nouns (N).

Functional phrases, that is, phrases introduced by function words have a structure similar to lexical
phrases, it has been claimed. For example, inflections (verb attachments) and the accompanying
verb can be labelled an inflectional phrase (IP).

COMPLEX SENTENCES

This process is know as conjoining. In theory an indefinite number of sentences could be joined
together:

However, conjoining is not the only process by which sentence-like structures are liked together.
More often subsidiary sentences are inserted into one main sentence. This is know as embedding.

Recursion is the possibility of repeatedly re-using the same construction, so that there is no fixed
limit to the lenght of sentences. It means that we can never make a complete list of all the possible
sentences of any language.

It is quite easy to incorporate recursion into the rewrite rules, if one allows a symbol such as VP to
be rewritten to include an S:

VP -> V S

This rule (which would need to be combined with the other VP rule discussed earlier) allows one to
generate a sentence.

This chapter has shown how linguistics analyze sentence patterns, with particular attention to
configurational languages.

VERBS: THE SYNTAX-MEANING OVERLAP