English Studies 2022/2023 Module: Morpho-syntax

Semester 5
BeniMellal Group 1 -MD-

MORPHO-SYNTAX

• Why is it important to study language?

• Why should we study the salient hot issues of linguistics?

--- What is Linguistics? ---

Linguistics: is the scientific study of language and its structure.

→ According to Chomsky, “Language is the mirror of the mind”, i.e., by studying a language,
we can understand how mind processes and produces language.
In studying a language, linguists tend to develop 3 theories:
➢ The theory of Language structure: tries to define structural properties of human natural
language.
➢ The theory of language acquisition: tries to answer the question of how children
acquire their native language.
➢ The theory of language use: raises the question of how linguistic and non-linguistic
knowledge interacts to speech production and comprehension.
Chomsky devoted his time to develop a theory of language structure by asking these
questions:
✓ What is a language?
✓ What is it, when you say you know a language?
✓ Do languages differ from each other or do they share common universal properties?

To answer these questions, a linguist should come up with a devise to describe a particular
language. These descriptions are known as Grammar (Phonetics, Phonology, Syntax, …) and
seek to abstract from these particular grammar universal properties. → This is the study of
Universal Grammar.
Since the first step in developing this theory is to devise a grammar of particular language, so
what is our concern in studying a particular Grammar? What a particular Grammar attempts to
describe?

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For Chomsky, a Grammar is a model systematic description, the linguist abilities of native
speakers that enable them to speak and understand their language fluently.
→ Chomsky calls this Linguistics abilities competence of native speakers. It is the speaker-
hearer knowledge of his language.

- The goal of the descriptive study of a language is the construction of a grammar (Chomsky –
Hall). The grammar of the language for Chomsky is the system of rules (competence) that
specifies the sound-meaning relationship.
 Chomsky said that we have to make a distinction between what the speaker of a language
knows implicitly about that language (competence) and what he actually does with his
knowledge(performance).

Competence: is the abstract knowledge that native speakers have about their language.
- It is the system of rules that enables the speaker to understand and produce an unlimited
number of sentences.
Grammatical (linguistic) competence:
➢ It is the native speaker’s knowledge of language.
➢ It is the ability to distinguish between languages, and to know grammatical rules and
intuitive judgements about well formedness and ill-formedness of a sentence
structure.
➔ Native speaker’s ability to judge sentences which have never heard before is what
Chomsky refers to as creativity of language. And the sentences they produce and hear
is what he calls novel utterances.
 Acquiring a language requires a set of syntactic/morphological/phonological and semantic
rules. This is what means that a language is a rule-governed creativity.

----- Pragmatic competence -----

 Is the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and to
understand a language in context.
 The use of language according to Linguistic Factors (Baba, Lwalid, Ba)

----- Performance -----

Performance is the actual use of competence, and it involves individual and situational
features, imperfections, errors, memory limitations, time limitations on the length of
sentences (on the number of sentences actually produced by the individual).
▪ Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance reminds us of Saussure’s
distinction between Langue and Parole.

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Intuition means the ability of native speakers to distinguish between well-formed sentence

or whether it is structured. Here, we consider 3 principles of universal Grammar:

 Head parameter:
It specifies the order of the head in a language. It distinguishes between languages in which
the head comes first; before its complement (the preposition head) → “English”, and these
in which the head comes last (the postposition head) → “Japanese Nihon ni” (in Japan).
 Structure dependency:
 A restriction on movement in human languages that makes it depend on the structure of
the sentence, rather than on its linear order. A PRINCIPLE OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR.
▪ All rules of a language are structured dependency, means that we can create an infinite
number of sentences based on a specific structure; SVO.
 Projection:
It is a stipulation proposed by Chomsky as a part of the phrase structure component of
generative-transformational grammar.
▪ It is the essential categories of the language which depend on the other elements. E.g.,
the verb “write” needs an adj (direct and indirect) → needs an inanimate object and an
animate subject, so the verb project the whole sentence structure.
➔ Projection principle requires the syntax to accommodate the characteristic of each real
item.
Serialization principle: the process of converting sentences in a serial form.
Ad hoc grammar: refers to a grammar that generates an infinite number of rules.
Ultimate constituent: the smallest units resulting from the process of Immediate Constituent
Analysis (the final string).
Open class: unlimited: nouns – verbs – adjs – advs
Closed class: determiners – prepositions
Intermediate: being between 2 constituents, or in the middle of a range.
Innateness hypothesis: linguistic idea (theory) of language acquisition that enables
children to acquire their first language.
definitions

