Unit Five
Syntax (1)
The Sentence Structure of Language
5.1 Syntax: An Overview
5.1.1
A Definition
Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences
and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.
It is the fact that the meaning of a sentence depends to a large extent on the meaning of
the individual words of which it is composed. Anyhow, the connections among the
component words mean a great deal to the interpretation of the sentence. This means that
how the sentence is constructed contributes to its meaning. The interpretation of the meaning
of a sentence is subject to rules.
Word order is one of the rules:
a) Jack gives Mary a pen. ---- b) Mary gives Jack a pen.
Yet the word order does not always affect the meaning of the sentence:
a) The little girl put her toys away. --- b) The little girl put away her toys.
The grammars of all languages have such syntactic knowledge as their component part.
The field of syntax covers both what is shown (the connections among words of a
sentence and their resulted meaning) and the means by which it is done (the syntactic rules
like word order, agreement, etc.).
5.1.2
Grammaticality （合语法性）
The grammaticality of a sentence is determined by whether the rules of syntax are
applicable. The sentence in the domain of the rules that specify that certain combinations of
words is well-formed or grammatical.
For Chomsky, grammaticality is an intuitive（直觉的）judgment that all the members of
a given linguistic community pass on it. A speaker of a language does not have to be a
linguist to recognize that “It is hot.” is grammatical, but “It are hot.” And “It hot are.” are
ill-formed or unacceptable. The ability to make this sort of judgment is part of the linguistic
competence of speakers. In fact, a speaker of a language can make judgment of
grammaticality on an infinite set of sentences, even if he/she has never heard them before.
Speakers may have never come across the sentence “The tall water met a great book of
balls in the song.”, but their syntactic knowledge will enable them to recognize it as
grammatical. This is because the evaluation is based not on memory and experience, but on a
system of general rules that have been internalized in the course of language learning. The
rules of the syntactic component are the ones that thus prohibit the syntactically
ungrammatical utterances.
5.1.3
Structural Ambiguity
The grouping together of words into phrases or sentences reflects not only the syntactic
organization of the phrase or sentence, but the way in which word meanings are joined
together to give the meaning of the full phrase or sentence. Thus, syntactic knowledge also
accounts for the double meaning, or ambiguity, a phrase or sentence may express.
e.g.: 1)
old men and women
1a) old men and old women
1b) old men and a few of women
2) Leave the book in the room.
2a) Leave the book which is in the room.
2b) The book should be left in the room.
3) The man beat the boy with a stick.
3a) The man used a stick to beat the boy.
3b) The man beat the boy who had a stick with him.
A phrase or a sentence may be understood in different ways according to the
possible interpretations of its structure; however, it is the syntactic rules that determined
its meaning.
5.1.4
Syntactic Rules
Syntactic knowledge of speakers provides them with rules that are used to decide
whether a sentence is grammatical or not. Linguists have proved that speakers of a
language, with internalized syntactic rules, can produce and understand an infinite
number of sentences which have never been produced or hears or read before.
e.g.: 4a) The man beat the boy.
4b) The boy was beaten by the man.
4c) The boy beat the man.
5.1.5
Syntactic Categories
To understand the structure of a sentence, it is first of all necessary to know what
syntactic category a word or a phrase belongs to. A syntactic category refers to large
groups of words or expressions that have very similar properties. Such a group of words
or expressions can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality. Syntactic
categories fall into two types: lexical category and phrasal category.
5.1.5.1 Lexical Categories
Examples of some lexical categories
Major lexical categories
Noun (N)
Verb (V)
Adjective (A)
Preposition (P)
Minor lexical categories
Determiner (Det)
Degree word (Deg)
Qualifier (Qual)
Auxiliary (Aux)
Conjunction (Con)
Examples
book, boy, love, sheep
run, read, play
happy, tall, clear
about, over, on
Examples
the, a this, those
quite, very, more. So
often, always, seldom, almost
must, can, should, might
and, but, or
Traditional grammar designates the two lexical categories as parts of speech.
