Syntax

syntax  Study of structure and order of components within a sentence

 The word “Syntax” came from Greek, it means “a setting out
together” or “arrangement”.
Generative  1950’s, American linguist Noam Chomsky introduced Generative
Grammar Grammar.
1. Hypothesized: every normal child has language acquisition
device (LAD)
2. LAD enables the child to learn a language.
3. It is innate capacity of human.
 Generative grammar attempts to produce a particular type of
grammar which would have a very explicit system of rules which
specify what combinations of basic elements would result in well-
formed sentence.
 If the sentences of a language can be seen as a comparable set,
then there must be a set of explicit rules which produce those
sentences. Such a set of explicit rules is a generative grammar.
According to Chomsky; every natural language can be described
in terms of specific explicit system of rules.
 These explicit system of rules have similarity with the types of
rules found in mathematics.
 “I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of
sentences” (Chomsky, 1957:13).
 Generative grammar has finite set of rules, they operate on finite
vocabulary to produce infinite grammatical units (sentences).
 Two particular but main aspects of Generative Grammar, they are
that GG deals with the
1. Only possible sentences of the language.
2. What the possible sentence of the language are.
Some properties of  This type of grammar must have number of properties, for
the grammar example
1. The grammar will generate all the well-formed syntactic
structures (sentences) of a language and fail to generate ill-formed
structure.
2. The grammar will have finite number of rules, but will be capable
of producing infinite number of well-formed structures. In this
Resursiveness way productivity of a language would be captured within the
grammar.
 The rules of this grammar will also need the crucial property of
recursiveness.
 The capacity to be applied more than one in generating a structure.
 For example, “That chased the cat”, “This is the dog that chased
the cat”, and “this is the dog that chased the cat that killed the
rat….”
 3. The grammar should also be able of revealing two other
phenomenon.
3.1. How some superficially distinct sentences are closely
related?
3.2. How some superficially similar sentences are in fact distinct?
Deep and Surface  How some superficially distinct sentences are closely related?
Structure  “Charlie broke the window” and “The window was broken by
Charlie”
 First sentence is an active, whereas, the second sentence is
passive, moreover, both are superficially distinct. This distinction
between the active and passive sentences is a difference in their
surface level. What’s more, this difference in superficial forms
hides the fact that both the two sentences are very closely related.
 The less superficial level or underlying level where the basic
components shared by the two sentences would be represented,
has been called their deep structure.
Structural  Deep structure: is an abstract level of structural organization in
Ambiguity which all the elements determining structural interpretation are
represented.

 How some superficially similar sentences are in fact distinct?

(surface level)
Annie beat a man with an umbrella.
(deeper level#1) (deeper level#2)
Annie had an umbrella and Annie beat a man and the man happened to
she beat a man with it. be carrying an umbrella.
 The above sentence is structurally ambiguous.
 At deep structural level both sentences have different underlying
interpretations.
Models of GG 1. Finite State Grammar
2. Phrase Structure Grammar
3. Transformational Generative Grammar
Finite State  Simplest grammar
Grammar  It can generate infinite set of sentences.
 It works on the recursive rules upon a finite vocabulary
Based on the view
 Sentences are produced/ generated by means of choice.
 This choice is made from left to right.
 After selecting the first element, the every preceding element
determines the following element.
The  young  boy  kicks  the football.
Those  men have eaten the books.
Limitation of FSG
 FGG fails to produce the following type of sentences
1. The girl who is washing clothes is my wife.
 2. He who dares wins
due the assumption which is mentioned in the above points

Phrase Structure  It is more powerful than FSG.

Grammar  It can produce all the sentences which FSG can.
 It deals with the constituency structure of sentences.
 It is structured by the means of a system of generative rules.
 It demonstrates more powerfully the description of natural
languages than Finite State Grammar.