Syntax: is the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences.
Generally speaking, it is the study of the interrelationships between all elements of a
sentence structure (including morphemes), and the rules governing the arrangement of
sentences in sequences.

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Morphology: is the branch of grammar that studies the structure of words. It is divided
into inflectional morphology; the study of inflections, and lexical, and derivational
morphology; the study of word formation.
Morpho-syntax: is the study of grammatical categories or properties for whose definition
criteria of morphology and syntax both apply.
➔ The number category in nouns, e.g., may be expressed morphologically (through
inflectional endings) and syntactically (through agreement with a verb).
➔ A syntactic analysis deals with external arrangement of words within the boundaries of a
sentence.

---------------------- Some notion that are related to language: -------------------

➢ For what reasons or purposes human use language?

Communication – prevarication – informing - …
➢ What are the essential defining characteristics of human language?
Productivity: a general term in linguistics for the unlimited ability to use language to say
new things.
Semanticity: the unique relationship between an arbitrary symbol and something in the
real world.
Duality: the ability of human language to form discrete meaningful units.
Displacement: human being is able via language to bring the past, talk about the present
and anticipate the future.
Grammaticality: human language has a set of finite rules and infinite number of structures.
E.g., Nfe finite: map – fan – death infinite number
apd
e.g., N – Det – Adj – Adv finite (closed classes)
- To know in what language differ and in what they resemble we should go through 2 steps:
1) Formulating detailed grammars of particular languages.
2) Abstracting general principles.
 Substitution by a pronoun:
→ Phrasal categories can be substituted by a pronoun (him, there, she, …)
E.g., John read the book on chemistry.
> John read it. (it = [the book on chemistry])

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Prominalization:
The pronoun is used to refer to the constituent in a second sentence.
E.g., John read a book on chemistry. He found it very interesting.
→ “it” refers to a book on chemistry.

Dependency (dependent):
Any element whose form or function is determine by another part of the sentence.
E.g., The black book → The article and the adj both depend on the noun.

Recursive:
Descriptive of rules which are capable of repeated application in generating a sentence.
E.g., a rule for inserting adjectives before a noun applies in English (the small, interesting,
expensive, … book).
------ ---------- Universal Grammar: --------- -----
• Universal Grammar refers to the aspects of language that all languages have in
common.
➔ The main principle of generative grammar is that all humans are born with an innate
capacity for language and that this capacity shapes the rules for what is considered
"correct" grammar in a language. The idea of an innate language capacity—or a
"universal grammar"—is not accepted by all linguists. Some believe, to the contrary,
that all languages are learned and, therefore, based on certain constraints.
➔ As generative grammar is a "theory of competence," one way to test its validity is with
what is called a grammaticality judgment task. This involves presenting a native speaker
with a series of sentences and having them decide whether the sentences are grammati-
cal (acceptable) or ungrammatical (unacceptable). For example:
• The man is happy.
• *Happy man is the.
➔ A native speaker would judge the first sentence to be acceptable and the second to be
unacceptable. From this, we can make certain assumptions about the rules governing
how parts of speech should be ordered in English sentences. For instance, a "to be" verb
linking a noun and an adjective must follow the noun and precede the adjective.

➔ In the Chomskyan sense, Universal Grammar refers to the language faculty built in to the
human mind, seen as consisting of principles such as structure-dependency, and
parameters such as PRO-DROP.

