Descriptive grammar 5
25.11.2008
I. syntax
-native speakers have intuition about syntactic structure of the sentence
-shows how sentences are structured from units (constituents)
-shows whether units belong to the same category or not
*single words belong to categories
*bigger units belong to categories
Syntactic categories:
-each constituent (word or phrase) belong to a syntactic category
-there are word-level categories and phrase-level categories
-the notions of categories are based on empirical evidence
II. word-level categories
-words belong to such categories as Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Determiners, Prepositions etc.
Phonological evidence
-the stress in such words depends on the category to which they belong
-phonological rules have access to the information about the category
Semantic evidence
-the sentences are ambiguous more than one interpretation is possible
-the ambiguity lies in the syntactic interpretation (which words form constituents)
-categories can be defined with the use of semantic properties (meaning)
*But these criteria are unreliable:
A murder – denotes an action but it is a noun
Fast food – ‘fast’ indicates the manner but it is an adjective
Happiness – denotes a state but it is a noun
Morphological evidence
-grammatical endings are used only with certain categories
-verbs have 5 forms
-morphological criterion justifies the distinction between verbs and modal verbs
-only adjectives and adverbs have comparative forms (-er, -est)
-only adverbs carry the ending –ly
-only nouns have plural –s
-prepositions are invariable (no inflections)
Syntactic evidence (distributional)
-categories have their fixed places in the sentences
-words are learned and remembered as belonging to groups
-grammatical rules children learn are category based
I want a car
(a: in this position also the, this etc)
a child can now form sentences with those words
III. phrase-level categories
-word-level categories can be expanded into phrasal categories: nouns can form NPs, verbs can form VPs etc.
Morphological evidence
-one morpheme in English can go with phrases and not just words genitive ‘s goes with NPs and not words
Semantic evidence
“Mary looked very hard” ambiguity relates to the status of the phrase ‘very hard’
“Alice could not sign the contract”
It was not possible for her to sign the contract (not modifies could)
It was not possible for her not to sign the contract (not modifies the verb phrase sign the contract)
-phonology: negative ’not’ can be contracted
-such a contraction is possible only when ‘not’ modifies the modal and not when it modifies the VP
-rule of contraction is sensitive to the structure of the sentence
-two interpretations (meanings) depending on the status of the phrase
Adjectival phrase: 2. Adverbial phrase
Syntactic evidence:
-preposing: only the whole phrase can be proposed
-sentence fragments: only whole phrases can serve as sentence fragments
-coordination: only identical constituents can be conjoined
-pronominalisation: only whole phrases can be replaced with pronouns
-ellipsis: only verb phrases can be elipted