Syntax
THE STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES
Formal syntax: Learning objectives
 Explain the notions “language organ” and “Universal
Grammar”
 Explain the similarities and differences between
languages (principles and parameters)
 Explain how sentences are constructed
Evidence for an independent language faculty:
 People display a knowledge of grammar that is
deeper than what they could get from the linguistic
input they receive – the poverty-of-the stimulus
argument
 Language impairment (aphasia/Down syndrome):
language independent from intelligence
Transformational generative grammar
 Chomsky: structuralist explanations could not
distinguish between sentences such as: John is easy
to please and John is eager to please
 While the surface structure is similar, the deep
structure reveals a major difference: the implied
subject in the first is John and in the second John is
the object
Transformational generative grammar
 Chomsky: structuralist grammars could not explain
ambiguity which can arise from the syntactic
arrangement of clauses, e.g. Stolen painting found by
tree
Universal Grammar: Principles & parameters
 People – “pre-programmed” with principles of
grammar – Universal Grammar (UG)
 Universal grammar has a biological basis– a
language organ
 Principles of UG are common across all languages
 One of these principles, which is considered as an
essential property of human language, is recursion:
allows individuals to understand an unlimited
number of sentences without memorizing each one
of them (cf. poverty of stimulus)
Principle of recursion
 Grammars are finite but they nonetheless enable
individuals to produce and understand an infinite
number of sentences
 This is made possible through the principle of
recursion
 Recursion means that grammatical processes can
apply more than once, which enables speakers to
produce sentences of indefinite length and
complexity
Mechanisms of recursion
 Embedding: One can always add additional
subordinate clauses within a frame of the sentence
e.g. This is the house that Jack built<This is the cheese that lay in the
house that Jack built< This is the mouse that nibbled the cheese
that lay in the house that Jack built etc.
Coordination: We can use coordinating conjunctions
(and, but, or etc.) to link an indefinite number of
sentences
e.g. Mary went to the airport and John went to the bus station but
Joanna cancelled her trip and went to the mall.
Parameters of UG
 Some of the principles of UG are underspecified,
which means that they can be realized through
different parameters in different languages
 Once all the parameters have been correctly set for a
particular language, then we have a grammar for this
language
 Example: every language must have a subject –
principle (underspecified); subject can be expressed
in different ways – parameter values (pronouns in
English and Italian)
Modularity of language
 Principles and parameters – part of a syntactic




computational mechanism
This mechanism feeds both the articulatory (phonetic)
component and the interpretative (semantic) component
Each of these components functions independently modularity
Various modules can feed each other through interfaces
Phonetic form (PF) interface with articulatory module;
Logical form (LF) – interface with the interpretative
module
Y-model: centrality of syntax
 Syntax draws information from the lexicon and
“feeds” both PF and LF
 PF
LF
Syntax
Lexicon
Table of grammatical categories
Type
Word category
Examples
Phrasal
category
Lexical
Noun (N)
Puppy, park
Noun Phrase (NP)
Lexical
Verb (V)
Take, run, be
Verbal Phrase (VP)
Lexical
Adjective (A)
Good, red, big
Adjective Phrase
(AP)
Lexical
Adverb (Adv)
Happily, fast
Adverb Phrase
(AdvP)
Functional
Determiner (D)
This, the, a, his
Determiner Phrase
(DP)
Functional
Preposition (P)
In, on, between
Prepositional
Phrase (PP)
Functional
Complementizer
(C)
that
Complementizer
Phrase (CP
Lexical vs. Functional categories
 Words that belong to lexical categories are
semantically rich and contribute primarily to the
meaning of the sentence (nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs, prepositions) – open category
 Words in functional categories – semantically weak,
and contribute more to the grammar of sentences
than to the meaning (e.g. determiners) – closed
category
Compositionality
 Grammar of every language – compositional and
hierarchical
 Sentences are made of smaller constituents
(phrases), which in turn are made up of even smaller
constituents (words)
Compositionality: Constituency tests
 1) noun replacement (A girl with a golden earring
ate an apple > She ate an apple vs. *She with a
golden earring ate an apple)- only an entire
nominal constituent can be replaced with a pronoun
 2) verb replacement (She ate an apple and so did I
vs. *She ate an apple and so did I a pear)- only an
entire verbal constituent can be replaced with do
 Certain groups of words form close units:
constituents, e.g. Nominal constituent (1) (NP=noun
phrase), (2) verbal constituent (VP=verb phrase)
Hierarchy
 Even though sentences are linear on the surface,
their constituents are organized in a hierarchical way
Projection
 Composing the structure of a sentence begins with
words that belong to categories such as noun, verb,
preposition, adjective, or determiner
 These words – heads of phrases
 Phrases are constructed bottom-up: words are drawn
from a lexicon – a mental dictionary stored in
people’s brain - and merged into structures
 Once they are inserted into structures they project
phrases (XPs) of the same category (e.g. NP, VP, DP)
which form larger constituents that compose a
sentence
Phrase structure grammar: immediate constituent analysis
 Words can be broken down into morphemes, and
morphemes into phonemes
 How can the sentence be broken down into its
structural units, and how can those units, i.e.
