Syntax

For the required phrase structure trees below, it is preferred that you use the provided tree drawing website and copy/paste the resulting trees. Less preferably, you could use the ability of your word processor to insert text-boxes (for nodes) and lines (for branches), or you could use a drawing program to draw a tree, and then insert the resulting tree into word processing.

http://ironcreek.net/syntaxtree/

(1.) 27 e, f, g.

Construct a phrase structure tree for each of the following expressions:e. sent the man an email ly calle f. thought Sally hated Bob g. barked yesterday\f(9) a. kono kodomo to this Child with 'with this child' b. *to kono kodomo Apart from imposing relative ordering constraints between certain kinds of expres- sions, languages can also have word order restrictions that mandate that a certain expres- sion occur in a specic position in a sentence. For example, Warlpiri, another Australian language, generally allows free ordering of expressions in a sentence. The only word order restriction is that an auxiliary verb (e.g., will in English} must occur in the second position in a sentence. It doesn't matter what kind of expression comes right before or right after the auxiliary, and it doesn't matter how the expressions that follow the auxiliary are relatively ordered, so long as the auxiliary is second. As we have seen, there are many different kinds of word order constraints that languages make use of. However, merely getting expressions in the right order in a sentence doesn't guarantee syntactic well-formedness. There is much more to syntax than just word order. In Japanese, however, the expression to 'with' must occur immediately to the right of the noun phrase, as shown in (9). For that reason, expressions like the Japanese to are called postpositions, and not prepositions. jsSyntax Tree V1.05 sans-serif v 16 v O Color Auto subscript Triangles O Align at bottom Phrase (labelled bracket notation) [S [NP Syntax ] [VP [V is ] [Adj cool]] ] S NP VP Syntax V Adj is coolv1.05 jsSyntax Tree sans-serif v 16 v O Color Auto subscript Triangles O Align at bottom Phrase (labelled bracket notation) [VP [TV liked] [Det the] [Adj gray] [N cat] 1 bracket(s) open [ TV Det Adj N liked the gray cat Tip: Click on the syntax tree image to download a copy.jsSyntax Tree V1.05 sans-serif v 16 v O Color Auto subscript Triangles O Align at bottom Phrase (labelled bracket notation) [VP [TV liked] [NP [Det the] [Adj gray] [N cat] ] ] VP TV NP liked Det Adj N the gray catPhrase (labelled bracket notation) [VP [TV liked] [NP [Det the] [N [Adj gray] [N cat] ] ] ] VP TV NP liked Det the Adj N2 gray catPhrase (labelled bracket notation) [ [ al] [ omen] [ feliz] ] al omen feliz ( Bolognese) the man happy "the happy man" Phrase must start with [ and end with ] VP TV NP liked Det the Adj N2 gray catPhrase Structure Function Rule S - NP VP allows VPs to combine with their subject NP to form a sentence NP - Det N allows determiners to combine with a noun to form an NP N - Adj N allows attributive adjectives to be noun adjuncts VP - VP Adv allows adverbs to be VP adjuncts VP - TV NP allows transitive verbs to combine with their object NP to form a VP VP - DTV NP NP allows ditransitive verbs to combine with their object NPs to form a VP VP - SV S allows sentential complement verbs to combine with their complement S to form a VP PP - PNP allows prepositions to combine with their complement NP to form a PP N - NPP allows PPs to be noun adjuncts VP - VP PP allows PPs to be VP adjunctsA past student asked "In the example of syntactic distribution referenced in the textbook l[page 220}. with "Sally likes the cat." "Sally likes Fluffy," etc.. the book rst states that "Fluffy" and "the cat" have the same distribution. But then the book points out that "Fluffy" and "cat" are not interchangeable so therefore they don't have the same distribution. 30, does that mean that interchangeability is an essential test to determine syntactic distribution?" My a nswer: Interchangeability is a test to determine syntactic distribution, but Iwouldn't call it "essential". Instead, I would call it "typically extremely useful, but sometimes with distracting/interfering factors that need to be taken into account", which I will explain. First, though, take a step back. Constituency tests tell you that a group of words form a constituent. but not necessarily what kind of constituent. Interchangeability shows you that two elements are members of the same category/type of constituent. So, the text to which you refer shows that both "Fluffy" and "the cat" are the same kind of constituent. With more evidence, we can show that their type is NP: Only NPs can be subjects of sentences {PS rule "5 > NP VP"), and both ofthese are interchangeable in " ____ likes Bob." l[\"Fluffy likes Bob" and "The cat likes Bob" are both grammatical.) Similarly, a lack of interchangeability shows us that two elements are not ofthe same kind: in that same sentence, "Fluffy" can occur in the blank but "cat" cannot: "Fluffy likes Bob" is grammatical and "cat likes Bob is ungrammatical {review 5.1.1 for [unlgrammaticality}. The last linguistic expressions exemplify what I meant by "factors that need to be taken into account." Above, the relevant factor is about the difference between count and mass nouns [review 5.4.2 for this difference). Another example involves "the cat" and "the cats", which are both NPs. They are interchangeable in the frame "Sally likes ___." (Both "Sally likes the cat" and "Sally likes the cats" are grammatical.) But they are not interchangeable in the frames " ___ likes Bob" or " ___ like Bob", because of subjectverb agreement {review 5.2.3: for agreement}.1 That is. "The cat likes Bob" is grammatical while "The cats likes Bob is ungrammatical l[first frame}, and (second frame} "The cat Iike Bob is ungrammatical while "The cats like Bob" is grammatical.2 We describe this set of