Syntax 1

Fundamentals of Language SciencesSyntax I

Samar Husain([email protected])

March 9, 2015

S. Husain (HSS-Linguistics, IITD) Fundamentals of Language Sciences March 9, 2015 1 / 23

Syllabus and Evaluation

Syntax: Grammar, Constituents, Hierarchy, CFG, Some topics in GB

Computational linguistics: Basics of (Morphological analysis, POStagging, Parsing), Treebanking/Resources

Psycholinguistics: Word processing, Sentence processing, Bilinguallanguage processing

Minor 2: 8 points (+12 points from topics covered earlier)Major: 32 points (+8)

Internal evaluation: 10 points


Introduction

Each of us produce and comprehend novel sentences on a daily basis

Number of possible utterances in any language is infinite

Given the limited capacity of our brain, all possible utterances cannotbe stored

What does the above fact tell us about human language systems?


Syntax

The grammar of a language can then be defined as rules thatdetermine all possible utterances that can be produced by a nativespeaker

Syntax

The part of our grammar that specifies rules that govern sentence and itsstructure


Syntax

Combinatorial rules

Word order

Establishing relationship between (group of) words

Specifying other constraints (eg. verbs requirements)

Hierarchical organization


An example

womanandmenold womanandmenold


Syntax

Grammaticality?I Form vs. meaningI Colorless green ideas sleep furiously vs * Furiously sleep ideas green

colorless

Mental grammar vs. prescriptive grammar


Sentence structure

Hierarchy: Tree representation (as opposed to a flat structure)

[root]

puppyafound

childThe


Constituents

Groups/parts of a sentence

Standalone testI What did you find?I a puppy, not a

Replacement by a pronoun (or do)I Where did you find a puppy?I I found him in the parkI John found a puppy and Bill did too

Move as a unitI It was a puppy that the child found.I A puppy was found by the child.

Psycholinguistic reality of a constituent?


Syntactic category

Generalized set for similar consituents

Members of this set (syntactic category) can replace one another toform grammatical expressions

This (unconscious) knowledge is part of native speakers syntax

How do we show this via some simple examples?


Syntactic category

Lexical vs Phrasal categories

Functional categories: grammatical functions (eg. Aux, Det)

What roles do these functional categories play? Any examples?


Phrase structure

S

VP

NP

N

puppy

Det

a

V

found

NP

N

child

Det

The

A phrase/constituent structure treerepresents:

I Linear order of the wordsI Syntactic categories of words and

phrasesI Hierarchical structure of the words in

the sentence

Tree configurational relations:I Dominate, Immediately dominate,

Sister


Phrase structure trees

A formal device to capture speakers syntactic intuitions

Phrase structure rules help to capture finite set of rules that reflectspeakers knowledge of grammatical and ungrammatical constructionin a language

S

VP

NP

N

puppy

Det

a

V

found

NP

N

child

Det

The

S NP VPNP Det NVP V NP


Phrase structure rules

1 S

VPNP

2 NP

NDet

3 VP

NPV

S NP VPNP Det NVP V NP



4 VP

V

VP V

An example?



S

VP

NP

N

puppy

Det

a

V

found

NP

N

child

Det

The

S

VP

PP

NP

N

garden

Det

the

P

in

NP

N

puppy

Det

a

V

found

NP

N

child

Det

The

Phrase structure rule?



1 S NP VP2 NP Det N3 VP V NP PP4 VP V PP5 VP V6 PP P NP

How about:The man said that the student was in the classroom.



Can be used to build trees for a sentence that follows thegrammatical constraints of a language

Many variations in order to build a treeI Syntactic parsing


Recursion

We need formal devices in order to capture the infinite grammaticalsentences in any language

Use of recursive rules

The girl walked down the street over the hill through the woods . . . .

How can we handle the above sentence?

6 VP VP PP


Phrase structure rules: Testability

A formal system makes predictions that can be verified

The phrase structure rules can be used to produce new sentences tosee if it produces all and only those structures that are grammatical inthe language


Next Lecture

More on Phrase structure grammarStructural ambiguitiesRelation between different sentencesUniversal grammarChomskian perspective to language


Reference

The slides draw its content (sometimes verbatim) from the followingsources:

Fromkin, Victoria, and Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. 2003. AnIntroduction to Language. 9th edition. Wadsworth. pp. 117148.


Fin.


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Syntax 1