Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
SYNTAX 1 NOV 9, 2015 – DAY 31 Brain & Language LING 4110-4890-5110-7960 NSCI 4110-4891-6110 Fall 2015 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 2 Course organization • Schedule: • http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/BrLg/t1-Intro.html#schedule-oftopics • Today's chapter: • http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/BrLg/t19-aIFG.html • Fun with https://www.facebook.com/BrLg15/ • Quiz before Thanksgiving will be in class & on Blackboard. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 3 Grades Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 MIN 6 5 5 4 7 3 4 AVG 9.0 8.8 8.8 8.4 9.2 7.5 8.7 MAX 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University COMBINATORIAL NET 2 4 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University The lexical interface 5 11/09/15 SYNTAX 1 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 6 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 7 What are the parts of speech/syntactic categories? • Major/content categories • noun • verb • adjective • adverb • preposition/postposition? • Minor/functional categories • determiner: article, quantifier, demonstrative • pronoun • negation • conjunction: coordinating, subordinating • auxiliary verb? • Interjection 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 8 Words group to together to form phrases • What are the thematic roles of "Mary" and "John" in "Mary kissed John"? • Mary is Agent (and subject) • John is Patient (and direct object) • What goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John"? • Mary kissed John. • She kissed John. • That girl kissed John. • The tall girl kissed John. • The girl over there kissed John. • A girl that you don’t know kissed John. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 9 Restatement of subject data as NP • Answer • A word that is ‘nouny’, or a group of words that contain a noun; it does not matter which one. • We want a way to generalize over all of these possibilities, and the infinite number of alternatives that we can think up. • Let’s do this by calling it a noun phrase or NP. • An NP goes before, or can be the Agent of, "kissed John" • [NP Mary] kissed John. • [NP She] kissed John. • [NP That girl] kissed John. • [NP The tall girl] kissed John. • [NP The girl over there] kissed John. • [NP A girl that you don’t know] kissed John. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University Words to phrases 2 • What goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed"? • John kissed Mary. • John kissed her. • John kissed that girl. • John kissed the tall girl. • John kissed the girl over there. • John kissed a girl that you don’t know. • Answer • The same ‘nouny’ thing as before. • So let’s also call it a NP. 10 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 11 Restatement of object data as NP • An NP goes after, or is the Patient of, "John kissed": • John kissed [NP Mary]. • John kissed [NP her]. • John kissed [NP that girl]. • John kissed [NP the tall girl]. • John kissed [NP the girl over there]. • John kissed [NP a girl that you don’t know]. • The structure of our sentence now looks like this: • NP kissed NP. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 12 NPs get around • English treats NPs as units, in the sense that they can appear in different parts of a sentence: a. b. c. d. e. Which girl kissed John? ~ Which girl did John kiss __? THAT girl kissed John. ~ THAT girl, John kissed __. Not even Mary kissed John. ~ Not even Mary did John kiss __. That girl is who kissed John. ~ That girl is who John kissed __. Who kissed John is that girl. ~ Who John kissed __ is that girl. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 13 More phrases • But it seems to be that ‘kissed NP’ is a unit, too: 1. Kiss Mary, I would never do. 2. *Kiss, I would never do Mary. 3. What John did was kiss Mary. 4. *What John did Mary was kiss. 5. What did John do? –– Kiss Mary. 6. *What did John do Mary? –– Kiss. 7. John said he would kiss Mary, and he did so. 8. #John said he would kiss, and he did Mary. • Let’s call this new unit VP, so our sentence looks like this: • NP [VP kissed NP] • By the way, how do you know which ones are bad? • Because you are an expert in the grammar of your native language. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 14 A bigger unit • The structure that we just saw covers a whole sentence, and it would be convenient to point this out in some way. • So let us just make up a new unit, say ‘S’ for sentence: • [S NP [VP kissed NP]] • Many people find it hard to keep up with all the labels and brackets, though, so linguists came up with an alternative, the tree structure: S NP VP kissed NP 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 15 Compositionality • Compare these next two sentences: 1. Mary kicked the mule. 2. Mary kicked the bucket. • #2 has two readings a. Mary applied force to the bucket with her foot. b. Mary died. • In the (a) reading, the sentence means what the sum of its words mean; in the (b) reading, it means something special, not predictable from the individual words. • This happens in morphology, too: a. b. the past tense of depart: departed the past tense of go: *goed, went • We call the (a) readings compositional, while the (b) readings are non-compositional or lexical. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 16 More on kicking the bucket • Almost any change, no matter how minor, makes "kick the bucket" lose its non-compositional meaning: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Mary kicked the buckets. Mary kicked a bucket. Mary kicked that bucket. Mary kicked the pail. Mary kicked the big bucket. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 17 What is syntactic processing? • “Narrowly defined, syntactic processing involves the assignment of syntactic structure to word strings that qualify as a ‘sentences’”. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 18 What is a sentence? • Some definitions • A complete thought. • • • • • Mary kissed John. Mary kissed. Mary. Kissed. Kissed John. • A subject and a predicate. • Mary kissed John. • Mary kissed. • Mary. • Kissed. • Kissed John. • A string of words starting with a capital letter and ending with a period. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University What we said at the beginning • S = NP VP, or • [S NP VP] • [S Mary [VP kissed John]] S NP Mary V kissed VP NP John 19 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 20 But … • … we very often utter incomplete sentences: a) Who kissed John? b) Mary. c) What did Mary do? d) Kiss John. • So the missing information can be filled in by the context: a) Who kissed John? b) [S Mary [VP Ø]] c) What did Mary do? d) [S [NP Ø] [VP kiss John]] 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 21 What is a grammar? • “A grammar is an explicit set of rules for distinguishing the well-formed sentences of a language from those that are ill-formed (ungrammatical).” We have already seen a fragment of a grammar of English: S → NP VP ② VP → V NP ① • Which of these strings are ill-formed (ungrammatical), according to this grammar? • • • • • Mary kissed John. * Mary kissed. * Mary. * Kissed. * Kissed John. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 22 Final project • Improve a Wikipedia article about any of the topics mentioned in class or any other topic broadly related to neurolinguistics. • Write a short essay explaining what you did and why you did it. • Print the article before you improve it, highlighting any subtractions. • Print the article after you improve it, highlighting your additions. 11/09/15 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University NEXT TIME More syntax 23