observations by means of a descriptive rule of "subjectverb agreement", which I am sure is rather familiar to us all {although maybe in a prescriptive guise]. It is not, however, part of the PSrules themselves, it is separate from them, though it depends on the trees describedfcreated by the PS-rules. (In particular, the notion of a "subject" is formally denedidescribed as "An NP in a tree because of the PSrule S > NPVP. The verb must "agree" in features with that particular NRS} Thus, "the cat" and "the cats" can both be NPs, in the same sort of subject position, but still they may not be interchangeable because of a nonPSrule, in this case, the rule of subjectverb agreement. These are just two of many possible interfering factors, but like all such things, observing them leads us linguists to go investigate these factors, hoping to understand the underlying pattern, in order to describe it. Having such possible interfering factors is a major reason why we don't usually rely on any one test, but instead look for multiple tests that converge on a conclusion. Language is complex, as we've certainly come to understand. 1 English generally doesn't have object-verb agreement, but other grammars might. and many do; therefore, those grammars would not allow the equivalent of a singular vs. plural NP into the same "object frame" because of the failure of objectverb agreement with one of them. 2 These are my judgments concerning {unlgrammaticallty, and are relevant for describing my competence. There are English competences that don't have rules of agreement like this (or which don't have agreement morphemes for verbs. Those competences are just as in need of description as mine, and they will obviously have different patterns, i.e. different descriptive rules. Other interfering factors can certainly be found in my competence and in theirs, but this one may not apply in their competences.) 3 Yes, yes, I know, it is much more complex than that. Which is why we don't focus on formalizing it here. For more, take LING 4020, 5021, then continue to grad school in linguistics. A past student asked "In doing Syntax PS2 D,you write: "Write a lexical entry for each word in the Japanese phrase in that example." Do you mean a gloss for each of the Japanese words {as your video & PowerPoint show)?" My answer: Let me be very clear, because they are not the same thing, though in a way they do relate when we doing problems. The gloss is an indication, in a 3-line presentation of non-English data, of (the meaning part of]I the morphemes in the actual data. A lexical entry is a part of our representation of the competence that people have. For example, in my competence. there is a lexical entry "N u) cat", and another "N - -> wheel". (For shorthand, we can write "N --> catr wheel. boy. book. elbow, water, song, fish" and we could list many more. We'd have to!) Obviously, the cat and wheel and other possible parts are simply representations of the morphemes, using normal English spelling and the meaning that we assume that linguists working in English will understand. Of course, the actual morpheme is a pair of a form {a string of phonemes} and a meaning l[however that is represented in our minds}. The "N u)" part tells us further important info for morphology and syntax. In morphology, we know that the plural morpheme can attach to count nouns (a subset of the members of category N}. giving us words like [N cats] or [N wheels], since the plural morpheme like other functional afxes doesn't change the category of the stemxroot to which it attaches. In syntax, any word of category N (bare root or complex of root and afxes} can go into an appropriate N slot created by a PSrule. So, I meant, in PS2 D, to write something like "X > {wordlL word2 ...}]", where X is the relevant basic category that can have words in it (N, NP, VP. adj. P. det. etc}, and wordl. word2, etc are morphemes/words from the language being investigated (the English competence being discussed in the textbook is partially exemplied in {3} of section 5.5.2}. For the morphemes/words, use the spelling of the language itself, as given in the problem. DO NOT use the English translation of it. {And don't worry about doing any morphological analysis in these problems, in doing syntax, there is usually not enough info in a sentence or two to also do a complete morphological analysis. lnstead,just treat all words as though they are simple, and put them into a lexical entry.) Now our grammar predicts that The uffy cat slept is a sentence, since we can construct the phrase structure tree in (8). (3) S A NP VP A | De! N slept l /\\ the Adj N uffy cat In this tree, as always, the forms of the lexical expressions are the leaves. The syntactic category names that occur right above the leaves represent the syntactic categories of lexical expressions, in accordance with the lexical entries. The tree also shows that the immediate constituents of this sentence are NP and VP (rule 4), that the immediate con- stituents of NP are Det and N (rule 6}, and that the immediate constituents of the higher occurrence of N in the tree are Adj and N (rule 7). Reading the leaves of this entire tree from left to right gives us the string The uffv cat slept, the form of the whole sentence whose structure this tree represents. Our grammar now predicts that Sally gave Bob this dog is a sentence, which we can repre- sent by means of the phrase structure tree in (10). (10) S NP VP Sally DTV NP NP gave Bob Det N this dogv1.11 jsSyntax Tree sans-serif |16 Color Auto subscript _ Triangles Align at bottom Phrase (labelled bracket notation) [S [NP [det the] [N [N woman] [PP [P with] [NP [det the] [N [Adj heavy] [N [Adi black] [N briefcase] ]]]]] ][VP [TV likes][NP [det. every ][N [Adj new] [N suggestion] ]]]] S NP1 VP NP 3 det1 N1 TV the N2 PP likes det3 V6 P NP2 every Adj3 N7 woman with det2 N3 new suggestion the Adj1 heavy Adj2 N5 black briefcase