Syntax: The Sentence

Patterns of Language
Humans can produce and understand an infinite
number of sentences.

All languages have mechanisms that make the

number of sentences limitless.

•The cat chased the mouse.

•The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese.

•The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese

that came from the cow.

•The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese

that came from the cow that grazed in the field.
 Sentences are composed of discrete units that are
combined by rules.
The part of grammar that represents a speaker’s
knowledge of sentences and their structures is called
syntax.

Rhymes with Orange cartoon (by Hilary Price, Stanford '91)

 What the Syntax Rules Do
The rules of syntax:
Combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences.

Specify the correct word order for a language.

1. The President nominated

a new Supreme Court
justice.

2. *President the new

Supreme justice Court a
nominated.
 Describe the relationship between the meaning of a
particular group of words and the arrangement of those
words.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March

Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least—I mean what I
say—that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You
might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the
same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare,
“that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get
what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the
Dormouse . . . “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the
same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter.

LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Specify the grammatical relations of a sentence, such as
subject and direct object (who is doing what to whom).

• Shang hit Mulan

• Mulan hit Shang

Identical or similar sentences have very different meanings.

Specify other constraints that sentences must adhere
to.

(a) The boy found.

(b) The boy found
quickly. (a) Daniel slept the baby.
(c) The boy found in (b) Daniel slept soundly.
the house.
(d) The boy found the
lamp.
(a) Zack believes Robert to be a
gentleman.
(b) Zack believes to be a
gentleman.
(c) Zack tries Robert to be a
gentleman.
(d) Zack tries to be a
gentleman.
(e) Zack wants to be a
gentleman.
(f) Zack wants Robert to be a
gentleman.
Grammatical judgments are neither idiosyncratic nor
capricious, but are determined by rules that are
shared by all speakers of a language.
 Sentences have an organization, like in the next
patterns:

• Ran up the hill • Ran up the bill

(a) Jack and Jill ran up (a) Jack and Jill ran up
the hill. the bill.
(b) Jack and Jill ran (b) Jack and Jill ran
the hill up. the bill up.
(c) Up the hill ran Jack (c) Up the bill ran Jack
and Jill. and Jill.
Syntax includes how words form groups in a sentence, or
how they are hierarchically arranged with respect to one
another.

The captain ordered all old men and women off the sinking ship.

old men and women old men and women

 Many sentences exhibit such ambiguities, often
leading to humorous results.

For sale: an antique desk suitable for lady with

thick legs and large drawers.

We will oil your sewing machine and adjust

tension in your home for $10.00.
 Because these ambiguities are a result of
different structures, they are instances of
structural ambiguity.

This will make you smart.

1
smart She's a smart girl.
adjective Her
2 eyes were smarting from the
smart verb
smoke.
1.- Very good at learning or 1.- To feel a sudden sharp
thinking about pain.
things : INTELLIGENT.
2.- To be upset about
2.- Showing intelligence or something — usually used
good judgment : WISE as (be) smarting.
 Often a combination of differing structure and double
word-meaning creates ambiguity and humor.

Rhymes With Orange (105945) © Hilary B. Price. King Features Syndicate

 Syntactic rules reveal and deal with:
grammatical relations among the words of a sentence
their order
hierarchical organization
grouping of words related to its meaning
ambiguity
a limitless number of sentences
never produced or heard before
What Grammaticality Is
Not Based On
Person’s ability to make grammaticality

People are able to understand, produce,

and make judgments about an infinite
range of sentences.
Our knowledge of language is…

we can exploit the resources of our language and

grammar to produce and understand a limitless
number of sentences embodying a limitless
range of ideas and emotions.
Structure of a sentence contributes to its meaning. However, grammaticality
and meaningfulness are not the same thing, as shown by the following
sentences:

• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

• A verb crumpled the milk.

They are syntactically well formed. They sound funny.

