Syntax – Week 2, Lecture 1
1
Criteria for establishing syntactic
categories and constituents:
External / Syntactic and Internal /
Morphological
1. Review: Scots Gaelic – Part 2
17. Chunnaic mi an cù I saw the dog
18. Bhuail e an gille He struck the boy
19. Ghlac Calum breac Calum caught a trout
20. Reic Calum an cù Calum sold the dog
21. Sgrìobh mi litir I wrote a letter
22. Ghlac Calum an cù Calum caught the dog
23. Bhuail Tearlach an cù Charlie struck the dog
24. Chunnaic an cù Calum The dog saw Calum
25. Bhàsaich Tearlach Charlie died
26. Fhuair Tearlach cù Charlie got a dog
27. Sheinn mi I sang
28. Bhàsaich an cù The dog died
29. Chunnaic Calum cù Calum saw a dog
Syntax – Week 2, Lecture 1
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Start by working out what the words mean.
This is straightforward when we have translations and minimal
pairs of sentences, e.g. compare 25 and 28:
25. Bhàsaich Tearlach Charlie died
28. Bhàsaich an cù The dog died
The two words in common are: died and bhàsaich – so, bhàsaich
must mean died. Using this technique, we get the following
translations:
Verb (V) Determinative (Dtv) Noun
bhàsaich – die an – the cù – dog
chunnaic – saw gille – boy
bhuail – struck breac – trout
ghlac – catch Pronoun litir – letter
reic – sold e – he Tearlach – Charlie
Sgrìobh – wrote mi – I
fhuair – got
sheinn – sang
So, the PSR’s (phrase structure rule) which could give sentences
like (17) or (18):
S → V NP NP
NP → {
PN
Dtv N
}
However, not just any verb can be used – or we would predict
sentences like (30) below to be grammatical:
(30) *Bhàsaich Tearlach an cù “Charlie died the dog”
Syntax – Week 2, Lecture 1
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What to do?
For now, we will create two subcategories of verbs: Vt, Vi:
Vt (transitive verbs): have two NP’s (like see, kill, hit)
Vi (intransitive verbs): have one NP (like sleep, bark, yawn)
So in summary we have the following lexicon:
Vcop = {bha}
Vt = {chunnaic, bhuail, ghlac, reci, sgriobh, fhuair}
Vi = {bhàsaich, sheinn}
PN = {Calum, Màiri, Tearlach}
Pro = {mi, e}
Adj = {mór, sgìth, beag, bàn, dubh}
Dtv = {an}
N = {cù, cat, gille, breac, litir}
Note in (21), the determinative is optional. When an doesn’t
appear, the sense of the noun is indefinite (c.f.,: a cat vs the cat).
We capture this optionality by using brackets:
NP → (dtv) N
Here the (dtv) means “you can have a determinative here, but
you don’t have to”. The following rules give us grammatical
sentences, and account for all the sentences in the exercise:
S → {
Vcop NP Adj
Vt NP NP
Vi NP
}
NP → {
Pro
PN
(dtv) N
}
Syntax – Week 2, Lecture 1
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2. Establishing syntactic categories and constituents
Remember from last time:
• categories are types/kinds of words (or of phrases), e.g. N,
V, Adj etc. are (word-level) syntactic categories, also known
as word classes or pasts of speech.
• constituents or phrases are strings of words that function
as a single unit. E.g. we saw that the tall man and he both
act as single units, so they are both constituents/phrases.
Three overarching questions about word-level syntactic
categories:
1. How are word classes / parts of speech / word-level
syntactic categories established for a particular language?
2. Are there semantic distinctions corresponding to the
distinctions between categories?
3. Can the categories in one language be equated with the
categories in other languages?
Lexical vs. grammatical categories
• lexical morphemes / lexical categories
o e.g. N, V, Adj, Adv
o open classes (can admit new members easily)
o ‘major’ parts of speech; ‘content words’
o can be heads of phrases (NP, VP, AdjP, AdvP) (in
English at least)
o free forms or roots,
dog, walk dog-s, walk-ing
• grammatical morphemes / categories
o e.g. Number, Tense etc.
o closed classes
o minor parts of speech ; ‘function words’
o bound forms or separate words belonging to closed
Syntax – Week 2, Lecture 1
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classes:
dog-s, walk-ing a / the dog
Major ways of defining or arguing for lexical syntactic
categories:
• Distributional / syntactic / external evidence
Where items of a class can occur within a string (linear
order, and what they can go next to):
– distribution of phrases in which the word occurs
– structure of phrases in which the word occurs
Evidence from substitution test
• Morphological / internal evidence
What grammatical categories and inflectional forms items
of this class can take.
Examples:
Distribution evidence for categories in English:
1. ________ can be a pain in the neck.