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 ------ ---------- Sentence structure: ------ -----------
 Each language has a specific word order, for example English and French have the same
order SVO, and do not allow other alternative word orders in simple basic sentences.
E.g.,

English → Mohamed bought a car. -- [SVO]

French → Mohamed a acheté une voiture. -- [SVO]

 Berber, Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic have VSO structure, but sometimes they
allow other alternative word orders.
E.g.,

Standard Arabic → ‫ اشترى محمد السيارة‬-- [VSO]

Moroccan Arabic → ‫ شرى محمد طوموبيل‬-- [VSO]

Berber/Tamazight → ⵉⵙⵖⴰ ⵎⵓⵃⵎⵎⴰⴷ ⵜⴰⵇⵊⴷⴰⵡⵜ -- [VSO]

SVO – VSO – OVS – OSV – SOV – VOS → The 6 possible word order.
- Sentences do not contain words that are combined randomly.
- The order of words in a sentence is essentially rule-governed/patterned.
- If the word order is not respected, the sentence would sound meaningless.
- → sentences which obey the syntactic rules of a language are said to be grammatical
or well-formed.
1) *Book Mary read the → ungrammatical but interpretable

2) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously → grammatical/uninterpretable

The aspect/characteristics of language structure:

Grammaticality, arbitrariness, and productivity.
Types of Syntactic Analysis :
✓ Traditional Grammar : refers to the collection of prescriptive rules and concepts
about the structure of language that is commonly taught in schools.
✓ Structural Grammar : is a means of analyzing written and spoken language. It is
concerned with how elements of a sentence such as morphemes, phonemes,
phrases, clauses and parts of speech are put together.
✓ Generative Grammar. (See p:15)

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 Transformational Generative Grammar:
TGG is a device for generating sentences in a language.
- It generates only the well-formed or grammatically correct sentences of a language since
meant to create the rules and principles which are in the mind of native speakers.
Characteristics of Transformational Grammar:
1) It was part of philosophical studies.
2) It was based on meaning.
3) It was prescriptive and not descriptive.
4) A Grammar of language taken to mean a book about that language.

Advantages of TG: filter hypothesis:

 It was a starting point which allows progress.

 Traditional terms (clause, sentence, subject) are still used.
 The idea of subject/predicate is important in Syntactic Analysis.
Grammar’s criteria of adequacy :
 Observational Adequacy:
Is the ability of a Grammar to generate all and only the grammatical sentences of a
language in a fixed body of data (corpus).
E.g., If a description of English phonology states that there are words such as play and
clay but no word *nlay exists. ↓ Observationally adequate: correctly states that certain
forms exist while others don't.
➔ To observe what is grammatically correct and what is not;
- *Like I Basketball.
- I like Basketball.
 Descriptive adequacy:
To describe the structure of the sentence and provide a principal account of the native
speaker’s intuition. (Why a sentence is grammatical and why it is not?) Principle accounts:
SVO - descriptive rules: N V Adj.
 Explanatory adequacy: (the highest level):
While it might seem obvious how we evaluate the adequacy of grammar of particular
language, it is less obvious by what criteria we judge the adequacy of linguistic theory.
- There are conditions which have to be imposed on any adequate linguistic theory, which
should be:
• Universal: enables us to describe the grammar of any natural language adequately.

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 • Maximally constrained: should provide us with technical devices which can
only be used to describe human languages and are not appropriate for the
description of other communicative systems).
---- Grammar ---- ---- Syntax -----
- General term. - The study of sentences
- The set of rules in a given language and their structure.
including Syntax, Morphology.
Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA)

ICA: is a method of sentence analysis that was first mentioned by Leonard Bloomfield.
➔ It is a binary segmentation of sentence structure, which is based on the notion subject
and predicate.
➔ It is done through tree branching/tree diagram of the use of bracketing [].

➔ It refers to a system of grammatical analysis that divides sentences

into successive layers or constituents.
A linguistic unit which is an element of a larger construction
• Sentences have a Categorical Constituent structure, that is sentences are built up of
constituents, each of which belongs to a specific syntactic category [ NP, VP, AdvP,
AdjP, PP].