Limitations of Phrase Structure Grammar

S  NP + VP (The boy) (hit the football).
NP (Art) (Det) + N (A) (baby) takes tea.
NP  (Art) + Adj + N (A) (goody) (boy)
NP  (Art) + Adj + N +( PP)
NP  Pro (He) jumped into the water.
AP  AP + Adj or Adj + AP
VP  V He (laughs).
VP  V + PP He (jumped) (into) the water.
VP  Aux + MV He (is) (singing).
PP  P + NP He was walking (on) (the footpath).
VP  V + (NP) (Adj) (Adv) He (drives) (a car) (very)
(speedily).
Aux  Tenses (modals) (aspect)
Tenses  (past) (present)
Modals  (can, could, may, might
etc
Aspects  (be+ing), (have+en),
(be+en)
Symbols used in S Sentence
syntactic description N Nouns
Art. Articles
 Consist of (NP  Art. N), Noun phrase
consists of an article and noun
-() Optional constituent
NP Art (Adj) N, means an adjective is
optional in noun phrase; for example, “the
(green) book”
-{ } One and only one of the constituents must
be selected.

Pro Pronoun
PN Proper noun
 V Verb
Adv Adverb
Prep Preposition
VP Verb phrase
PP Prepositional phrase
* Ungrammatical sequence

Labeled tree  A tree may consist of one or more branches.

diagram  Node: branch of tree
 Non terminal node: that dominates a phrase because it can be further
rewritten
 Terminal node: that cannot be further rewritten or a node that has
nothing beneath it.
 Tree diagram presents the liner order of the constituents.
 Tree diagram represents all the grammatical information found in
the analysis.

 Tree diagram also shows that there are different lower levels in the
analysis as NP is comprised of Art and N, VP of V and NP etc.

Phrase structure  Tree diagram gives two different format

rules 1. Static representation of the structure of the sentence.
 Tree diagram of the every sentence of English can be drawn.
2. Dynamic representation of the structure of the sentence.
 With the dynamic format of the tree diagram we cannot not only
produce a one sentence but number of sentences with the similar
structures because it enables us to generate a large number of
sentences with only a small number of rules. These rules are
usually called phrase structure rules.
 Phrase structure rules present the information of the tree diagram
in an alternative format as
  The rule can be read as “a sentence consists of a noun phrase
followed by a verb phrase”. (these rules can generate infinite
Lexical rules structures)

 Which indicate the words to be used for constituents

 These rules will generate the grammatical sentences but not

ungrammatical sentences.
1. The girl followed the boy.
2. A boy helped the horse.
3. The horse saw a girl.
4. Myrna helped George recently.
5. George saw a horse yesterday.
6. A small horse followed Myrna.
7. The small boy saw George with a crazy horse recently.
8. *Boy the Myrna saw.
9. *Helped a girl.
10. *Small horse with girl.
Problem with  One problem with the phrase structure rules is that they will
phrase structure generate all sentences with fairly fixed word order to the
constituents.
 According to phrase structure rules “George helped Myrna
yesterday” is possible but “Yesterday George helped Myrna” is
not possible because according to phrase structure rules “adverbs”
will always come at the end of their sentences.
Transformational  In order to move the constituents we need a set of rules which will
rules change or move constituents in the structures which drive from
the phrase structure rules. These are called transformational rules.
 In this rule, a “branch” of the “tree” is moved from one part of the
tree diagram, and attach it to a different part. For example
Important

 We need to know which constituents can be moved, from where

to where.
 “Ali picked up the magazine”. “Ali picked the magazine up”
 These sentences contain a verb-particle construction (verb- pick,
particle- up), and it is clear that the particle can be separated from
the verb.
 These type of sentences generate two types of tree diagrams but
the both sentences must come from a single underlying source.
 “Ali picked up the magazine”. This sentence produces a string of
elements like: NP V Particle NP.
 “Ali picked the magazine up” after the particle movement, this
sentence produce the string of elements like: NP V NP Particle.
 After the analysis of the both sentence we can say they are
“surface” variation of a single underlying structure.