2. They can ________.
3. ________ I be frank?
4. He is very ________.
5. He walks very _______.
6. Go right ________ the ladder.
7. He wrote ________ other work(s).
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1. can be a N, but not P, Adj, Adv, Dtv
2. V in base form
3. modal verb
4. Adj
5. Adv
6. P (can be modified by right= completely)
7. Dtv
The above frames give syntactic/external evidence for the
category of the word – because we are not looking at the word
itself, but where it appears in the sentence.
Note: In some grammars, the terms determinative (dtv) and
determiner (det) mean different things. So far I have used
determinative, but for our purposes, either can be used unless
noted otherwise.
What about morphological/internal evidence?
• Certain inflectional forms only attach to words of a
particular class, and don’t attach to words of other classes
(e.g., -ed on English verbs – and more examples next
lecture).
• Phonological evidence – e.g. in English, some pairs of
nouns/verbs show different stress placement.
(Have a go at marking the stressed syllable in the pairs
below….)
1. We need to increase productivity.
2. We need an increase in productivity.
3. Why do you torment me?
4. Why do you leave me in torment?
5. We might transfer him to another club.
6. He’s asked for a transfer.
7. Are you some kind of pervert?
Syntax – Week 2, Lecture 1
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8. Don’t try and pervert the course of justice.
9. Remember to record the show!
10. I’ll keep a record of that request.
Aside: looking for syntactic and morphological evidence for
word class membership is not a new thing…
Dionysius Thrax (first century BC):
‘The noun is a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a
person or thing.’
‘The verb is a part of speech without case inflection, but
inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or
process performed or undergone.’
‘The preposition is a part of speech placed before other words
in composition and in syntax.’
However, lay people are often more familiar with notional or
semantic definitions of word classes – these are the kinds of
things you might be taught in primary school.
Examples of notional (or semantic) definitions of word classes:
Noun: name of person, place, thing [i.e. entity]
Verb: action
Adjective: state or property; ‘describing word’
Adverb: manner in which something is done
Preposition: location
Morphological and syntactic evidence is far more reliable than
semantic evidence.
But this raises a question: if we identify a particular word class
as having certain morphosyntactic properties x, y and z, what
label should we give to the class?
• One possibility: just call them anything, like ‘Class A’, ‘Class
B’ etc. This is what we did, at least at first, in the Scots
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Gaelic exercise.
• But if we want to give more meaningful labels, and to
allow for cross-linguistic comparison, we’ll want to
consider semantics at least a little bit here.
Arguably, all languages have at least the following two classes of
words:
• A class which is used to make reference to things – Nouns
• A class which is used to describe actions – Verbs
“Once the words of a language have been assigned to
parts-of-speech classes on grammatical grounds and
it is found that one of these classes includes the
preponderance of words that are the names of
persons, places, and things, then it is perfectly
reasonable to call this class the class of Nouns, and to
compare the class so named with the similarly named
classes of other languages.”
Schachter
Aside:
It is popular for some linguists to claim that some languages don’t
make a distinction between nouns and verbs (usually phrased as
“language X doesn’t have nouns and verbs). I think this is
probably not the case. What they mean is that a word can’t be
understood as noun or a verb unless you see it in context. For
example: “cheer”, “boast” could be either nouns or verbs
depending on how they are used.
“Listen to the cheer from Woodstock” Noun
“I like to cheer” Verb
598 of the top 1000 verbs in English also have an identical
nominal counterpart.
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3. Relative importance of different criteria within different
languages
Distributional evidence is less useful in a language with free word
order, like Warlpiri; morphological evidence is less useful in a
language without inflectional morphology like Mandarin Chinese.
SYNTACTIC EVIDENCE
+ –
MORPHOLOGICAL
EVIDENCE
+ English
Ancient Gk
Warlpiri
Latin
– Tongan ?
4. Tips and practice
Keep an inventory of words with which you are familiar in order
to help yourself determine word categories:
Noun: cat, courage
Adjective: green, important
Vcop: is, was, seems
Vi: bark, sleep, yawn
Vt: see, hit, catch
Vdt: give, pass
Adverb: quickly, very
Preposition: on, of, under
Dtv: a, the, several
If you get stuck on a word, rule out the categories it can’t be.
Try:
There was a certain quality to the way she smiled.
I bought some equipment
The destruction of the city
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Frames from Radford:
Noun: ______ can be a pain in the neck.
Verb: They/it can _______.
Modal: ____ I be frank.
Adjective: She is very _____.
Adjective: They are very ______.
Adverb: She walks very ______.
Adverbs: She treats him _______.
Prepositions: Go right _____ the ladder.
He fell right _____ the stairs.
It’s right _____ the bed. etc.
Dtv: She wrote ______ other work(s).