Syntax (NOTES)

Syntax 5.2 Grammaticality It is apparent that some strings of words represent possible sentences for a given grammar, while other strings of words do not. a. The clown likes only fresh twinkies. b. *Twinkies only the likes fresh clown. (5.1a) appears to have a relatively straightforward interpretation (it asserts of some specific clown that he has the property of liking only fresh twinkies, as opposed to stale twinkies or fresh asparagus). By contrast, the string of words in (5.1b) does not appear to assert anything about anyone (or anything). Modern syntactic literature refers string of words, which speakers with the relevant grammar consider to be a ‘sentence’ as a grammatical string or a grammatical sentence , while a string of words which does not have this property is generally called ungrammatical and is marked with an asterisk, as in (5.1b) above. Grammaticality is not a question of whether or not you have ever heard a particular sentence or whether the string involved is one you are likely to say. For example, it is probable that you have never said the sentence in (5.2). (5.2) I just whacked my little toe against the P-Z volume of the Oxford English Dictionary again! It may be for many of you that it is extremely unlikely that you would ever say such a sentence – e.g., you may not have the Oxford English Dictionary, or you may be really careful when you walk around barefoot. Nevertheless, even for those of you for whom utterance of such a string is virtually unthinkable, it is clearly a perfectly well-formed sentence for speakers with English-type grammars. (Syntactic well-formedness is synonymous with grammaticality.) Well-formedness, therefore, has nothing to do with likelihood of utterance. It is also the case that well-formedness has nothing to do with length of utterance – a well-formed sentence may be arbitrarily long. The resulting long sentence would be boring to listen to and kind of useless, but it would be well-formed, and therefore grammatical. Secondly – and this is sometimes a difficult point for non-linguists to fully appreciate – grammaticality is about syntactic well-formedness only. It therefore does not matter if the string of words makes sense at all when one is attempting to determine whether that string is grammatical. Look at the examples in (5.3). (5.3) a. The refrigerator hid under the mouse. b. Excitement said that the television had a new hairdo.

c. My dog always wins at poker. (5.4) a. *Under mouse the hid refrigerator the. b. *Said the had new a that excitement television hairdo. c. *Poker my always at wins dog. Clearly, the examples in (5.3), while semantically odd, are well-formed in a way in which those in (5.4) – which involve exactly the same words – are not. Notice that the oddness of the sentences in (5.3) is essentially oddness about the world – refrigerators don’t normally ‘hide,’ excitement can’t ‘speak,’ TVs don’t have hairdos… For at least certain types of words, syntactic well-formedness has nothing to do with the ‘meaning’ of the word in question. Your grammar does not care whether you are talking about ‘dogs’ or ‘refrigerators’ – you can construct exactly the same sentences using either noun. This is the contrast between syntax and semantics: syntax is about syntactic well-formedness, semantics is about meaning. 5.3 The simple sentence in English The basic unit of syntactic analysis is the sentence. A (grammatical) sentence is a string of words which the syntactic component of the grammar can assign a coherent structural analysis to. The strings in (5.1a), (5.2), and (5.3a-c) all represent sentences, while those in (5.1b) and (5.4a-c) do not. - A sentence is made up of words, which, as we saw in our discussion of morphology, may be either (morphologically) simple or complex. As the contrast between (5.3) and (5.4) suggests, in English-type grammars at least, the arrangement of words is critical as to whether or not a given string represents a (grammatical) sentence or an (ungrammatical) string. The semantics of the individual words does not play a key role in determining syntactic well-formedness. What does turn out to be extremely relevant to this determination is the so-called syntactic category of the word in question. We can substitute virtually any noun for ‘dog’ in the sentence ‘the dog is ill-behaved’ – giving ‘the cat is ill-behaved,’ ‘the tree is ill-behaved ‘the excitement is ill-behaved,’ etc. – if we attempt to place a verb (like ‘drowns’ or ‘believes’) in the position of the noun ‘dog’, we get ungrammatical strings: ‘*the drowns is ill-behaved’. Examine the sentences and ungrammatical strings in (5.5). (5.5) a. The dog sits on the carpet. b. *The dog sit on the carpet. c. The dogs sit on the carpet. d. *The dogs sits on the carpet. In general, verbs must agree with the number of their subject in English-type grammars. And there is always a noun present in the string that represents the subject. ‘’ without verbs, the strings are not sentences’’.

