ELL113 Week 4
Don’t worry, it’s just a phrase
THE PARTS OF
SYNTAX
2
Heads and phrases
• In
Now
we have
the tools
to identify
where
the that
previous
two weeks,
students
learned
how to
different
categories
of words
appear, determiners,
we can start to
define
categories
like nouns,
adjectives,
represent
them on
structurally.
and
verbs based
their distribution in the sentence.
• Selection
Each word
is the
head
of a phrase, and because
is the
notion
of immediate
locality
or are
‘sisterhood’
in syntax
and they come in the
phrases
based on
their heads,
morphology.
same categories that words do!
• Each head will have certain selectional properties
Selection helps explain to students
that syntactic
determine
theare
characteristics
of the phrase.
why
trees
binary.
3
Heads and phrases
• Noun phrase (NP): happy boy
• The type of noun determines what kind of
adjectives it can be modified by (*happy table).
• Determiner phrase (DP): the boy
• Different determiners select different types of
nouns (the sand, *a sand)
• Prepositional phrase (PP): on the table
4
Heads and phrases
• Verb phrase (VP): quickly eat a cake
• Different verbs require different numbers of
arguments
‘swim’ is a verb that takes one argument (swimmer)
‘eat’ takes two arguments (eater and eatee).
‘give’ is a verb that takes three arguments (giver,
givee, and the thing being given)
• Different verbs can be modified by different
types of adverbs (*quickly have a car)
5
Heads and phrases
• Tense phrase (TP): will eat a cake.
• Communicates the temporal setting of the
event.
6
Heads and phrases
• In English, phrases are head-initial, meaning
that the head (underlined) comes before the
material it selects, called the complement
(italicized)
•
•
•
•
VP: see the boy with the headband
DP: The boy with the headband
NP: boy with the headband
PP: with the headband
7
Introducing Constituency
•Many
Phrases
chunky.
syntaxare
textbooks
introduce tree drawing through
phrase
structure
rules. can be repeated over and over
• Some
sequences
again
S NP
(aux)
I saw
theVP
book
NP  IDet
N [on the chair]
saw(Adj)
the book
VP  IVsaw
(NP)
the(PP)
book [on the chair] [in the library]
I saw the book [on the chair] [in the library] [on the hill]
• What sequence is repeating?
Preposition – Determiner – Noun (PDN)
8
Introducing Constituency
• It’s not possible to repeat just PD or DN
*I saw the book [the chair]
*I saw the book [on the chair] [in the]
• Why can only certain structures repeat?
• Just as morphemes combine hierarchically to form words,
words combine hierarchically to form constituents.
• A constituent is a string of words that speakers can
manipulate as a single unit.
9
Constituency tests
• In order to find constituents, syntacticians
use constituency tests.
• If a string of words is a constituent, then
we will treat it as if it is one unit in our
hierarchical structure of the sentence
10
Constituency tests
• You will notice that many of our
constituency tests identify individual
phrases as units
• Sometimes, a phrase IS a constituent
• Sometimes, constituents consist of more than
one phrase
How many phrases can you identify in “on the
chair”?
11
Test 1: Substitution
• Substitution involves replacing an entire string
of words with a single word that keeps the
meaning of the sentence the same.
This girl in the red coat
will put a picture of Bill on the desk
she
12
Test 1: Substitution
• The girl in the red coat  she
• What type of phrase is the pronoun ‘she’
substituting for?
• Hint: What word is the head of the phrase?
The head determines the type of phrase.
13
Test 1: Substitution
a picture of Bill
This girl in the red coat will put
on the desk
it
girl in the red coat
This
will put a picture of Bill on the desk
one
• What types of phrases do ‘it’ substitution and
‘one’ substitution identify?
14
Test 1: Substitution
are oftenwith
veryaconfused
a
•Students
Replacement
pronounabout
(he, how
she,toit)classify
tells you
proper
name.
that the
string you are a replacing is a DP
constituent
ate cake with
She‘one’
ate cake
•Susan
Replacement
tells DP
yousubstitution
that the string
you are replacing is an NP constituent
Names must be DPs, but students often want them to be
• Make
sure place,
that when
you go to use this test, you are
nouns
(person,
or thing…)
thinking of the noun version of ‘one’, which can be
pluralized (I want the red ones), rather than the
This is
where one,
the distributional
tests
areones
useful:
numeral
which can’t (*I
have
dog)
Susan = the girl
five Susans = five girls
15
Test 1: Substitution
• One replacement can occur with NPs of
different sizes!
• The pretty red coat
That pretty red [one] (=coat)
That pretty [one]
(=red coat)
That [one]
(=pretty red coat)
discussion
up of
to learn
about
idea
•This
What
must sets
the students
structure
pretty
redthe
coat
of be?
adjuncts, which occurs in the following week.
16
Test 1: Substitution
• Because adjectives modify nouns, they
appear inside the NP, at the very edge.
• This is part of why you can have as many
adjectives as you want—they modify the
noun instead of being selected by it directly.
• How do we know they aren’t selected? They
aren’t necessary.
• This is also why they occur before the noun,
even though English is head initial.
17
Test 1: Substitution
Redacted: Substitution tests for PP (there) and VP (do
so), followed by a second time of constituency test
(deletion).
In the second year Syntax course (ELL 221), students
learn several more constituency tests, some of which let
them identify types of phrases that aren’t discussed here.
18
Constituency tests: The take
home message
• The logic behind constituency tests is that any time a string of
words can behave as if it is a single unit, then it must BE a
single unit.
19
Practice
• This beautiful big blue blanket will cover
that couch in the room nicely.
This sentence seems incredibly daunting at first, but with
the distributional tests from Week 3 and the constituency
tests from this lecture, students can actually build every
part of the tree except the very top, which they will learn
about the following week.
Plus, they can explain why the structure is that way.
20
• this beautiful big blue blanket = it = DP
• beautiful big blue blanket = one = NP
• big blue blanket = one = NP
• blue blanket = one = NP
• blanket = one = NP
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21
• Cover that couch in the room nicely= do so = VP
• Cover that couch in the room = do so = VP
• that couch in the room = it = DP
• couch in the room = one = NP
• couch = one = NP
• In the room = there = PP
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Putting it together
• In the first year course, the students aren’t
taught the constituency tools to figure out how to
represent the subject, Tense and Verb Phrase in
a binary way. Instead, we ask them to
(temporarily) memorize and use this structure:
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23
Further resources
• www.allaboutlinguistics.com
• An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory
– Sportiche, Koopman, and Stabler
• Current text for ELL113 Structure of English
(Chapters 2, 3.1-3.5) and ELL221 Syntax (Chapters
3-8)
• An Introduction to Language (10th edition) –
Fromkin, Rodman, and Hyams
• Chapter 3 is a fairly accessible introduction to
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© The University of Sheffield
structure.