There are also sentences that we understand even though they are not well
formed according to the rules of the syntax.
Grammaticality also does not depend on the truth of sentences.
 The syntactic rules that permit us to
produce, understand, and make
grammaticality judgments are
unconscious rules.

We develop the mental rules of

grammar
long before we attend school.
 Sentence Structure
Structure of an English sentence, and more
specifically, a template that gave the correct
word order for English. We might come up
with something like the following:

Det—N—V—Det—N

This template says that a determiner (an

article) is followed by a noun, which is
followed by a verb, and so on.
 • The child found a puppy.

• The professor wrote a book.

• That runner won the race.

Sentences are strings of words belonging to particular grammatical

categories (“parts of speech”) with no internal organization.
That such “flat” structures are incorrect.
The words are grouped into natural units.
 root

child found
the a puppy

The phrase found a puppy divides naturally into two branches,

one for the verb found and the other for the direct object a
puppy. A different division, say, found a and puppy, is
unnatural.
 Constituents and Constituency Tests
The natural groupings or parts of a sentence are called constituents.
• The first test is the “stand alone” test.

• If a group of words can stand alone, they form a constituent.

• The second test is “replacement by a pronoun.” Pronouns can
substitute for natural groups.

• If a group of words can be replaced by a pronoun or a word like do, it

forms a constituent.

• A third test of constituency is the “move as a unit” test. If a group of

words can be moved, they form a constituent.
 played
puppy in
the the garden

Every sentence in a language is associated with

one or more constituent structures.
If a sentence has more than one constituent
structure, it is ambiguous, and each tree will
correspond to one of the possible meanings
The sentence “I bought an antique desk suitable for a lady with thick legs and
large drawers” has two phrase structure trees associated with it. In one
structure the phrase [a lady with thick legs and large drawers] forms a
constituent.

• I bought an antique desk suitable for a lady with thick legs and large
drawers
SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES
The child

The police
officers found a puppy

Your
neighbor
A family of expressions
that can substitute for one SYNTACTIC
another, without changing CATEGORY
the grammar of the
sentence, BUT changing
the meaning is a: They can be phrasal
categories:

Noun phrase
Verb phrase
Prepositional phrase
Adjective phrase
 NOUN John found the puppy.

PHRASES He found the puppy.

The puppy loved him.

Function as the subject or an object

in the sentence

They often contain a

determiner and a noun,
but they can vary
(proper name, pronoun,
sentence, clause, etc.)
 They can be more complex:

“The girl that Professor Snape loved married the man of her
dreams.”

NP NP
subject object
 VERB VP are those phrases that can complete the
sentence:
PHRASES “The child ___________”

a) saw a clown

It contains a verb, and it b) a bird

may contain other c) slept
categories (noun phrase
or prepositional phrase) d) smart
e) ate the cake
f) found the cake in the cupboard

g) realized that the earth was round

 PREPOSITIONAL
PHRASES

They are composed

by a preposition
followed by a NP

e.g. in the park

on the roof
with a ballon
LEXICAL AND
FUNCTIONAL
CATEGORIES
 They are known as parts of speech and
LEXICAL they all have a corresponding phrasal
CATEGORIES category:

NOUN
VERB
PREPOSITION
ADJECTIVE
ADVERB
DETERMINER
DEMONSTRATIVE
AUXILIARY
 NOUNS

Common noun: refers to general

entities (dog, house).
Proper noun: refers to particular
individuals, places, or other things that
are commercial for example Coca-Cola.
Some nouns refer to events, states of being.
 They refer to actions,
VERBS events and states of being
(kick, marry, jump).
 They refer to qualities or properties, they
ADJECTIVES qualify, or give more information (lucky, old,
pretty)
 PREPOSITIONS

They are used to express

relationships between two entities
involving a location, and time (the
boy is in the room, the cat is under
the bed)