c. The cat sits on the big dogs. (5.9a-c) are Noun phrase examples (NP). ***GOOGLE : Noun Phrase? A noun phrase is a group of two or more words that acts like a noun in a sentence. For the word group to be a noun phrase, it must contain a noun and its modifiers. “I found the owner of the dog,” “the owner of the dog” is a noun phrase.  Modifier: A word or a group of words that describe a noun . (adjectives or prepositional)  Noun phrase: A group of two or more words that consists of a noun and its modifiers . Example: the witch with a crooked nose (prepositional phrase) the little boy. We know that a noun is a key element of a noun phrase . The second key element is the modifier . The modifier can come before or after the noun to provide more information about the noun. ( 5.9a-c show) are Noun phrase examples (NP). Consider the subject of (5.7c), ‘the big dog in the corner.’ (5.7) c. The big dog in the corner sits on the carpet. Notice that although this subject contains two nouns, only one of them is the real or structural subject (namely, the ‘dog’ – i.e., it is the dog in (5.7c) which is sitting on the carpet, not the corner that is doing the sitting). - ‘the corner’, by contrast, is the object of the preposition ‘in’. Prepositions symbol is P . Notice that ‘*the dog in sits on the carpet’ is ungrammatical . This is because ‘in’ requires an object when used as a preposition (prepositions are pre-posed to their nominal objects). Prepositional Phrase (PP ), which consists of a P and an NP (i.e., a preposition and its noun phrase object). A Noun Phrase, as (5.7c) shows, can also contain a PP – thus the structure of Noun Phrases appears to be the following: (D) (A) N (PP) GOOGLE: A prepositional phrase is a group of words that begins with a preposition and ends with a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase (this noun, pronoun, or noun phrase is the object of the preposition). Prepositional phrases modify or describe nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. A prepositional phrase begins with the preposition and ends with its object . The object of a prepositional phrase can be a noun, pronoun, or gerund. She is going down the stairs. The preposition in this sentence is down, and the stairs is the object. 5.5 Constituency and Structure Building

The internal structure of phrases turns out to be fairly complex. We have gotten very consistent results about syntactic categories and structure from what we call constituency tests. Coordination is one such test, illustrated below. (5.10) The dog [sits on the sofa] and [sleeps on the bed]. (5.11) The dog sits [on the sofa] and [on the bed]. (5.12) The dog sits on [the sofa] and [the bed]. Above examples, two elements belonging to the same syntactic category have been conjoined – two VP’s , two PP’s , or two NP’s . Interestingly, however, it seems that only like categories can be conjoined by ‘and.’ (5.13) *The dog bites with his teeth and the mailman. This is further support for the hypothesis that the syntactic component is sensitive to categories such as N, PP, and so forth. In addition, it suggests that groupings of certain elements, such as PP’s, form sub-constituents within the sentence. Another type of constituency test is substitution . The results of these tests strongly support the idea that syntactic structure is hierarchical in nature. (5.14) The dog sits on the carpet and the cat sits there, too. [there = ‘on the carpet’] (5.15) The dog sits on the carpet and the cat does, too. [does = ‘sits on the carpet’] In the above, ‘there’ substitutes for a PP and ‘does’ substitutes for a VP . There is another substitution, called ‘one substitution’ that we can do for elements in an NP. (5.16) a. I saw a big yellow house and you saw one, too. [one=‘a big yellow house’] b. *I saw a big yellow house and you one, too. [one=‘saw a big yellow house’] c. I saw a big yellow house and you saw a small one [one=‘yellow house’] d. I saw a big yellow house and you saw a small white one [one=‘house’] e. *I saw a big yellow house and you saw a one house [one= ‘big yellow’] f. *I saw a big yellow house and you saw big yellow one, too. [one=‘a house’] Part of the phrase that we understand ‘one’ to be substituting for is indicated in square brackets. These sentences suggest the following: • ‘one’ can only substitute for NP-related constituents (including NP itself) but not for verbs, for example. • ‘one’ cannot substitute for just any random constituents within the NP • the NP seems to have an internal structure which is more complex than the linear order of the words in the NP suggests.

Not all constituents that modify the head are exactly equal. There are two types of constituents that, when present, have a special status with respect to the head of a phrase. One of these is the specifier and the other is the complement . These two constituents are structurally related to the head of the phrase in the way that is shown below. These two constituents are structurally related to the head of the phrase in the way that is shown below. schematic trees illustrate several important aspects of syntactic relationships, using letter variables (so X, W, Y and Z could be any syntactic categories). Perhaps the most important of these is the sisterhood relationship. As with genealogical trees, sisters share a single ‘mother’ node. In the trees above, the X heads and their WP complements are sisters. There are a number of additional sisterhood relationships in these structures which we leave to you to identify. Crucially, these sisterhood relationships are independent of linear order. As pair (a) and (b) and pair (c) and (d) illustrate, X and WP occur in different linear orders – X precedes WP linearly in (a) and (c) and X follows WP linearly in (b) and (d). However, the syntactic relationships remain the same across all of these because those relationships are based on hierarchical structure, sharing a ‘mother’ node, which all X and WP pairs in these structures do. Two additional syntactic relationships are illustrated by these trees. The phrasal constituents ZP, labelled Specifiers , have the unique property of being direct ‘daughters’ of the XP. In addition, the WPs, as sisters specifically of the heads of the phrase (XP), have a special status which we call ‘ Complement . - The terms ‘specifier’ and ‘complement’ are simply convenient names given to these structural positions. In addition, there are dominance relationships, denoting hierarchical positions. In the tree above, XP immediately dominates both Spec and the highest X’ and dominates every node below that.

