Syntax Jaber M 2 nd ICC Plan

Syntax Jaber M. 2 nd ICC

Plan • What is Syntax? • Main categories and constructions (briefly) • Collocations & colligations (definition, typology, examples) • Syntactic theories & names (Fillmore, Chomsky, Gazdar, etc. )

What is Syntax? • From Ancient Greek: σύνταξις "arrangement" (σύν = "together“ + τάξις = "an ordering“) • The study of the rules that govern the ways in which words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. • A component of grammar. • The arrangement of words in a sentence. Syntax – the study of grammatical relations between words and other units within the sentence.

Syntactic categories: sentence Clausal sentence – the form of a single clause: Sue went to London last week. Compound sentence – the form of 2 or more coordinated clauses, usually joined by a coordinator (such as and, or, but): Sue went to London last week and her father went with her.

Syntactic categories: clauses Canonical clauses – the most basic and elementary kinds of clause: positive, declarative, main clauses, active, etc. Non-canonical clauses – the rest: negative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatives, subordinate, passive, etc. Ann has read your article. The police were noticed. What a fool I am! Please, close the door!

Clause type and speech acts • Declarative: You are very tactful. • Closed interrogative – used to ask questions with a closed set of answers (yes, no, it’s…): Are you very tactful? • Open interrogative – used to ask questions with an open set of answers, contain “wh-word”: How tactful are you? • Exclamative – an exclamative phrase at the front of the clause (how or what): How tactful you are! • Imperative: Be very tactful. You be careful! Don't you speak to me like that! Somebody open the window! (“ 3 d form imp. ”) • Mixed

Syntactic categories: the parts of speech 8 primary word classes, or parts of speech: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Verb: He is ill. She left early. Noun: Sue won easily. I love you*. Adjective: He's very young. Adverb: She spoke clearly. Determinative (subclass of adj. ): The dog barked. We need some milk. 6. Preposition: He's in the garden. We went to Paris. 7. Conjunctions: coordinators. We saw Kim and Pat. Cheap but good. <–> Equal S. status 8. Conjunctions: subordinators. I know that it's true. (+ whether, if)

Syntactic categories: phrases 1. Verb phrase, VP: She [wrote some letters]. He [is still in London]. 2. Noun phrase, NP: [The boss] wants to see [you]. 3. Adjective phrase, AP: It's getting [rather late]. I'm [glad you could come]. 4. Adverb phrase: I spoke [too soon]. It's [quite extraordinarily] good. 5. Determinative phrase, Det: I saw [almost every] card. We've [very little] money left. 6. Preposition phrase, PP: They're [in the garden]. He wrote a book [on sharks].

Collocations • John R. Firth [1957]: “Collocations of a given word are statements of habitual or customary places of that word”. • From Latin: collocare, “place together”. => Þ Collocation is a tendency to occur together. • Notions: significance (Smadja, Church, Hanks), frequency (“much larger than a chance”), typicality, tendency, idiomaticity*. • Example: “Computer” + “hate” = “My computer hates me”.

Types of collocations 1. Noun + Noun (a surge of anger, a pang of conscience, etc. ) 2. Noun + Verb vs Verb + Noun 3. Adjective + Noun (brief chat, key issue, major problem, etc. ) 4. Adverb + Adjective (completely satisfied, fully aware, blissfully unaware, etc. ) 5. Verb + Expression with preposition (burst into tears, swell with pride, etc. ) 6. Verb + Adverb (whisper softly, place gently, etc. )

N&V (not necessarily distinguished) I. N (subject) + V: II. 1. The economy boomed in the 1990 s. 1. V + N (object): Students framed no questions after that lecture. (to frame the question) 2. This wind will wreak havoc with my flowers. (to wreak havoc) 3. The company launched the product in 2002.

Collocability & Co. Collocational restriction (selectional rules): • a restriction on the choice of individual lexical units in construction with other lexical units; • any restriction on the collocability of one individual word with another. Example: “Breath” + animate subject.

Understanding (adopted for collocation concept) Syntagmatic associations: phraseological units (dark night, bright day, etc. ) Structure Non-syntagmatic associations: semantically motivated associations (milk – cow, etc. ) Meaning Syntagma is an elementary constituent segment within a text.

