Syntax – Week 2, Lecture 2
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Criteria for establishing syntactic
categories and constituents: Phrasal
Categories
Readings: Brown and Miller (chs 2,5,16)
Kroeger Ch 3
1. Review: Scots Gaelic and Mbabaram data exercises
What these exercises show us is:
• some general principles of how to approach linguistic data
• a technique for identifying word classes – substitution
• the use of morphological criteria as a second means of identifying &
defining word classes
• the notions of :
• ‘minimal pair’ (of sentence strings)
• slot and filler
• intransitive & transitive constructions
• copula constructions
• the idea of a simple Phrase Structure Grammar, expressed either in
the form of a table or more elegantly in the form of a lexicon (sets of
word classes) and Phrase Structure Rules (rewrite rules)
• however, mostly we were looking at single words and their syntactic
class or category.
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2. Review: Word-level syntactic classes or categories
• Lexical morphemes / categories vs. grammatical morphemes /
categories
(roughly equivalent to open vs. closed classes or major vs. minor
parts of speech)
• Major ways of defining or arguing for lexical syntactic categories:
• Distributional / syntactic / external evidence
(Where items of this class can occur within a string, i.e.
linear order, and what they can go next to)
• Morphological / internal evidence
(What grammatical categories and actual inflectional
forms items of this class can take)
• Distributional criteria alone may isolate many word classes
• In practice morphological and syntactic criteria usually converge
to define the same class but there are some problem cases
• Individual words may belong to more than one category e.g.
smile, sleep hence categorical ambiguity (mistrust wounds).
Solution: categorise word in context, not in isolation.
• Relative importance of different kinds of evidence or
argumentation within particular languages.
3. Overview for Today
• Grammatical categories (esp. of nouns and verbs)
• Talk more about identifying and defining phrases
4. Grammatical Categories
Terminological note:
• We’ve been using the term syntactic category to refer to what are
also known as word classes or parts of speech (e.g. nouns, verbs,
etc.).
• The term grammatical category can sometimes also mean the same
as the above. But more often, it means a kind of grammatical
property that can be marked on words of certain word classes, e.g.
tense, gender, number, case, aspect, voice, mood, evidentiality,
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volition, definiteness.
Grammatical categories come in different shapes and sizes. Not all
languages have the same set of grammatical categories. E.g. many
languages lack tense (side note: they can still talk about things in the past
or future – how?).
Within a grammatical category, there are different values. E.g. within the
category of tense, a language might differentiate between present tense
and past tense (among other possibilities).
Inherent categories:
Some grammatical categories are inherent to the word class they apply to
– e.g. tense is inherent to verbs in many languages including English.
What this means is that the choice of tense doesn’t depend on other
elements in the sentence (for the most part). E.g. if something happened
in the past, we’d probably describe it using the past tense. Compare:
The dog ate my PhD thesis.
The dog will eat my PhD thesis.
Note that for some inherent categories like tense, we (as speakers)
choose between different values, depending on what we mean
– e.g. did the event happen in the past or not? Another grammatical
category like this is number – whether you say the penguin or the
penguins depends on whether you’re referring to one or more than one.
For other inherent categories, we don’t get a choice. For example, in
French, gender is a grammatical category of nouns (and adjectives,
determiners), but speakers don’t choose which gender to assign to which
noun – it’s already determined by the grammar of the language. E.g., the
noun porte ‘door’ is feminine and arbre ‘tree’ is masculine.
Determinatives and adjectives that modify the noun must ‘agree’ with the
noun in gender:
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une grande porte ‘a big door’
un grand arbre ‘a big tree’
*un grand porte
* une grande arbre
You can think of it like this: firstly, speakers just have to know which nouns
are masculine and which are feminine. Then, when using a noun in
context, the noun acts as the head of the Noun Phrase and it calls the
shots – if it’s masculine, it makes its determiner and adjective masculine
as well; if it’s feminine, it makes the det. and adjective feminine.
What the French gender system amounts to is a set of subclasses (or
subcategories) of nouns. I.e., there’s a class of nouns, then within that, we
can further sort all the nouns into masculine or feminine subcategories.
Bear in mind:
• This is quite different from something like tense. We don’t want to
say that some verbs are in a subcategory ‘past’ and others in a
subcategory ‘present’ – a particular verb like eat/ate can be put in
the past or the present (in English, French, etc.), but a particular
noun like porte can’t be sometimes masculine and sometimes
feminine.
• Grammatical gender has little to do with social gender or biological
sex. E.g. the German noun Mädchen ‘girl’ is in the neuter gender in
German, not the feminine gender. ‘Gender’ here is related to the
term ‘genre’, i.e. ‘type/kind’. Another (better?) label for grammatical
gender is noun classes.
