Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2 121 C

Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2 -121 C, group b Lecture 3 Eleni Miltsakaki AUTH Spring 2006 1

Morphology review • What is the subject matter of morphology? – The study of the structure of words • What is a word? – An arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning • What is a morpheme? – Building blocks of complex words 2

Morphology review • Explain the following distinctions: – Content words and function words • Content concepts, open class • Function grammatical function, closed class – Bound and free morphemes • Free: independent words bound: affixes – Derivational morphology and inflectional morphology • Derivational: root+bound morpheme=new word with new meaning • Inflectional: root+bound morpheme= new word with marking of some grammatical aspect 3

Morphology review • Word formation • How are new words created? Give an example of each of the following categories – – – – Word formation rules (derivations) Coining Compounding Blending Acronyms Clippings Backformation Conversion 4

Morphology review • The hierarchical structure of words – What’s the evidence? – How do we represent the hierarchical structure of words? • Think of an ambiguous word and represent the meanings in tree diagrams 5

Syntax • What is syntax? – The study of sentence structure – Video: linear order 6

Grammaticality • Grammatical sentences are sequences of words that conform to the rules of syntax. • Ungrammatical sentences violate syntactic rules 7

Grammaticality judgment • Language speakers have intuitions about grammaticality – The boy found the ball – The boy found quickly – The boy found in the house – The boy found the ball in the house 8

Grammaticality judgment • The ability to make grammaticality judgments does NOT depend on: – Having heard the sentence before • Enormous crickets in pink socks danced at the prom – Whether a sentence is meaningful or not • Colorless green ideas sleep furiously – The truth of sentences • The earth is flat 9

Grammaticality judgment • Ungrammaticality – You may understand the meaning of a sentence and still judge it to be ungrammatical *The boy quickly in the house the ball found 10

Ambiguity • Syntax can also account for multiple meanings ---AMBIGUITY • Like words, sentences have hierarchical structure 11

Ambiguity • The girl saw the man with the telescope. – (The girl) (saw) (the man with the telescope) – (The girl) (saw) (the man) (with the telescope) • We can “tree” the ambiguity (will do so shortly after we look at sentence structure). 12

Practice • Paraphrase to show the ambiguity – The design has big squares and circles – Terry loves his wife and so do I – No smoking section available – Dick finally decided on the boat – The sheepdog is too hairy to eat 13

Sentence structure • Syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence and how the words are grouped – The child found the puppy How many groupings are possible? 14

Tree diagram 15

Tree terminology • • Syntactic trees are upside down The root of the tree The leaves of the tree The nodes of the tree Mother-daughter relation Siblings: sister-sister relation Dominate relation Immediately dominate relation 16

Constituents • The natural groupings of a sentence are constituents • Our knowledge of the constituent structure can be represented with a tree 17

Syntactic categories • A family of expressions that can substitute for one another retaining grammaticality is called a syntactic category – – A police officer found the puppy in the garden Your neighbor found the puppy in the garden This yellow cat found the puppy in the garden They found the puppy in the garden • What syntactic category is the subject in the above sentences? • Can you think of other syntactic categories? 18

Syntactic categories • • • S: sentence NP: noun phrase VP: verb phrase PP: prepositional phrase AP: adjective phrase N: noun, V: verb, P: preposition, A: adjective, D: determiner, Adj: adjective, Adv: adverb, Aux: auxiliary verb 19

Diagnostics for constituents Diagnostics for phrasal constituents • Substitution/Pronoun substitution – Mary loves apples. – My sister loves everything she sees. – Black cats detest green beans. They detest them. • Questions – What do you love? The cats/Cats with long fluffy tails. – Where did Ali Baba go? To New York/On a long journey. • Relocation (movement) – I fed the cats. The cats, I fed. • It-cleft focus – I fed the cats. It was the cats that I fed. 20

Phrase structure trees • Constituents can be represented graphically as nodes in a tree • A tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a phrase structure tree • They represent (encode) three aspects of speakers’ syntactic knowledge: – The linear order of words – The groupings of words into syntactic categories – The hierarchical structure of syntactic categories 21

Practice • Draw phrase structure trees for the following sentences: – – – The puppy found the child A frightened passenger landed the damaged plane The house on the hill collapsed in the wind The ice melted The children put the toy in the box The old tree swayed in the wind 22

Are any strings represented as constituents that shouldn't be? Are any strings not represented as constituents that should be? Are any of the trees misleading in other respects? 23

Heads and complements • Phrase structure rules show relations between the members of the phrase • A VP, for example, contains a V which is the head of the phrase • The VP may contain other categories but the entire phrase refers to what the head refers – E. g. Put the puppy in the garden refers to the event of ‘putting’ • The other constituents in the phrase are complements 24

Heads and complements • Every phrasal category has a head of its same syntactic type: – VP: V – NP: N – PP: P etc. 25

Practice • Find the head and the complements of the following NPs – The man with the telescope – The destruction of Rome – A person worthy of praise – A boy who pitched a perfect game 26

Complement selection • Whether a verb takes more than one complement depends on the properties of the verb • The verb find is a transitive verb and requires an NP direct object complement • This information, selection, is included in the lexical entry of the word and explains for the grammaticality judgment of the following: – The boy found the ball – *They boy found quickly – *The boy found in the house 27

Complement selection • Sleep is intransitive, it cannot take an NP complement – Michael slept – *Michael slept a fish 28

Complement selection • Think takes (selects) a clausal complement. Tell selects for and NP and an S, feel selects an AP or an S – – – I think that Sam won the race I told Sam that Michael was on the bicycle They felt strong as oxen They feel that they can win *They feel 29

Complement selection • It’s not only verbs that have selectional restrictions • Belief selects a PP or an S • Sympathy selects a PP • Tired selects a PP etc 30

The infinity of language • aka recursion • The number of sentences in a language is infinite • This is because sentences can be lengthened by various means • The heart of this linguistic property is the ability to generate recursive structures 31

The infinity of language • The is the farmer sowing the corn – – – – – that kept the cock that crowned in the morn, that waked the priest all shaven and shorn, that married the man all tattered and torn, that kissed the maiden all forlorn, that milked the cow with the crumpled horn, that tossed the dog, that worried the cat, that killed the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built 32

Infinity of language • The girl with the feather on the ribbon on the brim • Tree 33

Infinity of language • The repetition of categories within categories is common in all languages and explains the infinity of language • Our brain capacity is finite and able to store only a finite number of categories and rules for their combination • These finite means place an infinite set of sentences at our disposal 34