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• MORPHOLOGY - morphemes are the
building blocks that make up words.
• The study of the structure of sentences is
called the SYNTAX of the language.
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To convince you that there is such a thing as
syntax in your brain, I would like to ask you
to make a sentence out of the following sets of
words:
• a) sleeps, a, baby, newborn
• b) in, house, live, green, the, a people
• c) the, kicked, boy, ball, a
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• Can you tell me which sentence has a good
structure?
(1) House student painted a the.
(2) A student painted the house.
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• How do you know how to form grammatical
sentences of a language?
• We have an unconscious knowledge of the
grammatical architecture in each sentence.
• This architecture is a result of some computation
that is going on in our brain.
• Recall that monkeys can produce sentences
consisting of maximally two words and there is no
notion of word order in their communication:
banana give and give banana is perfectly fine for
a monkey.
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• Only human beings have this amazing
language faculty in their brains which
allows them to compute sentences. It is
exactly this computational device which
helps you determine which sentences of
English or Polish are grammatical and
which are not.
• What is it exactly that enables you to do this
ordering?
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• The Human brain is a real-world computing
device.
• Scientists working in artificial intelligence are
trying to program computers to solve the problems
that the human brain can solve.
• - Vision
• - Motorics
• - Natural Language Processing
• It is possible thanks to the findings of linguists
who claim that in our brain we have an inborn
language faculty which is like a small computer
program generating and processing language.
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• Grammar: the entire system of rules and principles
that account for our linguisitic behavior.
• Linguistics is concerned with the structure of
language in our mind, the structure shared by all
language speakers all over the world (the
Universal Grammar UG)
• One of the components of the UG is the syntactic
component: the rules which tell how the words are
to be organized into sentences and what the
structures of these sentences are.
• Syntax: the study of how words are combined to
form sentences.
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QUESTION:
What are the basic elements of sentences?
What is the system of rules and
categories which underlie sentence
formation?
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• We will rely on the intuition that:
1) Certain words in a sentence are grouped
together into phrases.
2) Phrases form a hierarchical structure
which results from the application of certain
computational rules.
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• Are you able to change the order of each
sentence? How? Do you change the order of
words or the order of some larger units?
• a) Has been eating the chocolate cake the
old man.
• b) The old man the chocolate cake has
been eating.
• c) Has been eating the old man the
chocolate cake.
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This indicates that words are grouped to
form some units which are not necessarily
sentences. We call these groupings
PHRASES.
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• There are three tests which can be used to identify
which groups in a sentence are phrases:
• TEST 1: SUBSTITUTION
• It is possible to substitute phrases with pronouns
or auxiliaries:
• The old man ate the chocolate cake: He ate
chocolate cakes.
• The old man ate the chocolate cake: The old man
ate it.
• The old man ate the chocolate cake: Who ate the
chocolate cakes? The old man did.
• The old man ate the chocolate cake: It is
impossible to replace the old man ate with any
shorter linguistic form because it is not a phrase in
this sentence.
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• Test 2: Movement
• It is possible to move the whole phases not
their parts:
• The chocolate cake was eaten by the old
man.
• *The chocolate was eaten by the old man
cake.
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• Test 3: Phrases do not just form grammatical units but
also form units of meaning.
• The following phrases have a coherent indentifiable
meaning:
• a)
the old man, the chocolate cake
• b)
the large evil alligator
• c)
in a bad mood
• d)
quite large
• e)
is reading a book
• Consider the following groups:
• a)
the the old
• b)
cake which the
• c)
the big
• d)
in the
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• e)
cake ate
CONCLUSION: Words are grouped together to form
phrases and phrases form sentences.
What is the structure of phrases?
• Words belong to some categories.
• These are the word-level categories which are the
most central to the study of syntax:
• Lexical categories:
• Nouns (N), Verbs (V), Adjective (A), Preposition
(P), Adevrb (Adv)
• Functional categories:
• Determiners (Det) a, the, this, that
• Degree words (Deg) too, so, very, more, quite
• Auxiliary (Aux) will, can, should
• Conjunction (Conj) and, but, or
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Exercises 1 and 2
We have agreed earlier that sentences are not
formed by simply stringing words together
like beads on a necklace.
Sentences have a hierarchical design in which
words are grouped together into
successively larger structural units built
around categories. These units built around
categories are called PHRASES.
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• Nouns allow us to form NOUN PHRASES
(NP)
• Adjectives allow us to form ADJECTIVE
PHRASES (AP)
• Verbs allow us to form VERB PHRASES
(VP)
• Prepositions allow us to form
PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES (PP)
• Categories are the words around which a
given phrase is built.
• Exercise 3
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• Those words around which phrases are built are
called HEADS. HEADS are the only obligatory
elements of each phrase.
• In other words, phrases can consist of just one
word.
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• Although phrases can consist of just one
word, they often contain other elements as
well.
• For instance:
• [NP the books]
• [VP often fly]
• [AP very beautiful]
• [PP almost outside]
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• In addition to a head, each phrase includes a
second word that has a specific semantic and
syntactic role. Such words as determiners, degree
words are called SPECIFIERS.
• Specifiers make the meaning of the head more
specific. The determiner THE indicates that the
speaker has in mind specific books. The degree
words VERY, ALMOST speficy the extent to
which a property or location is manifested. In
English specifiers occur at the left boundary of
phrases, to the left of the head. Heads and their
specifiers together form the phrases depicted
below:
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• We can encrease the complexity of phrases
by adding some linguistic material to their
right. Consider the following examples:
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• The element which occurs to the right of the
head in English is called a COMPLEMENT.
• A relevant question which arises is about
the structure of those more complex
phrases?
• There is evidence that we cannot treat the
string specifier – head – complement as a
trinary structure depicted as follows:
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• First, we have a strong intuition that the
verb and its complement form a stronger
relationship than the specifier and the head.
• Second, this intuition about an integrity of
the head verb and its complement can be
supported by the following observation:
• Does John read books?
• In fact, he often does.
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• Does substitutes read books, which suggests
that the verb and its complement cooperate
with one another separately from the
specifier. For this reason we would like to
make the specifier on the one hand and the
verb+complement combination on the other
hand structuraly independent. Therefore,
there must be an intermediate level between
them.
• The resulting structure would look as
follows:
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• We know now that lexical categories can
form larger units called PHRASES.
• Lexical categories stand in particular
syntactic relationships and they play
different grammatical functions such as
SUBJECTS, DIRECT OBJECTS,
INDIRECT OBJECTS, PREDICATES,
ADVERBIALS.
• Grammatical functions are the roles of
particular phrases in sentence structure.
• Exercises 4 and 5
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• Subjects and objects are obligatory elements of
stenentes:
• John read a book this morning
• John read a book
• *John read
• *Read a book
• This element which is not obligatory in a sentence is
called an adverbial.
• There are subtypes of adverbials:
• Adjuncts - modify a verb or verb phrase e.g. clumsily,
angrily, the day after tomorrow
• Disjuncts – express speaker's or writer's attitude
towards sth for instance amazingly, frankly speaking,
unfortunately, probably
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THANK YOU
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