Relational categories:
Some grammatical categories reflect a word’s (or phrase’s) relationship
with other elements in the sentence. For example, recall that the suffix -ul
in Mbabaram marks the subject of transitive sentences (sentences that
have two nouns: a subject and an object). Markers of subjects, objects
and some other grammatical functions (like possessors) are known as
case markers. We’ll look at these more another time. For now though, the
important points are:
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• A relational category is not inherent to the word it applies to – e.g.
whether you say mog or mogul in Mbabarum, or we vs. us in
English, depends on the function or position or relationship with
respect to other things in the sentence.
Consider: we will eat vs. *us will eat; *The croc will eat we vs. The
croc will eat us.
• This means that mog and mogul are not in different subcategories of
nouns in Mbabaram – they’re just different grammatical forms or
inflections of the same noun, and they show up in different
grammatical contexts. The same goes for some English pronouns like
we vs. us; I vs. me, etc.
Major grammatical categories of Nouns
Inherent: number, gender/class, referential/deictic status
(definiteness, deictic location).
Relational: case.
Major grammatical categories of Verbs
Inherent: type of action (e.g. direction in which performed; manner in
which carried out; evidentiality, polarity; modality; realis/irrealis), tense,
aspect, conjugation class.
Relational: ‘agreement’ with nominal arguments, transitivity, causatives,
voice, reflexive / reciprocal, switch-reference.
Example: The class ‘noun’ in English
1. Distributional criteria:
• Occurs as ‘head’ of NP (co-occurs with determiners, numeral
modifiers etc.)
• Within a S, a NP occurs as subject, object etc. of verb
2. Inflectional criterion:
plural morpheme -s (or inflects for Number by means of other
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morphological changes e.g. man -> men)
3. Further categorical evidence:
Within the NP, the noun is associated with grammatical category of
Definiteness (via closed class of Determiners e.g. the, a)
Example: The class ‘verb’ in English
Tense – e.g. past –ed killed, walked etc.
Aspect – e.g. progressive –ing killing, walking etc.
Voice – active / passive expressed in English by aux + pst ppl (was
being killed)
Polarity – expressed in English by aux + not
Agreement – e.g. English he takes (3rd. person singular) / they take (3rd
person plural) etc.
5. Phrasal Categories — Two Central Issues
i) which words group together into phrases? (constituency)
ii) how do we assign phrase-level syntactic categories
(categorisation)
In answer to (ii):
The category assigned to the phrase is based on the category of its head
word. The head word is the most important element in the phrase. It is
an obligatory element, and often the only obligatory element.
In answer to (i):
Evidence and arguments for phrasal constituent structure include:
• native speaker intuitions about which words ‘go together’
• possible morphological evidence for phrases
• syntactic tests, e.g. transportation / transposition / movement
tests — can the same string of words appear as a unit in different
positions in the sentence?
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7. A classic problem: prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs in English
Compare the following two sentences:
1. Jill ran up the mountain.
2. Jill rang up her mother.
In terms of word level syntactic categories, these two sentences have the
same pattern:
PN – V – Prep – Dtv – Noun
However, these two sentences behave differently when rearranged:
1′. Up the mountain, Jill ran.
2′. Up her mother, Jill rang.
We call the verbs in sentences like (2) “phrasal verbs” and the verbs in
sentences like (1) prepositional verbs for reasons which will become clear.
We can only understand the differences in the way these sentences
behave when rearranged by studying the phrases (multi-word
constituents) in each of the sentences. To begin, let’s first expand our
corpus:
1. Jill ran up the mountain.
2. Jill rang up her mother.
3. Drunks would get off the bus.
4. Drunks would put off the customers.
5. He will climb up the ladder.
6. He will pick up the ladder.
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Arguing for Constituent Structure Analyses
a. intuitions?
b. various tests below
Test 1: Preposing (Topicalisation or Fronting)
The underlined strings are constituents as they can be moved to the front
of the clause.
I can’t stand your elder sister.
I simply will not tolerate that kind of behaviour.
He’s going to be leaving for Sydney very shortly.
John ran down the hill, as fast as he could.
How does our corpus behave when strings of words are moved?
Up the mountain, Jill ran.
*Up her mother, Jill rang.
?Off the bus, drunks would get.
*Off the customers, drunks would put.
Up the ladder, he will climb.
*Up the ladder, he will pick.
The fact that “up the mountain” can be moved as a block tells us that it is
a phrase. The fact that “up her Mother” can’t move that way tells us that
these three words do not form a phrase.
Prepositional verb: Verb – PP Verb [Prep NP]
Phrasal verb: Verb – Particle [Verb ‘Particle’] NP
Using these tests, which of the verbs get, put, climb, pick patterns like
“ran” – a prepositional verb, and which patterns like “rang”, a phrasal
verb?
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Test 2: Variant of the substitution test
A constituent of a particular kind should be able to be replaced by
another of the same kind, e.g. a PP
Jill ran down the mountain.
*Jill rang onto her mother.
Drunks would get on the bus.
?Drunks would put on the customers.
*He will pick down the ladder.
He will climb down the ladder.