Constituent Category = Internal Arguments: is a theoretical construction that is part of the

grammatical apparatus to explain certain facts about language.
➔ We use C. Categories for 2 main reasons: an explanation based on principles
1) They are necessary in order to provide a principled account of Linguistic phenomena.
2) Because of the structure dependency principle which goes with the innateness
hypothesis.

- Constituent Analysis are organized in a hierarchical way:

1) Immediate Constituent Analysis: also called IC Analysis, in linguistics, a system of

grammatical analysis that divides sentences into successive layers, or constituents, until,
in the final layer, each constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word.
2) Intermediate Constituent Analysis: the next string after the immediate
constituent, resulting from the process of analysis.
3) Ultimate Constituents: the smallest units resulting from the process of analysis.

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Hierarchy: is a classification of linguistic units which recognizes a series of successively
subordinate levels. An example is the analysis of a sentence into constituents, or the
relationship between different linguistic levels, such as: sentence, clause, phrase, word and
morpheme.
Poor John lost his watch

Poor John lost his watch Immediate C.

Poor John lost his watch Intermediate C.

His watch Ultimate C.
----- Constituent Analysis: -----

✓ The immediate constituents of the sentence Poor John lost his watch are the NP
(poor John) and the VP (lost his watch).
✓ The immediate constituents of the 1st NP (Poor John) are the pre-modifier “poor” and
the noun (head) “John”.
✓ The ultimate constituents are the words: poor, John, lost, his, watch.

The aim of ICA: is to discover the elements constitute language in general and sentences in
a scientific way.
- The segmentation is based on Expansion.
 Exocentric expansion: built on the notion of distribution.
Share the same - He is exhausted.
distribution or - He is reading a book in the café.
position in the - He is busy doing the exercise.
Sentence - He is extremely honest.

 Endocentric expansion: built on the notion of head within certain limits.

- The women.
- The nice women.
- The nice women from fez.
- Those elegant nice women from fez.
They all contain the head.

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 Exceptional tripartite division:

When we have 2 nouns joined with the conjunction “and”, we represent them in a
tripartite division:
Bill and John went to the café
S

Subject predicate
Bill and John went to the café

Bill and John went to the café

to the café
→ Order discontinuity
the café

Figure 1: the exceptional tripartite division.

Structural Ambiguity:
1) Intelligent boys and girls 2) Intelligent boys and girls

Intelligent boys and girls Intelligent boys and girls

Intelligent boys boys and girls

2) Egyptian cotton shirts.

3) He has colored pictures.

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 Structural adjacency: Morphological discontinuity:
Structural

Structure al

[S][t][r][ʌ][k][ʧ][ə][r] [ə][l]

Drawbacks of ICA:

 Although, it is said that ICA is based on an objective discover methods, we cannot deny
that it is based on the traditional Grammar notion of subject/predicate.
 There are cases in which binary division is not revealing because elements which form a
unit are not always adjacent in a sequence.
E.g., She switched the phone on; switched and on are elements of
one constituent even if they are not placed next to each other.
- Are you happy? This is what we call order discontinuity.
 It does not provide categorical labeling of isolating components of a sentence.
 It is impossible to have all the time a correct binary -di-.
 ICA could not account for imperative, interrogative, and coordination forms of
sentences. It goes only with declarative ones.
 ICA is observationally inadequate.
 It could not account for all types of structural Ambiguity.
ADVANTAGES of ica:
➢ It is concrete and allows a detailed analysis of the form of languages.
➢ It is used to explain structural ambiguities (ambiguities of form rather that meaning)

Word Class Grammar (wcg)

Word Class: is a set of words which share the same syntactic and morphological
properties. The term “word class” traditionally called a part of speech.

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 Distributional Analysis:
Refers to the total set of Linguistic contexts in which a unit can occur.
➔ A Distributional Analysis plots the places in larger linguistic units in which smaller units
appear, such as the distribution of words within a phrase.
 Isolation:
An isolating language is a language in which the words are in variable, and syntactic
relationships are shown by word order. He / is / happy.
- What could be a word in a language may not be a word in another.

