Announcements What is Syntax What is

Announcements

What is Syntax?

What is Syntax Not?

What is Syntax? (2)

Simplified View of Linguistics Phonology Morphology Semantics

The Big Picture Linguistic Theory Empirical Matter

What About Chomsky?

Types of Linguistic Theories

The Big Picture Linguistic Theory Empirical Matter

Syntax: Why should we care?

key ideas of syntax

From Substrings to Trees

Node Labels?

Node Labels S NP Det. P

Types of Nodes S nonterminal symbols = constituents NP Det. P NP Phrase-structure tree Det. P terminal symbols = words

Determining Part-of-Speech

Constituency (Review)

Constituency (II)

Constituency (III)

S NP Det. P Only leaf nodes labeled with words! All nodes are labeled with words!

S NP Det. P

Types of Dependency Adj(unct) Subj Fw Adj Obj Fw

Grammatical Relations

Subcategorization

What About the VP? S S NP Det. P VP NP Det. P

What About the VP?

Context-Free Grammars

CFG: Example the very small boy likes a girl

Derivations in a CFG S

Derivations in a CFG S NP VP

Derivations in a CFG S NP Det. P VP N

Derivations in a CFG S NP Det. P VP N

Derivations in a CFG S NP Det. P VP N V NP

Derivations in a CFG S NP Det. P VP N V NP Det. P N

S NP VP V NP Det. P N

Derivations of CFGs S NP Det. P N VP V NP Det. P N

Formal Definition of a CFG

Context?

Key Constituents (English)

Sentence-Types

NPs

PPs

Recursion

Recursion

Recursion

Grammar Equivalence

Normal Forms &c

Chomsky Normal Form

“Generative Grammar”

Massive Ambiguity of Syntax

Penn Treebank (PTB)

Example from PTB ( (S (NP-SBJ It) (VP 's (NP-PRD (NP the latest investment craze) (VP sweeping (NP Wall Street))) : (NP a rash) (PP of (NP new closed-end country funds) , (NP those (ADJP publicly traded) portfolios) (SBAR (WHNP-37 that) (S (NP-SBJ *T*-37) (VP invest (PP-CLR in (NP stocks) (PP of (NP a single foreign country))))))

Types of syntactic constructions

S NP S VP an elf V VP S to decide NP VP an elf V S V to seem NP PP to be in the kitchen VP an elf V PP to be in the kitchen

S NP S VP an elf V VP S decided NP VP PRO V S V seemed NP PP to be in the kitchen VP an elf V PP to be in the kitchen

S NP S VP an elf V VP S decided NP VP PRO V S V seemed NP PP to be in the kitchen VP an elf V PP to be in the kitchen

S NP S VP an elf V S decided NP VP PRO V S seemed NP PP to be in the kitchen VP V PP to be in the kitchen

Examples from PTB

The Big Picture Empirical Matter