Chapter 6: Syntax

karenpalmer

6 Chapter 6: Syntax

Learning Outcomes

After studying this chapter, you should be able to discuss:

the basic definition of syntax
the parts of speech, including open and closed classes
the definition of a phrase and different types of phrases
X Bar Theory
the definition of a sentence and how to diagram one
the tests for grammaticality
the different types of grammar
the acquisition of syntax

Syntax

The main goal of syntax is the study of sentence structure and the statement of rules and principles that determine how sentences are built. Here is a quick video introduction to syntax:

In general, two levels of syntactic analysis are distinguished:

The formal level analyzes the shape and internal structure of the units in sentences or sentence constituents. This level identifies different word classes, kinds of phrases, and various sentence types.
The functional level deals with the role that a word or other unit fills in relation to other elements in its construction. On this level, we find the different syntactic functions.

Words/Word Classes

Words may be sorted into word classes or parts of speech. Members of the Indo-European group of languages have been analyzed in terms of such categories since classical antiquity. The central principle of this classification is a paradigmatic one: words that can occur in the same syntactic context share the same word class.

There are various views about the taxonomy of word classes:

The traditional view
…defines a relatively large class of different word classes.
The structuralist view
…elaborates this approach and classifies word classes on a higher level, allowing a much more general approach towards syntactic categorization.

As we look at the two approaches, you may notice that the parts of speech look a little different from what you learned in your previous courses. In English, we generally include the following eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. The traditional approach separates articles from adjectives and auxiliary verbs from verbs. Interjections are mentioned, but a new category, numbers, is also mentioned. The important thing to remember is that there are different approaches, but all of them attempt to classify words according to some system of classes.

The Traditional Approach

According to the traditional view, syntactic categories (word classes) can be grouped into two general sets:

CLOSED CLASS ELEMENTS
(limited in number)

prepositions (e.g. in, on)
articles (e.g. a, the)
pronouns (e.g. that, who)
conjunctions (e.g. and, or)
auxiliary verbs (e.g. be, have)

OPEN CLASS ELEMENTS
(theoretically unlimited in number)

nouns (e.g. man, table)
verbs (e.g. go, see)
adjectives (e.g. quick, happy)
adverbs (e.g. quickly, rather)

Two lesser categories, numerals and interjections, as well as a small number of words with unique function (e.g. particles) may be added to these.

Note that some words, e.g. PLAY, occur in more than one word class.

The Structuralist Approach

This view defines word classes in a more general way and thus allows a more general approach towards syntactic categories.

CLOSED CLASS ELEMENTS
(limited in number)

prepositions (e.g. in, on)
determiners (e.g. a, this)
complementizers (e.g. that, who)
conjunctions (e.g. and, or)
inflectional elements (e.g. -ed, -ing)

OPEN CLASS ELEMENTS
(theoretically unlimited in number)

nouns (e.g. man, table)
verbs (e.g. go, see)
adjectives (e.g. quick, happy)
adverbs (e.g. quickly, rather)

Again, a small number of words with unique function, interjections and particles, may be added to these.

Note that some words, e.g. PLAY, occur in more than one word class.

The three syntactic categories of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, are called open-class categories. The categories are considered open because when new words get added to the language, they are almost always in one of these three categories — the categories are open to new members. These categories are sometimes also called lexical categories or content words because these categories are the ones that do most of the lexical semantic work in a sentence: they convey most of the meaning of a sentence.

Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives: Open Class Categories

In Linguistics, we observe how parts of language behave. When we find a set of words that all behave similarly, we can group them into a category, specifically, into a syntactic category. You might have learned about some of these categories as “parts of speech.”

You’ve probably learned, for example, that nouns are words that describe a person, place, or thing. But, when we’re studying morphology and syntax, we categorize words according to their behavior, not according to their meaning. There are two elements to a word’s behavior:

What inflectional morphemes does the word take?
What is the word’s syntactic distribution? In other words, what position does it occupy in a sentence?