Agglutinative non-agglutinative
• The origin comes from glutinative, which - It is the opposite of agglutinative.
means the language we cannot divide or isolate. - It is easy to split.
• An agglutinative language is one E.g., I / will / certainly / hit / you
in which words are built up by stringing forms
together, often into quite lengthy
sequences. E.g., ‫ كم → ألضربنكم‬/‫ بن‬/‫ضر‬/ ‫ أ‬/‫ل‬
➔ It would be better to avoid talking about words and taking them as basic units.

 Morphological variation:
 In English Morphology, an inflectional morpheme is a suffix that is added to a word
to assign a particular grammatical property to that word.
 Inflectional morphemes change what a word does in terms of grammar, but does not
create a new word.
Plural zero morphemes
Nouns Singular verbs 3rd person singular “s”
dual pronoun simple past “ed”
(Arabic) ‫المثنى‬ present / past continuous
“ing”

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 [-full]
[-ive]
[-ale]
[-ible] - in
Adjectives [er] Adverbs ----- “ly” Prepositions - out

[est] - up

[more]

[most]

 Linguistic environment/context :

 Without knowing the context, the meaning of a word is likely to be ambiguous;

providing this context is called contextualization.

 In generative Grammar, forms can be classified in terms of whether they occur only
in specific structural context (context sensitive) or are independent of context (context-
free).

• In a context-sensitive grammar, the rules apply only in particular contexts.

• In a context-free grammar, the rules apply regardless of context.

E.g., John ……. An apple.

→ In this context, only a verb can occur between “John” and “an apple”.

➢ Linguistic context: the position occupied by certain item words inside the
sentence.

➢ Word level category: a set of words which share a common set of Linguistic
properties; especially morphological and syntactic one.

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 Syntagmatic relationship:

 S → Det – N – V – Adj

The man eat beautiful

This chair go good ungrammatical sentences

That table talk nice

 S → Det – N – Aux V – Det – Adj – N

Those people eat the good meal

These chair will eat the red steaks Semantically unacceptable

The Man has give the blue sun

Drawbacks of Word class grammar

 Any grammar based on word-level categories cannot generate all of the grammatical
sentences of the English language.

E.g., *He came my house at night.

 WCG generated an infinite number of rules which makes language acquisition impossible
for a child.

 It cannot deal with interrogative and imperative forms of sentences.

E.g., What will John do?

→ According to contextual environment, we will have:

What will John do? → but this is not correct.

 W.C categories cannot capture the natural complexity of linguistic structure.

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 There are categories that are not larger than word categories such as:

Phrasal categories, e.g., “the old boy” in “did you see the old boy?” is one constituent.
Because when answering that question, we will have “no, I did not see him”; which means
that “the old boy” can be replaced with only one word “him”.

 It could not account for ambiguous sentences.

E.g., Jack looks hard.

- How does Jack look? Adv

- How was the look of Jack? Adj

Advantages of WCG:

- WCG labeled words in terms of their categorical nature.

Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG)

PSG: is a type of generative grammar in which a system of phrase-structure rules (or rewrite
rules) is used to describe a sentence in terms of the grammatical structures that generate its
form and define it as grammatical.

Generative Grammar:

GG is a type of grammar which describes a language in terms of a set of logical rules

formulated so as to be capable of generating the infinite number of possible sentences of
that language and providing them with the correct structural description.

PSG → based on Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance.

- There are 2 types of syntactic category within PSG:

• Word categories.

• Phrase level categories.

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 Expansion

It refers to the process of adding extra elements to a construction without affecting its
function or basic structure.

E.g., “The car” → can be expanded by the addition of adjectives and other modifiers → “the
new car in the street”.

Evidences of PSG

Morphological evidence: Genitive case:

❖ The king’s throne.

❖ The king of England’s crown.

❖ The king’s of England crown.

We get a result that “is” is not the property of Noun (WCG), but it is the property of Noun
Phrase.

If we followed this rule of WCG, we find this problem of ungrammaticality.

• NP → NP’s N

• NP → [Det adj N]’s NP

Phonological evidence:

- “ I could not change ”; “not” in this case, has a scope over the verb “change” (or VP).

