SYNTAX

1
SYNTAX

• by Don L. F. Nilsen
• and Alleen Pace Nilsen

2
BASIC SENTENCES

• John swims well (Subject, Predicate, Adverb)
• John saw Mary (Subject, Predicate, Direct Object)
• Bush became President (Subject, Predicate,
  Subject-Complement)
• John gave Mary a mink coat (Subject, Predicate,
  Indirect Object, Direct Object)
• The country elected Bush President (Subject,
  Predicate, Direct Object, Object Complement)
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 173-174)

3
BASIC TRANSFORMATIONS

• John gave Mary a mink coat.
• Question
• Did John give Mary a mink coat?
• Negative
• John didnt give Mary a mink coat.
• Negative Question
• Didnt John give Mary a mink coat?
• Information Question
• Who gave Mary a mink coat?
• Tag Question
• John gave Mary a mink coat, didnt he?
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 155-164)

4
Whos on First?
5
John gave Mary a mink coat.

• Passive
• Mary was given a mink coat by John. A mink coat
  was given to Mary by John.
• Imperative
• Give Mary a mink coat!
• Negative Imperative
• Dont give Mary a mink coat!
• Contrastive Stress
• John gave Mary a mink coat.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 155-164)

6
SPECIAL PROBLEMS

• Whiz Deletion I met the girl (who was) doing the
  dishes.
• Extraposition For John to be nice is very
  difficult ? It is very difficult for John to be
  nice.
• Expletive Thirty-seven students are in the room
  ? There are thirty-seven students in the room.

7
EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 1

• Relative Clause as Substantive
• He didnt know who had the bicycle.
• Relative Clause as Modifier
• Bill is the boy who has the bicycle.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 133)

8
EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 2

• Present-Participle as Substantive
• The young girls watching the children surprised
  everybody.
• Present-Participle as Modifier
• I met the girl (who was) watching the children.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 133)

9
EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 3

• Infinitive as Substantive
• For John to be nice is very hard.
• Infinitive as Modifier
• John came (in order) to be nice.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 133)

10
EMBEDDING TRANSFORMATIONS 4

• That-Clause as Substantive
• That John didnt get angry was a miracle.
• That-Clause as Modifier
• I was surprised that John didnt get angry.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 133)

11

• PRONOMINALIZATION AND DELETION
• Possible only when information is recoverable
  from linguistic context (antecedant) or social
  context
• John wanted Bill to buy the drinks.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 208-209)

12
PARTS OF SPEECH

• Lexical Categories
• Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb
• Grammatical Categories
• Preposition, Conjunction, Auxiliary, Expletive
• Pro-Form
• Relative Pronoun, Interrogative Pronoun, Personal
  Pronoun, Indefinite Pronoun
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 128-129)

13
FUNCTIONS

• A Noun can function as a Subject,
  Subject-Complement, Direct-Object,
  Indirect-Object, Object-Complement
• A Verb can function as a Predicate
• A Verbal can function as a Modifier
• An Adjective and an Adverb can function as a
  Modifier

14
TENDENCIES OF LEXICAL VS. GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES

• Can refer to things in the real world
• Can be stressed
• Cannot be guessed in a Cloze Test
• Can be inflected
• Can enter into compounds
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 128-129)

15
DO SUPPORT

• Look at the following English sentences
• John is doing his homework.
• a. Is John doing his homework?
• b. John isnt doing his homework.
• c. John is doing his homework.
• Notice that in each case something is happening
  to the auxiliary verb. In a, which is a
  question, the subject and auxiliary are inverted.
  In b, which is a negative, nt is attached to
  the auxiliary. And in c, which is stressed, the
  auxiliary is emphasized.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 162-163)

16

• English has two regular auxiliary verbs
• have (coming from perfect and passive
  constructions)
• be (coming from progressive constructions)
• When an English sentences has no auxiliary verb,
  we need to provide one to form questions,
  negatives, or stressed auxiliary.
• Do serves this function.
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 2011 145-148)

17

• From the sentence Michael read the book. we
  get
• Did Michael read the book.
• Michael didnt read the book.
• Michael did read the book.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 162-163)

18
SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY

• Smoking grass can be nauseating.
• Dick finally decided on the boat.
• The professors appointment was shocking.
• The design has big squares and circles.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 149-151)

19

• That sheepdog is too hairy to eat.
• Could this be the invisible mans hair tonic?
• The governor is a dirty street fighter.
• I cannot recommend him too highly.
• Terry loves his wife and so do I.
• They said she would go yesterday.
• No smoking section available
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 149-151)

20
TOPICALIZATION AND FOCUSING TRANSFORMATIONS

• Sentences consist of Subjects and Predicates.
• The Subject is what we are talking about, and the
  Predicate is what we say about it.
• Therefore the Subject contains old information
  (so speakers will have something to talk about),
  and the Predicate contains new information (so
  speakers will be able to say something new).
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 167-168)

21

• Any transformation that moves a constituent up
  into the Subject or Topic position is called a
  Topicalization Transformation.
• Any transformation that moves a constituent down
  into the Predicate position is called a Focusing
  Transformation.
• (Fromkin, Rodman Hyams 2011 167-168)

22

• The Passive Transformation is both a
  Topicalization Transformation and a Focusing
  Transformation.
• John saw the girl ?
• The girl was seen by John
• The girl has undergone a Topicalization
  Transformation, and John has undergone a
  Focusing Transformation.
• Note that this has not affected the truth value.
  John saw the girl is true if and only if The
  girl was seen by John.

