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Syntax 1

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Course grades In-class or homework

exercises every two weeks or so

Quizzes will be announced in advance: probably there will be two

Midterms will take place in class time

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Course grades Presentations

– Pairs– Read an article or chapter from

Yule– Report to the class

Essays – Each student writes one long essay– You can choose a topic from a

selection I will provide– I will give more information later

Class performance– Attitude– Attendance– Contribution to discussion

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Class rules Attendance is mandatory

– Assistant class leader please take attendance at break time– More than 4 missed classes (whether for sickness, sports, laziness, 病假 , 公假 , or any reason) – 0%!

If you arrive late, you must apologize and explain the reason

Please don’t eat hot food Please switch off your phone Please don’t chatter while I’m speaking Work only on class material during class time

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Class website

http://mcu.edu.tw/~ssmith Here you will find

– These PowerPoint slides– Syllabus, recommended reading and websites– Your grades

» Check grades on-line after quizzes and exercises are returned to you

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Textbook

Yule, The Study of Language (Cambridge, 2003)

There should be enough copies in the store You must buy a copy You must bring it next week and every

week

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Course syllabusWeeks 2 - 3 The structure of sentences: Syntax

Weeks 4 – 6 The study of meaning: Semantics

Weeks 7-8 Beyond the sentence: Pragmatics

Week 9 Midterm exam in class

Week 10 University mid-terms: no class this week

Weeks 11-12 The psychology of language: Psycholinguistics

Weeks 13-14 Sociolinguistics

Week 15 Historical linguistics

Week 16 Corpus linguistics

Week 17 Computational linguistics

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In your free time

Look at the diagram again, and try to understand it.

Phonetics Phonology

Sounds of language

Linguistics

Grammar

Morphology Syntax

Meaning

Semantics Pragmatics

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Morphology…the last word Affixation: hardly used in Chinese

– My son has 73 Ultramen– 我 (?的 )兒子有 73只鹹蛋超人 (*們 )

Compounding– rare in English: greenhouse, blackbird– productive in Chinese

» Verb-object compounds: 開車 , 幫忙» Resultative compounds: 來得及 , 跑不掉» Stump compounds: 交大

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我覺得這個教室太…冷 !

We can also say– 這個教室 ,我覺得太冷 !

I don’t think we can really say– ?我把這個教室覺得太冷 , because it sounds very strange

And we certainly can’t say something like– *我覺得太冷這個教室 , although we might understand it if some

one said it But if someone said

– *教室這個 ,太冷覺得我 , we would probably have no idea what they were talking about

This is because of syntactic rules governing Mandarin.

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Why study syntax? Some answers:

(It’s part of Linguistics) (Simon says we must) (There will be questions on it in the final exam) It’s part of the grammar of every language

(what’s the other part?) And the grammar of a language is part of a native

speaker’s linguistic knowledge (what’s the other part?)

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Here is another reason for studying syntax

Infinity of expressions– There is an infinite number of possible utterances in ev

ery language– It is obvious that all these utterances cannot be stored i

n our brains Our knowledge of a language consists of

– A finite number of words (the lexicon; the “dictionary in your head”), and

– Rules (the grammar of the language) It is the job of the syntactician (and the morpholo

gist) to find out what these rules are

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Language acquisition Everyone who can speak knows how to use

the rules– and it is amazing that children can do it so fast

But nobody can really state exactly what the rules are!

Understanding syntax (and morphology) can help researchers to understand how young children learn their native language

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Language acquisition device Put forward by Chomsky in the 1960s A physical part of the human brain All kids are born with the same LAD

– So any kid can learn any language LAD was an important part of psychological theor

y– “nature vs nurture”– Challenged behaviorist learning theory of Skinner

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Universal grammar Theory refined by Chomsky in 1981 UG has Principles, true of all languages

– All languages have the same underlying structure» e.g. all languages have nouns and verbs

and Parameters, whose setting varies from language to language– English and Chinese SVO; Japanese SOV– Spanish and Chinese pro-drop; English not pro-drop

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What does “unlockable” mean?

That was a morphological ambiguity Syntactic ambiguity (figure out the two me

anings)– John saw the girl with the telescope– 爸爸給小明買鹹蛋超人

Can you draw trees for these two sentences?– If that’s too difficult, don’t worry!

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All languages have constituents Take a simple sentence

– Zech danced We can call the sentence S, and label the

syntactic categories N and VS

N

Zech

V

danced

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Phrase structure grammar N and V aren’t always

very good labels Zech is similar to the

handsome student, because they are both the same kind of constituent

– They are both Noun Phrases

– We can remove John and add the handsome student, and the sentence structure is still similar

S

NP

The handsome student

VP

danced

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Different sentence, same constituents

Now let’s add an object danced the lambada is the

same kind of constituent as danced

– a VP You can swap danced for

danced the lambada and the basic structure is the same

S

NP

The handsome student

VP

danced the lambada

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Non-constituents

man danced is not a constituent – It’s not a VP or NP or anythingP– Because you can’t swap it for anything else

The old [man danced] the lambada *The old [man] the lambada *The old [danced] the lambada (remember what * means?)

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What are the NP and VP? The frog ate the lizard. The frog sat on the lilypad. The fat frog ate the long lizard slowly. The fat frog with a lizard in its mouth sat o

n the lilypad. The fat frog who was sitting on the lilypad

with a lizard in its mouth danced the lambada.

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Phrase structure rules

Now, you know this phrase structure rule:– S NP VP (a sentence comprises a noun phrase

followed by a verb phrase) Here are two more phrase structure rules:

– VP V NP– NP N

Think about that carefully Now, draw a tree with more detail

– For the sentence Marguerite drinks whisky

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Now let’s change the NP rule (First, DET means determiner

– Function words like the, a, this, several) NP (DET) N

– That means a noun phrase can have a determiner, and it must have a noun

Now you can diagram Zech danced the lambada in a bit more detail than I did on the other slide

(Remember:– S NP VP– VP V NP)

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Now let’s change the NP rule again

Such that we have– S NP VP– VP V NP – NP (DET) (ADJ) N

Now you can diagram this sentence– The unhappy book ate the green lambada– (The sentence is syntactically well-formed, by the wa

y)

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爸爸給小明買鹹蛋超人

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Complements

A complement an object (of a verb)– Like fish here:

There is another kind of complement– Sentential complement:– New rule:

VP V S

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Complementizers (that, if etc.)

Simple enough:

Complementizer that is optional:

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Other complementizers may not be optional

Like if– More rules:

CP COMP SVP V CP

*We wonder Tracy ate her fish. Does Chinese have a complementizer which means that?

Give examples of its use, and draw trees.

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S NP aux VP

Draw phrase structure trees for the following utterances.

1. John drinks.

2. John drinks beer with a straw (吸管 )

3. Jane believes John drinks beer.

4. John must drink beer.

5. Jane wonders whether John must drink beer.

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Answers to 2 and 5