Major lexical categories are so called, because they make up the largest part of the
vocabulary of a language.
Minor lexical categories are closed classes of words in the sense that
membership in them is restricted to a fixed set of elements already in the language; new
items are rarely added to them.
A word’s category is determined by three criteria, namely meaning, inflection, and
distribution.
5.1.5.2 Phrasal Categories
Syntactic units that are built around a certain word category are called phrases, the
category of which is determined by the word category around which the phrase is built.
Examples of some phrasal categories
Phrasal categories
Examples
Noun Phrase (NP)
Verb Phrase (VP)
Adjective Phrase (AdiP)
Adverb Phrase (AdvP)
Preposition Phrase (PP)
the great books
walk briskly
very pessimistic
very fast
in the park
A phrase that is formed by more than one word usually contains the following elements:
head, specifier and complement.
Head:
the word around which a phrase is formed.
Specifier:
the word on the left side of the head
Complement:
the word on the right side of the head
XP
Specifier
Head
Complement
5.2 Sentence Structure
Within any sentence, words are grouped together to form phrases, and then combine with
each other to form still longer phrases, until a sentence is made. And a tree diagram is used to
illustrate the relations between phrases of the sentence and between the words of each phrasal
category.
S
NP
Art
VP
N
V
NP
Art
5.2.1
N
The
man
beat
the
boy.
Phrase Structure Trees
Sentences may have different word groupings that belong to different syntactic
categories. This can be illustrated by a tree diagram, which specify the syntactic
category label of each word grouping. A graphic representation with syntactic category
information provided is called a phrase structure tree.
S
NP
VP
Adj
NP
N
V
N
AdjP
Adj
PP
P
NP
Art
N
Small
jacket buttons are available
in
the
shop
Sentences can be represented by phrase structure trees to show how they are constituted
and hoe grammatical elements are related.
5.2.2
Recursion
The grammar of a language tells that a sentence can be of any length. Speakers of a language
can make a sentence longer by various means, such as adding adjectives or adding clauses. A
sentence can be made longer by adding more elements either to its beginning or to its end.
5a) Mary has seen the film.
5b) I believe that Mary has seen the film.
5c) I believe that Mary has seen the film that many other people think exceptional.
This shows that the grammar of a language allows for an infinity of possible structures. This
limitless aspect of language is also reflected in phrase structure trees.
e.g.: a desk in a room on the second floor of the building …
Some syntactic category can be used more than once in a tree structure; the number of NPs
under PPs under NPs can actually be repeated infinitely. This is the recursive property of a
language, for a syntactic category may recur over and over in a sentence. This property allows
speakers to reuse the same syntactic categories in the same sentence.
5.3 Phrase Structure Rules
A certain word can only concur with certain other words. Some certain grammatical
mechanism ensure the appropriate positions that specifiers, heads, and complements occupy in
phrase structure. Such special type of grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of
elements that make up a phrase is called a phrase structure rules.
S  NP VP
NP 
(Det) N (PP) …
VP 
(Qual) V (NP) …
AP 
(Deg) A (PP) …
PP 
(Deg) P (NP) …
5.3.1
Application of Phrase Structure Rules
5.3.2
5.3.3
5.3.4
Finite Number of Phrase Structure Rules
Different Languages, Different Phrase Structure Rules
Modification of Phrase Structure Rules
5.4 Lexical Insertion
5.4.1
Subcategorization
5.4.2
Syntactic Basis of Lexical Differences
5.5 Transformation Rules
5.5.1
A Constraint on Transformation
5.5.2
Deep Structure and Surface Structure
5.5.3
Movement Rules
5.5.3.1 Extraposition
5.5.3.2 Topicalization
5.5.3.3 Wh Movement
5.5.4
Additional Transformation Rules
5.6.4.1 Deletion Rules
5.6.4.2 Insertion Rules
5.5.5
Embedding: Recursion of S
5.5.6
Structure Dependency