But not all of them are locational (of, by,

about, with)
 They show which thing or things
DETERMINER you are talking about. (a, the,
some, every)
 They show where an object, event or
DEMONSTRATIVES person is in relation to the speaker.
(this, that, these)
 AUXILIARY

They are helping elements,

that add meaning to the
basic meaning a verb, they
are normally verbs (have,
had, be, was)
They can also be modals
(may, might, can, shall)
 FUNCTIONAL
CATEGORIES
They are the Auxiliaries and Determiners, because
their members have a grammatical function rather
than a descriptive meaning.
Determiners: Auxiliaries:

Specify if a noun is Provide a time frame

indefinite or definite
They also express
Specify proximity possibility, necessity, or
ability
We define categories based on their syntactic distribution.
All languages have syntactic categories.
We have an unconscious knowledge of them.
PHRASE STRUCTURE TREES
AND RULES
PHRASE STRUCTURE TREE (PS TREE)
CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE TREE
What is it?
It is a tree diagram with syntactic category
information of the
sentence that is used.
Features
The branches have category labels.
It shows that a sentence is:
Lineal
Hierarchical structure
Sentence: The child found a
puppy
Subject Predicate
The child found a puppy
NP + V NP
VP

Phrase structure tree (PS tree)

Constituent structure tree
 Dominate
The higher node

Immediately dominate
Dominate the categories
one level bellow
Sisters
Dominated by the same
node

Larger
syntactic
category
Phrase structure trees (PS tress) are:

Explicit graphic representations

of a speaker’s knowledge of the
structure of the sentences of his
language.

It reflects the speaker’s linguistic

intuitions about the natural
groupings of words in a sentence.
Words
It is natural
PS trees represent speaker’s syntactic knowledge:
1. Linear order of words in a sentence.
2. Identification of :
syntactic categories of words
lexical categories of words listed in or lexicon

3. Hierarchical structure of
the syntactic categories

PP Determiner (Det)
(nothing)
*We use structures uncounsciously in speech
comprenhension
Phrase structure rules / PS rules

Speaker’s knowledge about possible structures of language

Creativity with a finite set of rules

My dog rode an unicorn

Example:
to get to the hospital
Rules (well-formed structures of a language)
Left side  Right side ( it shows the linear order)
Dominating category  immediately dominates
Rule 1.- S  NP VP The root of the tree

Rule 2.- NP  Det N

Noun

Rule 3.- VP  V NP
• Rule 4.- VP  V Example: the woman laughed.

• Rule 5.- VP V PP Sentence: the puppy played in the garden

• Rule 6.- PP P NP
This next sentence is pretty particular

Sentence: the professor said that the student passed the exam
Complementizer (C) embedded sentence

(A functional category, like an Aux and Det)

• Rule 7.- VP  V CP
• Rule 8.- CP  C S
(Complementizer Phrase  C + embedded Sentence)
Some complementizers:
that
if
whether
Some conventions for building Phrase Structure trees
1st : Find the rule with S on the left side of the arrow, and put the categories
on the right side below the S.

Rule 1.- S  NP VP

2nd : Now, do the same with the next syntactic categories (find the rule with
the category you want to continue, for example NP, at the left side of the
narrow, and write the categories on the right side below the NP).

Rule 2.- NP  Det N

 Continue this steps until get the last category developed.

NOTE:
• the order in which the rules appear in the list of
rules is irrelevant;
• we can use a rule as many times as it can apply.
The infinity of language: Recursive rules
• We can create an infinite number of sentences by adding an adjective or a
prepositional phrase (it could be before or after the main sentence)
Recursive rule
Rule 5.- VP → VP PP (it repeats its own category (VP) inside itself)
 The infinity of language: Recursive rules
VP rule 5 :
A syntactic category can repeat inside itself: instance of a recursive rule
In other words Recursion is: A constituent containing a constituent of the same
type inside of it , which allows the creation of infinite set of sentences.

image1

It is all about embedding…

This is how we illustrate recursion

* it is a non-sentence due to the fact it has no verb.