23

• Notice that in a normal sentence the strongest
  stress is on the last word. This is because this
  is part of the Predicate or new information, and
  is important enough to be stressed.
• Therefore, changing the word that is stressed in
  a sentence is a focusing transformation.
• John saw ten girls on bicycles.
• John saw ten girls on bicycles.
• John saw ten girls on bicycles.
• John saw ten girls on bicycles.
• John saw ten girls on bycles.

24
RECURSION THE INFINITY OF LANGUAGE

• This is the house that Jack built.
• This is the malt that lie in the house that Jack
  built.
• STUDENTS Using embedded relative clauses expand
  this sentence. Notice that this expansion could
  go on until you run out of breath, run out of
  daylight, or die.
• The same is true of adding very as a modifier.
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 2011 135-142)

25

• Other examples of infinitely recursive sentences
  are On the tenth day of Christmas, and The
  Farmer in the Dell, even though these examples
  do end.
• The Farmer in the Dell example ends with The
  cheese stands alone.
• This is the basis for Robert Cormiers novel, I
  Am the Cheese, which is about the Farmer family
  that is in the witness protection program and has
  no friends.
• As Kurt Vonnegut would say, And so it goes
  (NOTE No Final Period)

26
NONSENSE IS NOT NONSENSE

• Grammars must be able to parse nonsense
  sentences.
• Otherwise they must conclude that nonsense
  sentences dont have any meaning.
• Since all nonsense sentences have the same
  meaning, zero, then they all mean the same thing.
  
• However, the following sentences do not mean the
  same thing

27

• I never saw a horse smoke a dozen oranges.
  (Martin Jooss example)
• Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the
  prom.
• A verb crumpled the milk.
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Noam
  Chomskys example).
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 2011 49, 57, 302)

28

• Such sentences mean very different things and
  have very different functions in the English
  language.
• For example only Colorless green ideas sleep
  furiously is a grammatically well formed
  sentence, although all of the sentences
  demonstrate incompatabilities of certain words
  with other words in the same sentence.

29

• The asterisk in front of Colorless green ideas
  sleep furiously means that the grammar doesnt
  generate this sentence. It should not occur in
  English.
• Ironically, this non-occuring sentence is the
  sentence most likely to occur in many linguistics
  classrooms.
• Furthermore, its very poetic.

30
SEMANTIC VS. SYNTACTIC PARSING

• You may have been told that a word gets its
  meaning from its linguistic context.
• This is both true and not true. Words out of
  context tend to be very ambiguous.
• What the linguistic context does is to
  disambiguate a word. Social and cultural context
  do the same thing.

31

• As an example, consider the word ball. The
  fact that this word is written rather than spoken
  already disallows another word that sounds the
  same bawl meaning to cry loudly.
• If we add a the (more linguistic context) we
  know the word is a noun and not the verb ball
  meaning to roll paper or mud into a ball

32

• As we add more linguistic context we make the
  word less and less ambiguous, so that the beach
  ball is different from the basketball or the
  harvest ball which is a dance.
• In the case of Colorless green ideas sleep
  furiously, weve disambiguated the meanings down
  to zero, because of feature incompatibilities.
• Something colorless cant be green. Abstract
  things like ideas cant be any color, and cant
  sleep. Sleeping is usually not done
  furiously, etc.

33

• Like Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,
  Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did Gire
  and gimble in the wabe is also syntactically
  well formed but semantically anomalous.
• In the Colorless green example the words are
  incompatible however in the Twas brillig
  example the content words dont even exist.
• The function words it, was and did, and
  in exist, but the content words brillig,
  slithy toves, gyre, gimble and wabe are
  not English words, and therefore the issue of
  their compatibility with other words is a mute
  point.
• (Fromkin Rodman Hyams 2011 57, 123, 187)

34
!TOM SWIFTIES

• People who used to read the Tom Swift novels
  invented a new type of joke
• My name is Tom, he said Swiftly.
• This pattern is extended to
• Id like my egg boiled, she whispered softly.

35

• !!
• Get to the back of the boat! he shouted
  sternly.
• Would you like another pancake? she asked
  flippantly.
• She works in the mines, he roared ironically.
• (Nilsen Nilsen 176)

36
!!!The Whitest Kids Grammar Lesson

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vel1GyY3ZezA

37

• References
• Chomsky, Noam. Degrees of Grammaticalness.
  Fuzzy Grammar A Reader, Eds. Bas Aarts, et. al.,
  New York, NY Oxford University Press, 2004,
  321-325.
• Clark, Virginia, Paul Eschholz, and Alfred Rosa.
  Language Readings in Language and Culture, 6th
  Edition. New York, NY St. Martins Press, 1998.
• Heny, Frank. Syntax The Structure of Sentences
  (Clark 189-224).
• Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams.
  Syntax The Sentence Patterns of Language. An
  Introduction to Language, 9th Edition. Boston,
  MA Thomson Wadsworth, 2011, 117-178.

38

• Langacker, Ronald W. Siscreteness. Fuzzy
  Grammar A Reader, Eds. Bas Aarts, et. al., New
  York, NY Oxford University Press, 2004, 131-137.
• Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen.
  Encyclopedia of 20th Century American Humor.
  Westport, CT Greenwood, 2000.
• Truss, Lynne. Eats(,) Shoots Leaves The Zero
  Tolerance Approach to Punctuation!. Aukland, New
  Zealand Gotham Books, 2004.