The Major Principles of Syntax

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The Major Principles of Syntax

• The Operations of the Lexicon, Morphology,
• and Word Order in the
• Understanding of Language
• Daniel Kies

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The Three Components of Syntax
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Role of Lexicon in Syntax

• The lexicon adds meaningful (semantic) components
  to the sentence.
• The lexicon also plays a major role in
  determining the grammatical structure of the
  sentence.
• Selection restrictions are governed by the
  lexical items chosen in each clause.
• The water evaporated quickly.
• The boy evaporated quickly.
• The water evaporated the dog.

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The Elements of the Lexicon
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The Role of Word Order

• UNMARKED WORD ORDER
• functions to distinguish the grammatical and
  semantic roles of sentence constituents.
• Grammatical roles include subject, verb, object,
  complement, adverbial.
• Semantic roles include agent, action, goal,
  beneficiary, instrument, location, and more.
• MARKED WORD ORDER
• allows us to choose the point of view in the
  sentence
• and allows us to emphasize various parts of our
  message.

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The Grammatical Roles in Word Order

• Word order helps us understand the grammatical
  function of each constituent.
• Subjects in English for example are usually at
  the beginning of the clause.
• John left yesterday after he gave his lecture.
• Objects in English occur after the verb.
• Close the door, she yelled, kicking it shut.

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The Semantic Roles in Word Order

• Constituents also serve semantic roles in
  sentences, such as agent, action, goal,
  instrument, location and many more.
• John opened the door with a key. agent
  action goal instrument
• subject verb object adverbial
  In most cases, grammatical semantic roles
  overlap, but not always.

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Interplay of Grammatical Semantic Roles

• Semantic roles realize grammatical functions.
• In the usual, unmarked case, agents are realized
  by subjects, actions are realized by verbs, etc.
• Occasionally, language users do not choose to use
  some semantic roles, resulting in a marked
  realization of semantic roles.
• The key opened the
  door. instrument action goal
• subject verb object

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Marked Word Order Point of View

• Marked word order not only allow us to promote
  unusual semantic roles to unexpected
  grammatical functions, it can also allow us to
  choose a point of view.
• Elizabeth helped Emily.
• Emily was helped by Elizabeth.
• This is called voice the 1st example is called
  active voice, the 2nd passive voice.

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Marked Word Order Emphasis

• Marked word order also allows us to emphasize the
  most relevant portion of our sentence, our
  message. Compare
• John sent the letter to Mary.
• It was the letter that John sent to Mary.
• This variation allows us to emphasize the
  relevant portion of our sentence as message the
  2nd example is called a cleft sentence.

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The Role of Morphology

• Morphology provides us with two additional sets
  of language clues about the structure of a
  sentence
• Function words
• Inflectional morphemes (which usually occur as
  word endings in English)

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Function Words Syntax

• Function words are minor word classes.
• In English, those are prepositions, pronouns,
  articles, and conjunctions.
• These function words provide valuable grammatical
  information how easily can you read the
  following text for example?

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Examples of Function Words

• Was walking front door, dropping bags going.
• It was me -- walking out of my front door,
  dropping my bags and going back in. (O. J.)
• Function words provide important information
  about the grammatical semantic roles played by
  the constituents in a sentence.

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Grammatical Morphemes Syntax

• Other grammatical morphemes (primarily word
  endings in English) serve a similar function
• English uses grammatical inflections to provide
  different kinds of grammatical information on the
  major word classes -- nouns, verbs, adjectives,
  and adverbs.

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Grammatical Inflections in Nouns

• English uses the grammatical morphemes to mark
  case
• This is Johns book,
• number
• He owns several rare books,
• and gender
• Adrienne Rich hates being called a poetess.

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Grammatical Inflections in Verbs

• English uses grammatical morphemes to mark
• tense Liz walked with her sister.
• aspect Liz has helped her often.
• voice Liz was pleased by her cleverness.
• modality Liz must be smarter than Dad.
• mood God bless this ship all who sail in her.