 The infinity of language: Recursive rules
Where can we find evidence of
recursion?
In NPs which contain PPs recursively
(due to the fact PPs could have NPs
inside them).
VP inside VP
S which contain a VP which
contains a CP which in turn
contains a S which in turn again
contains VP and so on.
Image 2

And so on.
 Recursive Adjectives and Possessives

Now we must consider the case of multiple adjectives

e.g. NP

The kindhearted, intelligent, handsome man had many girlfriends

Recursive Adjectives and Possessives
NP can contain multiple Adjs
therefore we need a recursive NP
rule for NPs with prenominal adjs*

NP  Adj NP If we put an Adj before a Det, we would

not be following syntactic rules**
e.g
 Recursive Adjectives and Possessives
We must keep into account determiners role:
Adjs modify the noun, while determiners
modify the whole adjective(s) + noun complex
If the Adj modifies the noun, then it is sister to the noun

If the determiner modifies the adjective +

noun complex, then the determiner is sister to
this noun complex.
 Recursive Adjectives and Possessives
We can represent the sisterhood relations of Adj-N and
Det-complex N with a new level of structure between NP
and N. This new level is called N-bar or N‘.

- N' → Adj N‘ e.g. of Adj N'

- NP → N‘ (for NPs to reflect determiner-less)

- NP → Det N' (revised version of NP → Det N)

- N' → N (this rule exists because not all NP
have an Adj )
Recursive Adjectives and Possessives
 FYI

•Yet the set of

•Recursion is present sentences at our
in every language disposal is infinite

•Our brain capacity to •This linguistic

store syntactic rules is property (recursion) is
finite as our breath. an instance of
linguistic competence
 Heads and Complements
Phrase structure trees show relationships among elements. Another
kind of relationship is that between the head of a phrase and its
sisters. The head-complement relation is universal. However the
order may differ in different languages

• Head: word whose lexical category defines the type of phrase.

• Sisters: complements; they complete the meaning of the phrase.
must often be preceded by a complementizer that.

e.g. PPs are headed by prepositions; and have a complement.

Heads and Complements-Selection
For nouns, complements(PP or CP) are often optional:
the belief in freedom of speech
the belief that freedom of speech is a basic right

Adjs can also select to use a PP as a compliment:

I am tired of stale sandwiches
She is proud of her children
 Heads and Complements-Selection
Transitive Found, put, gave,
buy NP complement
PP complement
require a compliment/direct object Sentence complement

does not

Verbs Intransitive sleep

Can choose to use Verbs like feel select

either an AdjP or a
sentence complement
e.g.
Paul felt strong as an ox.
Select Think, tell, feel He feels that he can win.
 Heads and Complements-Selection
Lexical items you must know…

C-selection or subcategorization is: the information about the complement selected by

particular verbs

S-selection: relationship between a verb and its subject/ object (metaphors are the only
exception to this rule).
S-selection
For example, the verb murder requires its subject and object to be human.

Well-formedness of a phrase depends on at least two factors:

1) If the sentence follows the structural constraints of the language (PS rules)

2) And whether it obeys the selectional requirements of the head, both syntactic (C-
selection) and semantic (S-selection).
REFERENCES
• Merriam-Webster, Inc. (2010). Merriam-Webster's essential learner's
English dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.
• Syntactic category. (n.d.). Retrieved October 26, 2016, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_category
• Demonstratives | English Grammar Guide | EF. (n.d.). Retrieved
October 26, 2016, from
http://www.ef.com/english-resources/english-grammar/demonstrativ
es/
• E. (Ed.). (2016). Auxiliary Grammar. Retrieved October 26, 2016, from
https://global.britannica.com/topic/auxiliary
• Fromkin Victoria, R. R. (2011). An introduction to language. In R. R.
Fromkin Victoria, An introduction to language (pp. 136-577). Boston:
Wadsworth.