→ We use this structure in order to emphasize the verb that comes after it.

E.g., I could not stay → has a scope over the modal. We use this structure in order to
emphasize the M that precedes it.

/kænt/ → weak vowel , /kə’nɔt/ → strong vowel

- John is not happy. - John isn’t happy.

➔ “Not” can be followed only by a verb, adj, or an adv.

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Semantic evidence: Scope Ambiguity:

- The president cannot ratify the treaty.

This sentence allows 2 different interpretations:

 It is possible for the president not to ratify the treaty.

➔ This means that “not”, here, has an implication on the VP.

 It is not possible for the president to ratify the treaty.

➔ “not” has an implication on the modal “can”.

NP Aux VP

The president can (not cannot) ratify the treaty

Aux which is negated VP which is negated

Structural Ambiguity:

Structural or syntactic ambiguity is the potential of multiple interpretations for a piece of

written or spoken language because of the way words or phrases are organized.

[[John] [saw [the girl [with [one eye]]]]

John saw [the girl] [with [one eye]]

Syntactic/Transformational evidence:

Example 1: John loves roses. (active voice)

WCG
Roses are loved by John. (passive voice)

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Passive: → interchange the Noun which functions as a subject with Noun that functions as
an object.

Example 2: John has broken the magnificent Chinese vase. (active)

Vase has broken the magnificent Chinese by John. (passive)

➔ This is not correct, because if we follow this structure of WCG, we will have
ungrammatical structures. I.e., in passive voice, we should move a phrase (NP) and not
just the noun (N).

Example of passivation in Arabic:

(PCG) ‫]] ختم [ ال [ قارئ [ ال [ قرآن‬

(WCG)

‫ * ختم ال قارئ ال قرآن‬ungrammatical

Only phrasal categories can undergo transformation.

Coordination Criterion:

[[John][walks][[slowly][and][carefully]]] slowly and carefully

NP VP AdvP Conj AdvP Adv Adv

Mary and John are happy → NP Conj NP

Only phrasal categories can be conjuncted/coordinated.

Parenthetical Expression:

Certainly, Ahmed will succeed in the exam.

Certainly

Ahmed will succeed in x the x exam

S → ✓NxP ✓ Aux ✓ VxP

➔ When the insertion of parenthetical expression occurs between the NP and the Aux,
between the VP and the Aux, in the initial and final position. The sentence is considered
a grammatical sentence.

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In PSG, we try to analyze sentences and their component, terms of phrase structure rules
and, then, in terms of lexicon and lexical insertion rules.

Phrase Structure Rules (PSR)

The combination of words in sentences is highly rule-governed, means that sentences have
an internal phrase structure.

Phrase structure rules are the syntactic rules which underline the internal formation of
sentences.

 Linear representation (Bracketing):

First, we identify phrase-level categories, then word level categories:

E.g. [[[John]] [[wrote][[a][letter]]]]

S N V Det N

NP VP NP

S
[[[John]] [past] [[write] [[a] [letter]]]
N V Det N
Aux
NP VP NP
 Rewriting:

Our total set of rules of this sentence can be summarized as follows:

S → NP Aux VP

VP → V NP

NP → N / NP → Det N

Aux → tense

Tense → past

 Lexical insertion:

V → write

Write → [+transitive]

N → Proper N (John)

Common N (letter)

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Det → a

Tense → past

Tree diagram (phrase markers): -----------------------------------------------------------------------

- Are visual representation of the constituent structure of sentences. = hierarchical

representation.

NP Aux VP

PN tense V NP

Det N

John past wrote a letter

PSR Functions:

 They are explicit means of describing the regularities which underline languages.

 They reflected the kind pf syntactic knowledge that native speakers of a language
possess.

 They allow a hierarchical representation of sentences.

 PSRs are finite, but extremely powerful in the sense that they allow to create an
unlimited number of sentences.

Drawbacks of PSG:

 It could not account for negative and interrogative, passive forms. PSG takes into
consideration only kernel/nucleus/cardinal sentences.