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Grammatical Inflections in Adjectives Adverbs

• English uses grammatical morphemes on adjectives
  and adverbs to mark
• grammatical function
• Ingenious Liz can do this easily.
• comparison (degree)
• Liz is smarter than her father. She learns
  faster than he does.

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All the Elements of Syntax
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The Entire Syntax System in Concert

• There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs,
  that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really
  dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up
  our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a
  flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The
  Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you
  may, O my brother, have forgotten what these
  mestos where like things changing so skorry these
  days and everybody very quick to forget,
  newspaper not being read much neither. Well,
  what they sold there was milk plus something
  else. They had no license for selling liquor,
  but there was no law yet against prodding some of
  the some of the new veshches which they would put
  into the old moloko, so you could peet it with
  vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two
  other veshches which would give you a nice quiet
  horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All
  His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with
  lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could
  peet it with knives in it, as we use to say, and
  this would sharpen you up and make you ready for
  a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what
  we were peeting this evening Im starting off the
  story with. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork
  Orange

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Finding Nouns in A Clockwork Orange

• There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs,
  that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really
  dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up
  our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a
  flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The
  Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you
  may, O my brother, have forgotten what these
  mestos where like things changing so skorry these
  days and everybody very quick to forget,
  newspaper not being read much neither. Well,
  what they sold there was milk plus something
  else. They had no license for selling liquor,
  but there was no law yet against prodding some of
  the some of the new veshches which they would put
  into the old moloko, so you could peet it with
  vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two
  other veshches which would give you a nice quiet
  horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All
  His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with
  lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could
  peet it with knives in it, as we use to say, and
  this would sharpen you up and make you ready for
  a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what
  we were peeting this evening Im starting off the
  story with.

21
Finding Verbs in A Clockwork Orange

• There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs,
  that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really
  dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up
  our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a
  flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The
  Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you
  may, O my brother, have forgotten what these
  mestos where like things changing so skorry these
  days and everybody very quick to forget,
  newspaper not being read much neither. Well,
  what they sold there was milk plus something
  else. They had no license for selling liquor,
  but there was no law yet against prodding some of
  the some of the new veshches which they would put
  into the old moloko, so you could peet it with
  vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two
  other veshches which would give you a nice quiet
  horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All
  His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with
  lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could
  peet it with knives in it, as we use to say, and
  this would sharpen you up and make you ready for
  a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what
  we were peeting this evening Im starting off the
  story with.

22
Finding Modifiers in A Clockwork Orange

• There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs,
  that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really
  dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up
  our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a
  flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The
  Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you
  may, O my brother, have forgotten what these
  mestos where like things changing so skorry these
  days and everybody very quick to forget,
  newspaper not being read much neither. Well,
  what they sold there was milk plus something
  else. They had no license for selling liquor,
  but there was no law yet against prodding some of
  the some of the new veshches which they would put
  into the old moloko, so you could peet it with
  vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two
  other veshches which would give you a nice quiet
  horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All
  His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with
  lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could
  peet it with knives in it, as we use to say, and
  this would sharpen you up and make you ready for
  a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what
  we were peeting this evening Im starting off the
  story with.

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In Summary

• Despite the apparent, incredible variety of
  sentence structure in any one language, not to
  mention the 5200 languages around the world,
  syntax in all human languages is realized by the
  simultaneous work of three systems
• the lexicon
• word order
• inflectional morphology

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Doing Syntax Doing Linguistics

• In a literal way, syntax -- like all of
  linguistics -- is something we do. We do
  linguistics every time we make or decode a
  sentence.
• Despite the enormous variety of human language,
  we make or decode every linguistic act with just
  a few elements those elements are used in a
  system and we recognize the patterns. Doing
  linguistics is learning to see and understand
  those patterns of human language.