LING 720 Intro to Syntax
Notes 10-15-2014
Evans and Sharpe
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Discussed HW for next class (Monday, 10-20-2014)
o Pgs. 191-193, exercises 1 and 2
Grammar vs. acceptability (here we finished covering things from previous class, Chapter 10)
o Ex. The cat the rat bit died  OK
The dog the cat hissed at chased the rat  OK
The rat the cat the dog chased bit died  Not OK
o Center embedding is what makes the final example not acceptable, but grammatical. We
see that the same principle is applied to all three correctly, so they are grammatical, but
difficulties with processing make multiple instance of center embedding make the final
construction unacceptable.
Memory vs. processing
o These two are distinct.
 Memory involves situations such as John told Mary that Tim said that Frank…,
where there is no difficulty processing the sentence, but it is possible to forget
earlier parts of the sentence due to its length. This is an example of embedding to
one side, rather than center embedding. Multiple instances of embedding to one
side are generally acceptable, unlike multiple instances of center embedding.
 Processing refers to the earlier examples of center embedding. Different languages
utilize different constructions (e.g. English head initial constructions vs. Japanese
head final ones), which can result in trouble with processing, again, as we saw in the
previous example.
o Grammar generates structures
 The rat the cat the dog chased bit died is grammatically fine; the only difference is
that, if you allow it to do it twice, it becomes a processing problem.
Referencing the embedded NPs with the use of ‘that’ as complementizer of sentential sentences in
the book (p. 153), we see that a grammar doesn’t generate acceptable sentences, but grammatical
ones
o ‘That’ creates a clausal NP at the start of a sentence (e.g. That Bart saw Homer surprised us.)
and is, essentially, a semantically vacuous placeholder signaling a sentential subject.
Ambiguous phrasal attachments
o Ex. Mary ate a salad with spinach from California for lunch on Tuesday.
  with Spinach can attach to salad or ate.
 There are a total of 42 different parse trees (!) for this one sentence.
o Ex. New York University Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship program projects coordinator
Susan Reid.
 Over 429 possible parses here
Other ambiguous constructions
o The prime number  The prime number few
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Here, our initial inclination is to suggest that The prime number is one NP. Upon
seeing the remainder of the construction, we see that prime is the N and number is
used as the V.
 These are called “garden-path” sentences, because the reader is “led down the
garden path” of one sentence parse, until reaching the disambiguating phrase
(above: “few”), which makes the reader realize the true structure of the sentence.
The longer the sentential subject, the more likely we will postpose it
o Ex. we would say It is odd that Sally went to the store and bought eight carrots without
purchasing any milk for the dinner she was having much more often that That Sally went to
the store and… is odd.
HW questions about auxiliaries
o Bart gave Homer a gift and Marge a cookie.
 A structure with VP dominating [V gave] and [NP ([NP homer] [NP a gift]] does not
work.
 Instead, we need structure where VP dominates V and [NP a gift], [V give] and [PP [P
to] [NP Homer]], wherein [V give] moves to the V position one node under VP.
 This is called a “VP shell”, and can be seen in Larson’ PDF (the first of the
three PDFs sent to our class on Monday).
o Why not label all of the Vs as auxiliaries (p. 177)?
 There are just Vs in English, where the label (i.e. auxiliary, AUX) denotes a subclass
of V.
o Discussion of double modals
 One student suggested that English imported the use of double modal
constructions. Dr. Dubinsky replied that there is nothing imported about their use,
as English allows for the possibility; the difference is that some varieties take
advantage of it and some don’t.
Phrasal Verbs
o If they are compounds, then maybe there is some movement operation taking place.
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The case with the phrasal verbs is that they are not syntactically ambiguous (i.e. there are
not possible 2 trees for 1 construction), but that there are 2 constructions that have the
same meaning.
Phrasal vs. prepositional
 Take for example the prepositional verb get off. Here, get can take many different
locative prepositional phrases (PPs), all of which are complementary to the V (get).
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Compared to a phrasal verb such as put off, the situation is much easier because put
off is simply one verb.