Colligations • Firth’s term for: the general relation between elements in a construction, as opposed to a collocation or relation between individual words. (Why “opposed”? ) • Colligation – a type of collocation, where a lexical item is linked to a grammatical one.

Examples • Ex. 1 “It is astonishing/surprising/amazing” “It is not surprising” Þ “Surprising” colligates with the negative. • Ex. 2 “Cause cancer/dismay/riots” “Cause delight” Þ “Cause” colligated with the negative effects. Certain words associate with negative or positive contexts.

Linguistic schools Transformational grammar: • Standard Theory (ST) • Principles and Parameters Theory (P&P) – Government and Binding Theory (GB) – Minimalist Program (MP) etc. Monostratal grammar: • Relational Grammar (RG) • Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) • Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) • Categorial Grammar • Tree-Adjoining Grammar etc.

Names • Noam Chomsky: Syntactic Structures (1957) Generative Grammar (late 1950 s) • Charles J. Fillmore: Cognitive linguistics Transformational grammar: Case Grammar (1968) The theory of Frame Semantics (1976) • R. Montague: Montague Grammar (1970 s): “rule to rule hypothesis” • G. J. M. Gazdar: Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (1970 s) • Igor Melchuk: Dependency Syntax = Meaning–text theory (1981, 1988)

Generative Grammar • Universal grammar. • Deep structure (a kernel sentence, a simple declarative construction with only one verb, always active and affirmative) + Surface structure (the rest). • Deep structures are generated by phrasestructure rules, and surface structures are derived from deep structures by a series of transformations.

Passive Agent Deletion “In many instances, we delete the agent in passive sentences: The cake was eaten. When the subject agent is not identified, we use an indefinite pronoun to fill the slot where it would appear in the deep structure: [Someone] ate the cake. This deep structure would result in the surface structure of: The cake was eaten [by someone]. T-G grammar proposes a deletion rule that eliminates the prepositional phrase containing the subject agent. We can say that sentence has undergone 2 transformations, passive and passive agent deletion. " (James Dale Williams, The Teacher's Grammar Book, 2 nd ed. Lawrence Ehrlbaum, 2005)

Chomsky’s example

Some other examples

Transformational Grammar (TG) • A form of Generative Grammar. • Rules for: transformations formed a distinct component. • Role of T: to relate deep structures to surface structures. which forms • The Standard Theory = the syntactic description of a sentence. + Semantic representation + Phonetic representation => The Dependency Syntax occurred.

Case Grammar «Падежная» /Ролевая грамматика • Central idea: in any clause each NP has a “case” representing its semantic role (case role). • “Case frames” = combinations of each case with the verb given. • Example: I opened the door with the key. I the door with the key NP 1 NP 2 NP 3 Case of NP 1: agent Case of NP 2: patient Case of NP 3: instrumental Cases are of underlying level. Surface structure: adverbial (indicator: “with”).

Monostratal Grammars Remove the need of transformations, assumed in the most theories of generative grammar at the time. • Montague Grammar: Each syntactic rule correspond one-to-one with those of a semantic rule. Rule, not process. • Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar: In Who can you see? “who” is related to a null noun phrase: [Can you see NP[ ]] by a PS rule. • Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard, 1980 s): The structure of syntactic units is constrained (in)directly by the properties of lexical units, heads. BUT: process of unification.

Dependency Syntax • Dependency grammar is an approach to sentence structure where syntactic units are arranged according to the dependency relation (opp. to the constituency relation of PSG). • Dependencies are directed links between words. The verb is seen as the root of all clause structure + all the other words in the clause are (in)directly dependent on this root. • Dependency-based theories of syntax: Algebraic syntax, Word grammar, Operator grammar, Meaning–text theory, Functional generative description.

Meaning–text theory (MTT) • Main principle: language consists in a mapping from the content or meaning (semantics) of an utterance (выражение) to its form or text (phonetics). • Levels of representation:

Syntax & MTT Syntactic representations are implemented using dependency trees, which constitute the Syntactic Structure (Synt. S).

Thank you for your attention!