Matakuliah : G0922/Introduction to Linguistics
Tahun
: 2008
Session 11
Syntax 2
LEARNING OUTCOMES
– Students are able to mention the syntactic categories of a
sentence
– Students are able to draw a phrase structure tree
– Students are able to categorize the sentences according to the
phrase structure rules
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OUTLINE
– Syntactic Categories
– Phrase Structure Trees
– Phrase Structure Rules
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3
Syntactic Rules
Syntactic rules in grammar account for:
• The grammaticality of sentences
• Word order
• Hierarchical organization of sentences
• Grammatical relations such as subject and object
• Whether different structures have differing meanings or
the same meanings.
• The creative aspect of language
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Syntactic Rules
• Syntactic rules determine the order of words in a
sentence and how the words are grouped.
- ‘The child found the puppy’ may be grouped into
(The child) (found the puppy)
(the child) (found) (the puppy)
• The natural groupings of a sentence are called
constituents
• The constituent structure may be represented as a tree
structure
• Multiple tree structure can account for structural
ambiguity
- synthetic buffalo hides = (synthetic) (buffalo hides)
(synthetic buffalo) (hides)
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Syntactic Categories
• Each grouping of words belong to a certain syntactic
category
• The syntactic categories in English are:
- Noun (N)
Noun Verb (NP)
- Verb (V)
Verb Phrase (VP)
- Adjective (Adj)
Adjective Phrase (AP)
- Adverb (Adv)
Prepositional Phrase (PP)
- Determiner (Det)
Sentence (S)
- Preposition (P)
- Auxiliary Verb (Aux)
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Phrase Structure Tree
• A tree diagram with syntactic category information is
called a phrase structure tree or constituent structure
tree.
The child put the puppy in the garden
The child
The
child
put the puppy in the garden
put
the puppy
the
puppy
in the garden
in the garden
the
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garden
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Phrase Structure Trees
S
NP
VP
Det
N
V
the
child
put
NP
det
The
PP
N
P
puppy in
NP
Det
the
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N
garden
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Phrase structure rules
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S  NP VP
NP  Det N : a book
NP  (det) (Adj) N : a big book
NP  (det) (Adj) N (PP) : the big book on the chair
NP  that S : that I knew
NP  pronoun : he
VP  V
VP  V NP : I saw a buffalo
VP  V NP PP : I saw a buffalo in the zoo
VP  V NP PP Adv : I saw a buffalo in the zoo silently
VP  (Adv) V NP PP Adv : father silently wept bitterly
PP  P NP : in the zoo
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9