Test 3: The sentence fragment test
Constituents can be used alone:
Q. Where did Jill run?
A. Up the mountain.
Q. Who did Jill ring?
A. *Up her mother.
Q. Did they get off the train?
A. No, off the bus.
Q. Did they put off the waitresses?
A. *No, off the customers.
Q. Where will he climb?
A. Up the ladder.
Q. What will he pick?
A. *Up the ladder.
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Test 4: The (ordinary) coordination test
Constituents of the same type can be coordinated:
Jill ran up the mountain and over the other side.
*Jill rang up her mother and up her aunty.
Prepositional V or Phrasal V?
Drunks would get off the bus and on the train.
*Drunks would put off the customers and off the waitresses.
He will climb up the ladder and onto the roof.
*He will pick up the ladder and up the paint.
Test 5: The ‘shared constituent’ coordination test
When two sentences are coordinated with a shared final element, this can
be factored out and given only once at the end of the sentence – what is
factored out should be a constituent. Consider:
Jill ran up the mountain and Fred walked up the mountain
If “up the mountain” is a constituent, we should be able to just use it
once:
Jill ran – and Fred walked – up the mountain.
Compare this with rang below:
Jill rang up an old friend and Fred looked up an old friend.
*Jill rang – and Fred looked – up an old friend.
Prepositional V or Phrasal V?
Drunks would get – and junkies would fall – off the bus.
*Drunks would put – and junkies would also put – off the customers.
What do the following tests tell us?
Jill rang up an old friend and Fred looked up an old friend.
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*Jill rang – and Fred looked – up an old friend.
Jill rang up – and Fred looked up – an old friend.
Test 6: Cleft construction test
A cleft takes a sentence like (1) below and reformats it like (1′)
(1) Jill ran up the mountain.
(1′) It was up the mountain that Jill ran.
X verbed Y → It was Y which X verbed
It was up the mountain that Jill ran.
*It was up her mother that Jill rang.
Prepositional V or Phrasal V?
?It was off the bus the drunks would get.
*It was off the customers the drunks would put.
Test 7: Distribution of Adverbial Phrases
VP adverbials such as slowly, completely should be able to go between a V
and a PP:
Jill ran quickly up the mountain.
*Jill rang quickly up her mother.
Prepositional V or Phrasal V?
Drunks would get slowly off the bus.
* Drunks would put completely off the customers.
Test 8: Ellipsis test
This test uses ‘gapping’ of verbs:
John bought an apple, and Mary __ a pear.
Jill ran up the mountain, and John __ down the hill.
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*Jill rang up her mother, and John __ up his sister.
Prepositional V or Phrasal V?
Drunks would get off the bus, and junkies ___ off the train.
*Drunks would put off the customers, and junkies ___ off the
waitresses.
Test 9: Variant of a pronominalisation test
?Jill ran up it. (note: maybe sounds funny for information flow
reasons)
*Jill ran it up. (only works with a different meaning)
?Jill rang up her.
Jill rang her up.
Prepositional V or Phrasal V?
?Drunks would get off it.
*Drunks would get it off. (different meaning)
?Drunks would put off them.
Drunks would put them off.
Conclusions
We have shown that the 6 test sentences require one of two analyses to
account for their syntactic behaviour. A preposition followed by a NP can
be treated as a phrase for the following sentences:
1. Jill ran up the mountain.
3. Drunks would get off the bus.
5. He will climb up the ladder.
These sentences have the following constituency:
NP V [P NP]
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However, there is overwhelming evidence that this is not the case for the
following sentences:
2. Jill rang up her mother.
4. Drunks would put off the customers.
6. He will pick up the ladder.
These sentences have the following constituency:
NP V Particle NP V = a phrasal verb.
Here the preposition (or particle in this context) and the NP don’t form a
phrase.
Remember to be careful about what you are testing for. While the P + NP
don’t form a phrase in the phrasal verb sentences above, the NP itself is
still a phrase as evidenced by the tests below:
Jill rang up an old friend.
Jill rang up [an old friend]
Tests showing “an old friend” is a phrase:
1. An old friend, Jill rang up.
2. N/A
3. Who did Jill ring up? An old friend.
4. Jill rang up an old friend and her mother
5. Jill rang up – and Fred also rang up – an old friend.
6. It was an old friend that Jill rang up.
7. N/A
8. Jill rang up an old friend and John his mother.
9. N/A
But, an old friend is a phrase in both sentences (1) and (2), so running
tests for an old friend would not show the difference in structure between
the sentences.
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8. Summary
• We have now explored – at least to some extent – the kinds of
arguments which can be given for:
• Assigning words to syntactic categories or classes
• Grouping words together into phrasal constituents
• Assigning a category label to the phrasal constituent
• In the process, we have considered various types of analytical
methods and various kinds of argumentation which can be used for
constituency and categorisation, including:
• analysis and argumentation involving syntactic distribution –
substitution in particular, also movement and other tests
• analysis and argumentation based on the morphological forms
of words
• We have also been exposed to a range of different languages which
exhibit different kinds of syntax and morphology.