 It analyzes sentences in terms of individual and independent entities ignoring their

meaning.

 It analyzes only the surface structure of sentences; this proves the lack of explanatory
power.

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  It could not deal with all types of structural ambiguities.

“He sent a letter to his brother” (1)

S
[[He] [[sent]
V
[[his] [brother] [[a] [letter]]]].
N N
(2)
P Det Det
NP VP NP NP

S → NP Aux VP

VP → V NP NP ??? no branch-crossing constraint.

➔ We do not repeat any phrase category in rewriting step.

❖ The maximal projection of VP in PSG is:

NP

VP V (PP) (Adv)

AdjP

• So, it is clear that PSG does not account for sentences such us (2).

➔ This might push us tottery to revise our rule so as to generate sentences like sentence
(2). However, if we try to change our rule every time we come across new sentences, we
will have grammar that lacks adequacy.

The rule of an adequate Grammar should provide us with finite number of rules that
generate infinite number on sentences.

➢ PSG cannot handle the structural and semantic relationship between sentences.

For example: the bellow sentences have the same meaning, although they differ in PSG
structure.

1) John gives a book to Mary → S → NP Aux VP

VP → V NP PP ✓

2) John gives Mary a book → VP → V NP NP

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The verb “give” in (1) can be subcategorized as:

Give +V

(1) - +V (2)

+ [-NP] – [NP] +[-NP][-NP]

➔ In example (2) the meaning is understood, but for PSG it cannot observe this relatedness
between (1) and (2).

It is the same thing for the active and passive sentences. The 2nd sentence is predicted as
ungrammatical because it does not respect PSG’s rules.

Present

Tense

Past

(1) Leaves/works → present

(2) Left/worked → past

(3) Is leaving aux → tense be ing (present)

(4) was leaving Aux → tense be ing (past)

(5) has left

Aux → tense have en

(6) had left

(7) has been leaving

Aux → tense have en be ing

(8) Had been leaving

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 (9) will leave

Aux → tense will

(10) would leave

(11) will have left

Aux → tense will have en

(12) would have left

(13) will have been leaving

Aux → tense will have en

(14) would have been leaving

VP → V (NP) (PP) (AP) (AdvP) (S)

VP → V NP → Det (A) N
→ V NP → Proper N
→ V NP PP → Pronoun
→ V AP → N S
→ V AdvP
→ V PP
→ V S

Give the lexical insertion rules of the following phrase structure rules and give two
sentences:
S → NP aux VP N → PN, CN
VP → V (adv) NP tense → present
NP → (Det) N M→M
Aux → Tense M (have-en) V → eat – drink
V → transitive PN → John
CN → apple – tea
Det → some – on

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 John will eat furiously an apple.
 John will drink some tea.
➔ It is apparent that the 1st sentence is ungrammatical, whereas the 2nd one grammatical.

➢ So, this rule generates not only possible sentences, but also impossible sentences.
Therefore, for our grammar to be adequate, it must generate only possible sentences.
➔ The problem in the 1st sentence is the distribution of an adv. Hence, for the rule to
generate only grammatical sentences, the VP should be as: [V → V NP].

PSR:
Our total set of rules can be summarized as follow:
S → NP aux VP
VP → V (NP) (PP) (AP) (AdvP) (S)
NP → (Det) A’ N (PP/SS)
PP → P NP
AdjP → Adj (PP/VP/S)
AdvP → (AdvP) Adv
Aux → Tense (have ed/en) (be ing)
WCG:
 Isolation:
/ John / is / fearfully / afraid / of / spiders / and / snakes/.
words Morphological Grammatical Linguistic Comments
variation category environment
John Ø Limited category Proper Noun Begins the S
Is (s) present tense Limited category Verb After the subject
Fearfully Ly Adv – Noun Adv Before an adj
Afraid Ø Adj - Noun Adj
Of Ø Limited Preposition
Spiders (s) plural Limited Noun
And Ø Limited Conjunction
Snakes (s) plural Limited N

Grammaticality: the state of obeying the rules of a particular Grammar.

All the best

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