phrases, be broken down into smaller units, until we
reach the smallest constituent?
Immediate constituent analysis
 The boy kicked the ball.
 (a) the boy kicked
 (b) the boy
the ball
kicked the ball
Immediate constituent analysis
 On the syntagmatic level, we can add elements between our
constituents:
 B) The boy quickly kicked the ball
 The boy angrily kicked the ball
A)*The boy kicked quickly the ball
 *The boy kicked angrily the ball
 B) The boy kicked the ball quickly
 The boy kicked the ball angrily
Phrase structure rules
 The boy
 Noun phrase (NP)
 The
 Determiner
kicked the ball
verb phrase (VP)
boy
noun
Sentence
 S = NP + VP
Sentence
 Each point on the tree is called a node, and each
node defines a syntactic category
 The NP dominated immediately by the S node is the
subject
 The NP dominated by the VP is an object
 Thus, subject and object are defined through the role
they play in syntax, through syntactic terms, rather
than semantic ones
Generative structure
 Each category has a head: NP, VP
 What is the head of the sentence?
 Government and binding theory: it is the
information as to tense/aspect/modality (Aux)
Complementizer phrase (CP)
 The basic function of complementizers is to turn an
independent sentence into a complement
 Therefore each subordinate clause is headed by an
additional phrase projected by the complementizer (CP)
 Different types of complementizers depending on the
type of subordinate clause: in declaratives,
complementizers like that (I heard that those children
want a puppy); in interrogatives, complementizers like if
(He wondered if it would rain)
 A CP selects a TP in this context
CP in simple sentences
 Matrix clauses can also be divided in different types
(e.g. declarative, interrogative, exclamative)
 In subordinate contexts, different types of clauses
are associated with different complementizers,
Movement
 Besides building phrase structures, syntax can also
move parts of phrase structures around, by
detaching them from the position in which they were
originally inserted in the structure, and moving them
somewhere else
Movement and deletion
 Movement functions by copying an item into a new
location, leaving a copy in the original position
(sometimes described as a trace (t).
 This copy must later be deleted, because both copies
cannot be pronounced at the same time
 Syntax distinguishes between two types of
movements: head movement (e.g. auxiliary
movement in questions) and phrasal movement (e.g.
wh-movement in questions)
Summary
 Much of grammatical structure does not have to be
“learned”
 People “know” a lot about what is or isn’t a possible
grammatical structure without having been taught,
or even having had the right kind of experience to
have learned it: they know it because principles of
UG are innate
 The principle of recursion enables individuals to
produce and understand an infinite number of
sentences based on a limited input (cf. Poverty of
stimulus)
Summary
 One principle of the structure of sentences –
compositionality: sentences are composed of clauses
and phrases, which in turn are made up of smaller
clauses and phrases or words
 Compositionality - achieved by projection of simple
phrases from words from the mental lexicon
 The phrases projected take on the lexical and
functional categories of the words that project them
Summary
 Formal syntax - based on deducing abstract
grammatical principles from observing what
sentences are possible and not possible, without
regard to how they are used
 Formal approaches insist on the centrality of syntax
whithin the human language faculty; other types of
approaches (e.g. functional perspectives) put greater
emphasis on semantics or language usage