Syntax

Syntax

´ The Study of Sentence Structure

• Syntax focuses on how words are arranged in sentences and how sentences are
formed.
• The term originates from Greek, meaning "arrangement" or "putting together."
• Early syntactic studies aimed at describing the sequence of elements in
sentences, while modern syntax explores the rules that generate sentence
structures.
 Syntax
´ Syntactic Rules and the "All and Only" Criterion
• Syntactic analysis aims to identify rules that account for all grammatically correct
sentences and exclude incorrect ones.
• These rules help distinguish well-formed sentences from ill-formed ones, such as the
correct formation of prepositional phrases in English.
• An example rule is that a preposition is followed by a noun phrase, not just a noun, to form
phrases like "near London" or "with the dog.”
• “*With dog and” “*near tree” are incorrect because they violate specific grammatical rules
related to phrase structure and noun phrase (NP) modification.
• In English, prepositional phrases (PP) typically consist of a preposition followed by a noun phrase.
The NP often requires a determiner or a modifier to be grammatically complete, especially when
referring to countable nouns à “tree" is a countable noun à it lacks a determiner (like "a," "the,"
"that tree," etc.)
Syntax

´ Generative Grammar
• When we have an effective rule such as “a prepositional phrase in English consists of a
preposition followed by a noun phrase,” we can imagine an extremely large number of
English phrases that could be produced using this rule. In fact, the potential number is
unlimited.
• This reflects another goal of syntactic analysis, which is to have a small and finite (i.e.
limited) set of rules that will be capable of producing a large and potentially infinite (i.e.
unlimited) number of well-formed structures.
• A small set of syntactic rules can generate an infinite number of sentence structures, known
as a generative grammar.
• These rules are designed to explain how different sentence structures can be produced from
a single underlying structure.
Syntax

´ Deep and Surface Structure

• Sentences with different forms (surface structures) can share a common
underlying structure (deep structure).
• Examples include active and passive sentences ("Charlie broke the window" vs.
"The window was broken by Charlie"), which differ in surface structure but share a
deep structure.
• The “underlying” level, where the basic components (Noun Phrase + Verb + Noun
Phrase) shared by the two sentences can be represented, is called their deep
structure.
Syntax

´ Deep and Surface Structure

• That same deep structure can be the source of many other surface structures such as It
was Charlie who broke the window and Was the window broken by Charlie?.
 Syntax
´ Structural Ambiguity
• Some sentences can have more than one interpretation due to their structure, known as
structural ambiguity.
• For instance, "Annie bumped into a man with an umbrella" can mean either Annie or the
man had an umbrella.
• Let’s say we have two distinct deep structures. One expresses the idea that “Annie had
an umbrella and she bumped into a man with it.” The other expresses the idea that
“Annie bumped into a man and the man happened to be carrying an umbrella.”
• These two different versions of events can actually be expressed in the same surface
structure form: Annie bumped into a man with an umbrella.
Syntax

´ Syntactic Analysis Tools

• Syntactic categories and
phrase structure rules are
used to analyze sentences.
• Categories include nouns (N),
verbs (V), adjectives (Adj), and
articles (Art).
• Phrase structure rules
describe how sentences are
composed of noun phrases
(NP) and verb phrases (VP).
Syntax

´ Syntactic Analysis Tools

We would like to be able to represent the same syntactic information in a more
dynamic format. One way of presenting the concept “consists of” is with an arrow
(→), also interpreted as “rewrites as.” The following rule states that a noun phrase
(NP) such as the dog consists of or rewrites as (→) an article (the) and a noun (dog).
This simple formula is the underlying structure of millions of different English
phrases.
• NP → Art N
´ That’s not the only form?
Syntax

´ Syntactic Analysis Tools

´ We include another constituent (Adj) in the rule so that it is good for not only
phrases like the dog, but also the big dog. This constituent is optional in a noun
phrase, so we use round brackets to indicate that Adj is an optional constituent,
as shown here:
´ NP → Art (Adj) N
Syntax

´ Syntactic Analysis Tools

´ Another common symbol is in the
form of curly brackets {}. These
indicate that only one of the elements
enclosed within the curly brackets
must be selected.
 Syntax
´ Phrase Structure Rules
´ What we have started to create is a set of syntactic rules called phrase structure rules. As the
name suggests, these rules state that the structure of a phrase of a specific type will consist of
one or more constituents in a particular order.
´ The first rule in the following set of simple (and necessarily incomplete) phrase structure rules
captures a very general rule of English sentence structure: “a sentence (S) rewrites as a noun
phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP).”
´ The second rule states that “a noun phrase rewrites as either an article plus an optional adjective
plus a noun, or a pronoun, or a proper noun.”
´ In the third rule, a verb phrase rewrites as a verb plus a noun phrase.
• S → NP VP
• NP → {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN}
• VP → V NP
Syntax: Lexical rules

´ Phrase structure rules generate

structures. In order to turn those
structures into recognizable English,
we also need lexical rules that specify
which words can be used when we
rewrite constituents such as PN.
´ The first rule in the following set states
that “a proper noun rewrites as John
or Mary.” (It is a very small world.)
Syntax: Lexical
rules
´ We can rely on these rules to
generate the grammatical
sentences shown below in (1)–
(6), but not the ungrammatical
sentences shown in (7)–(12).
Syntax

´ Tree Diagrams
• Tree diagrams visually represent the hierarchical structure of sentences, showing
how different parts of speech and phrases are organized.
• These diagrams illustrate the generative nature of syntax, showing how complex
sentences are built from simpler structures.
• e.g., NP → art N
Syntax

´ Tree Diagrams
• We can do the same for more complex structure:
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´ Tree Diagrams
Putting them together à
Syntax
A special arrow (⇒) is used to indicate that a constituent can be moved, as shown in this
rule for Aux-movement: NP Aux VP ⇒ Aux NP VP.
Syntax

´ The concept of recursion is used in syntax to describe the

repeated application of a rule to the output of an earlier
application of the rule. For example, we can use the terms
“complementizer” (C) for the English word that, and
“complement phrase” (CP) for that Mary helped you as part of
the sentence Cathy knew that Mary helped you. In the
complement phrase, the part Mary helped you represents a
sentence (S), so there must be a rule: CP → C S, or “a
complement phrase rewrites as a complement and a sentence.”
´ This provides us with a small set of rules incorporating recursion.
(Note that when you reach the end of this set of rules, you can
keep going back to the beginning and repeating the sequence.
That is the essence of recursion.)
Syntax
Syntax
CP

CP

C S

Pro
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´ Tree Diagrams
Syntax
Syntax