Syntax Dr. Yaseen T. AliWhen we concentrate on the structure and ordering of components within a sentence, we are studying the syntax of a language. The word "syntax" comes originally from Greek and literally means "a putting together" or "arrangement." Syntactic Rules In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences (sentence structure) in a given language, usually including word order. ... The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languagesFor example, we might say informally that, in English, we put a preposition (near) before a noun (London)to form a prepositional phrase (wear London). This will describe a large number of phrases, but does it describe all (and only) the prepositional phrases in English? Note that, if we use this as a rule of the grammar to create structures involving a preposition and a noun, we will end up producing phrases like *near tree or *with dog. These don’t seem to be well-formed English structures, so we mark them with an asterisk *, indicating that they are ungrammatical. We clearly need to be more careful in forming the rule that underlies the structure of prepositional phrases in English. a noun phrase can consist of a proper noun (London), a pronoun (me) or the combination of an article (a, the) with a noun (tree, dog ) ,so that the revised rule can be used to produce these well-formed structures: near London, with me, near a tree, with the dog.A 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 (ie. limited) set of rules that will be capable of producing a large and potentially infinite (i.e. unlimited) number of well-formed structures. This small and finite set of rules is sometimes described as a generative grammar because it can be used to “generate” or produce sentence structures and not just describe them. This type of grammar should also be capable of revealing the basis of two other phenomena: first, how some superficially different phrases and sentences are closely related and, second, how some superficially similar phrases and sentences are in fact different.Deep and Surface Structure Our intuitions tell us that there must be some underlying similarity involving these two superficially different sentences: Charlie broke the window and The window was broken by Charlie. In traditional grammar, the first is called an active sentence, focusing on what Charlie did, and the second is a passive sentence, focusing on The window and what happened to it. The distinction between them is a difference in their surface structure, that is, the different syntactic forms they have as individual English sentences, However, this superficial difference in form disguises the fact that the two sentences are closely related, even identical, at a less superficial level.This other “underlying” level, where the basic components (Noun Phrase + Verb + Noun Phrase) shared by the two sentences can be represented, is called their deep structure. The deep structure is an abstract level of structural organization in which all the elements determining structural interpretation are represented. 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?. In short, the grammar must be capable of showing how a single underlying abstract representation can become different surface structures.Structural Ambiguity 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.” Now, these two different versions of events can actually be expressed in the same surface structure form: Annie bumped into a man with an umbrella. This sentence provides an example of structural ambiguity. It has two distinct underlying interpretations that have to be represented differently in deep structure. Note that this is not the type of ambiguity that we experience in hearing Their child has grovm another foot, which illustrates lexical ambiguity mainly because the word foot has more than one meaning. (See Task E, page 122, for further analysis.)The comedian Groucho Marx knew how to have fun with structural ambiguity. In the film Animal Crackers, he first says I once shot an elephant in my pajamas, then follows it with How he got into my pajamas I'll never know. In the non-funny interpretation, part of the underlying structure of the first sentence could be something like: “I shot an elephant (while I was) in my pajamas.” In the other (ho, ho) interpretation, part of the underlying structure would be something like: “I shot an elephant (which was) in my pajamas. ” ‘There are two different underlying structures with the same surface structure, revealed by syntactic analysis.Syntactic Analysis In syntactic analysis we use some conventional abbreviations for the parts of speech. Examples are N ( = noun) , Art ( = article), Adj ( = adjective) and V (= verb). We also use abbreviations for phrases, such as NP (= noun phrase) and VP (= verb phrase). In English, the verb phrase (VP) consists of the verb (V) plus the following noun phrase (NP). We can take the simple sentence from Table 7.3 (page 101) and label the constituents using these categories, asin Figure 8.1. TABLE 7.3 WORD ORDER (svo) Subject Verb Object ~ NP. Vv NP. English John saw the big dogNP. VP. v NP John saw | the big dog Figure 8.1 Sentence structure Figure 8.1 presents a static analysis of a single sentence. 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 (¢he) and a noun (dog). This simple formula is the underlying structure of millions of different English phrases. NP — Art NHowever, it is not the only form a noun phrase can take. We want to be able to include another constituent (Aq) 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 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. We have already seen, in Figure 7.3, on page 99, that a noun phrase can also contain a pronoun (if), or a proper noun (John). Using the abbreviations “Pro” (for pronoun) and “PN ” (for proper noun), we can write three separate rules, as shown on the left, but it is more succinct to write one rule, on the right, using curly brackets NP — Art (Adj) N NP — Pro NP — {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN} NP > PN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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 avery small world.) PN = {John, Mary} Art > {a, the} N = {girl, dog, boy} Adj — {big, small} V = {followed, helped, saw} Pro — {it, you} ‘We can rely on these rules to generate the grammatical sentences shown below in (1) - ©, but not the ungrammatical sentences shown in (7) - (12)()A dog followed the boy. (2)"Dog followed boy. (2) You saw it. (8) *You it saw. (3) John saw the big dog. (9) *John Mary small dog (4) It followed May. (10) "Followed Mary the dog big. (5) The small boy helped you. (11) *The helped you boy (6) Mary helped John. (12) "Mary John helped.