Note that in these X’ trees, unlike in the trees we have seen so far, there is only one head, X, and all the other branches end in phrasal categories (ZP, YP, WP). 5.5.1 Lexical vs. Functional Heads The phrase structure of X’ Theory does not refer to particular syntactic categories, like noun, determiner, and so on, but instead allows one to substitute a head of any type for the variable ‘X.’ The differences in phrases and sentences, then, must fall out, at least in part, from differences in the properties of the heads of phrases. One major difference in heads seems to be whether they contain a kind of ‘contentful’ semantics or have, instead, simply a ‘technical’ function. Examples of this contrast, between lexical and functional heads are given in the following pairs: Lexical Heads Functional Heads N (oun) P (reposition) V( erb) D (eterminer) Adj (ective) Q (uantifier) Adv (erb) M (odal)/I(nflectional) Lexical heads are typically open class items. This means that they are categories which can be added to freely (by borrowing words or by coining new words, for example). Functional heads , on the contrary, belong to closed classes , or categories that do not normally allow the addition of new members. In the syntax, both lexical heads and functional heads are necessary for an interpretable structure – lexical heads carry all the real content and functional heads bring the contentful pieces together into an interpretable whole. Let’s bring these bits together and see what the structure of a complete sentence might look like. We’ll start with an unordered selection of lexical heads – {see, boy, girl, stairs}. Notice that if this was all we had to build our sentence with, there are too many combinatorial possibilities and too many missing pieces of information for us to succeed at our task. The subject might just as easily be ‘boy’ or ‘girl’; either the boy or the girl or both might be a particular boy; the action may take place in the past, future, present, be only hypothesized to take place; and so on. Clearly some more elements are required here but they all appear to be functional elements. - Since there’s only one verb in our list, it looks like the predication is going to involve ‘seeing’. To get something that is a reasonable sentence in English, we’re going to need determiners for the NP’s and maybe a preposition to squeeze ‘stairs’ into the picture. Simply says, we need a functional element that will allow us to connect the two main constituents, the subject and the predicate, to one another.

With elements drawn from lexical and functional categories and the X’ schema we’ve discussed so far, we can create a multitude of sentences. There is really only one area where we still fall a bit short and that is in our ability to produce sentences like those below. (5.26) a. John may think that Sally has bought a car. b. Sally may ask whether John did buy the car. c. Sally has asked if John will buy her car. These sentences are unlike previously-discussed sentences in two ways. In (5.26a), for example, John will do some thinking and Sally has done some buying. Second, they each have a constituent between their clauses of a type that we have not yet encountered – ‘that’, ‘whether’ and ‘if’. When we look around at other sentences, we see that these three lexical items are very common and seem to introduce additional clauses which are subordinate to the main clause – ‘that’ introduces declarative clauses and ‘whether/if’ introduce indirect questions. W e’ll identify these items as members of a category ‘C’ (for ‘Complementizer’). CP’s almost always dominate IP’s and do always dominate main clause IP’s, for reasons we will go into later. Because of this, we will represent IP’s as being dominated by CP’s from now on, regardless of whether the CP has an overt C such as ‘that,’ or not (‘John may think Sally has bought a car.’ has no overt C in either CP, for example). GOOGLE : Subordination in English grammar is the process of linking two clauses in a sentence so that one clause is dependent on (or subordinate to) another .

5.6 Syntactic Operations Up to this point, we have some evidence that suggests that the syntactic component is sensitive to categories and uses items from these categories as building blocks for hierarchical arrangement of constituents. The interpretation of content and function of lexical items plus the relationships established between constituents will be identified with an interpretation or meaning for the string. 5.6.1 Yes/No Questions (5.28 ) a. When did John arrive? b. Who sat on the bee? These questions are all asking for specific pieces of new information regarding the timing, players, or other setting information for a particular predication. Crucially, a felicitous answer must contain the appropriate information. If, instead of “this morning,” you answer “yes” to (5.28a), it will be considered deviant in the extreme. Contrasting with the set of WH questions, are questions like those below. (5.29) a. Will Sally go to school tomorrow? (cf. Sally will go to school tomorrow.)

Finally, let’s consider how we will motivate the movement of the ‘I’ only in cases of an interrogative. Recall that the input to the yes/no question must be different from the input to the declarative. categories like N, V, C, and so on are syntax features. Those can simply be viewed as features, as can the agreement features that we see on subjects and ‘I’s of person and number. For our yes/no question example, we are talking about a type of feature that will control the illocutionary force of the utterance – essentially making it a question, an imperative, a declarative, and so on. Because this is about an entire sentence, such features should be particular to C - category items since CP dominates the clause ( IP ). Given that, we might expect that in our lexicon we have a C with a [+Q] feature, a C with a [+Dec] feature, and so on. As with many functional categories, there will be members of the category that are phonologically null and others that have phonological content. Consider the embedded indirect question in ‘John asked if Mary had a dog.’ Under the present analysis, the C, ‘if’, will have a [+Q] feature, making the embedded clause a question but the matrix clause C will be [+Decl], making the overall sentence a declarative.