Notes of An Introduction to Language (III)

2023-07-20 02:09 作者:Weida_Feng 0人讀過 | 我要投稿

Chapter III – Syntax: Infinite Use of Finite Means (句法：有限含義的無限使用)

1. What does syntax rules do:

a) The rules of syntax combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences.

b) The rules define the correct word order for a language.

c) The rules specify the grammatical relations of a sentence, such as subject and direct object.

2. The ability to produce, understand, and judge the grammatically of a sentence depends on whether it conforms to the unconscious rules of our mental grammar. This grammar is different from the prescriptive grammar rules that we are taught in school. We develop the mental rules of grammar long before we attend school.

3. Sentence structure: the tree diagram like below embodies the hypothesis that words are organized into subunits (or subtrees) and that speakers mentally represent sentences not as flat strings of words, but as complex structures with an internal organization. The subunits (or subtrees) of the sentence are called constituents (要素).

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4. Ambiguity (歧義):?

a) Lexical Ambiguity (詞匯歧義): a sentence has more than one meaning due to different meanings of words, like “This will make you smart”.

b) Structural Ambiguity (結構歧義): a sentence has more than one meaning due to different tree structures associated with it, like “Sue (saw the man) with the telescope” or “Sue saw (the man with the telescope)”.

5. Syntactic category:

a) A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality is called a syntactic category (句法類別), or more informally, a “part of speech”.

b) Syntactic categories include both phrasal categories (短語類別) such as NP, VP, AP, PP, and AdvP, as well as lexical categories (詞匯類別) such as N, V, A, P, and Adv.

c) There are also functional categories (功能類別): their members have grammatical functions rather than descriptive meanings, like Det (determiner), T (tense), and Comp (complementizers).

6. Phrase Structure Tree (PS tree, 短語結構樹): a tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a phrase structure tree or a constituent structure tree.

PS trees represent three aspects of a speaker’s syntactic knowledge:

a) The linear order of the words in the sentence.

b) The identification of the syntactic categories of words and groups of words.

c) The hierarchical structure of the syntactic categories.

In PS trees, every higher node is said to dominate (支配) all the categories beneath it. A node is said to immediately dominate (直接支配) the categories one level below it. Categories that are immediately dominated by the same node are sisters.

7. Phrase Structure Rules (短語結構規(guī)則): the information shown in a PS tree can also be represented by another formal device: phrase structure rules. PS rules capture the knowledge that speakers have about the possible structures of a language. For example, a PS rule “VP → V NP” means VP can dominate a V followed by a NP. More formal PS rules are at point 15 of this note.

8. Heads, complements, and specifiers:

a) The core of every phrase is a lexical category of its same syntactic type, which is its head (中心詞).

b) In addition to the head, the phrasal categories may contain other categories such as NP, PP, or CP. These sister categories are called complements (補充詞). A complement is a phrasal category that occurs next to a head, and only there, and which elaborates on the meaning of the head.

c) A phrase may have an element preceding the head, and there elements are called specifiers (說明符).

9. Selection (選擇):

a) C-selection (category selection, subcategorization): the information about the complement types selected by particular verbs and other lexical items.

b) S-selection (semantic selection): a verb also includes in its lexical entry a specification that imposes certain semantic requirements its subjects and complements, just as it selects for syntactic categories.

10. X-bar schema: a template or blueprint that specifies how the phrases of a language are organized, or alternatively, how PS rules are formed. Like this:

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11. The category Tense is a natural category to head sentence. Linguists refer to S as TPs with this:

12. Structure Dependent Agreement Rule: the verb agrees in person and number with the subject of the sentence, where subject is defined as the NP immediately dominated by S (TP).

13. Yes-no question are generated in two steps:

a) PS-rules generate a basic structure (deep structures or d-structure).

b) Aux inversion applies to the basic structure to produce the derived structure (surface structures or s-structure).

One example shown below (page 113), note that when there is no modal in the sentence, “have” or “be” can undergo a movement that is not available to other verbs: they can “raise” from the position under V to T, and then undergo a second movement to C to form a question.