Nouns

What behavior can we observe that allows us to categorize words as nouns? Looking at the inflectional morphology, we observe that most nouns in English have a singular and a plural form:

Singular

Plural

tree

trees

book

books

song

songs

idea

ideas

goal

goals

English uses a plural morpheme on a noun to indicate that there is more than one of something. But there is a subcategory of nouns that don’t have plural forms. Mass nouns, like rice, water, money, and oxygen, refer to things that aren’t really countable, so the nouns don’t get pluralized. Nouns that refer to abstract things (such as justice, beauty, happiness) behave like mass nouns, too. If they don’t have plural forms, why do we group them into the larger category of nouns? It’s because their syntactic distribution behaves like that of count nouns. Most English nouns, singular, plural, or mass, can appear in a phrase following the word the:

the tree, the trees

the book, the books

the song, the songs

the idea, the ideas

the goal, the goals

the rice

the money

the beauty (e.g., the beauty of the scenery)

the happiness (e.g., the happiness of the children)

Pronouns

In their syntactic distribution, pronouns (I, me, you, we, us, they, them, he, him, she, her, it) do the job that noun phrases do. A pronoun rarely appears with the, but it can replace an entire noun phrase:

The woman read the book.

She read it.

We’ll group pronouns into the larger category of nouns, remembering that they’re a special case.

Verbs

Verbs behave differently to nouns. Morphologically, verbs have a past tense form and a progressive form. For a few verbs, the past tense form is spelled or pronounced the same as the bare form (infinitive).

bare form	past tense form	progressive form
sing	sang	singing
think	thought	thinking
stay	stayed	staying
bake	baked	baking
remember	remembered	remembering
read [ɹid]	read [ɹɛd]	reading
set	set	setting

Every English verb has five different forms, but only two of the forms have a tense feature. The tensed forms are indicated with a morphosyntactic feature, either [+past] or [-past].

bare/infinitive	(non-tensed)	eat	walk	sing	take
[-past]	(tensed)	eats	walks	sings	takes
[+past]	(tensed)	ate	walked	sang	took
past participle	(non-tensed)	eaten	walked	sung	taken
present participle	(non-tensed)	eating	walking	singing	taking

Let’s consider a simple sentence, Jamie might bake cupcakes. This is a perfectly grammatical English sentence. If we change the verb bake to the verb eat, our sentence is still grammatical, Jamie might eat cupcakes. And that makes sense of what we know about how categories work — we group verbs together into the verb category because they behave the same way.

But what about these sentences?

Jamie might arrive cupcakes.

Jamie might hope cupcakes.

Are these grammatical? My mental grammar doesn’t generate these, and I bet yours doesn’t either. And their ungrammaticality isn’t just a matter of them not making semantic sense, either. Since the verb arrive often has something to do with a location, we could try changing cupcakes to Toronto, but the sentence is still ungrammatical: the grammar of English does not generate the sentence, Jamie might arrive Toronto. But why aren’t these sentences grammatical?

It’s something to do with the verbs themselves. Within the large category of verbs, we can group verbs further into subcategories according to the kinds of complements they take. The subcategory information tells us what kinds of complements each head will accept. So let’s look at a few verb subcategories.

Transitive Verbs

Transitive Verbs have one complement, a noun phrase, so they have this basic structure. The verb baked is transitive when it has a complement like cupcakes. Here are some other transitive structures: drank coffee, likes Linguistics, needs money, speaks Mandarin.

When there is a noun phrase in the complement of a verb, we call it the direct object. And the direct object doesn’t have to be a single word. It could be a fairly complex phrase itself. As long as it’s a noun phrase and it’s the complement of a verb head, we call it the direct object, and the verb is a transitive verb.

Intransitive

Intransitive verbs have no complement at all. These are verbs that describe an action or state that involves just a single participant, like sneezed or arrived or dances or slept.

Ditransitives

There’s a small set of verbs that are called ditransitives. They’re a little special because they have two complements, a direct object and what you’ve likely heard called an indirect object. For them to count as ditransitives, they have a special kind of behavior, called the dative alternation. The best example of a ditransitive verb is the verb give.

Grandma gives cupcakes to Sarah.

Take a look at this sentence and notice that the verb gave has — two complements — the noun cupcakes and the prepositional phrase to Sarah. But this verb give has another possible grammatical structure that means exactly the same thing.

Grandma gives Sarah cupcakes.

In this alternate structure, the verb also has two complements, but now they are both nouns. Sarah, which was the complement to the preposition in the other structure, is now the first complement, and cupcakes has become the second complement.

The fact that our mental grammar generates both these structures for this verb and its complements is called an alternation. There are other alternations in our mental lexicon, but this particular one is called the dative alternation, which comes from the Latin word for give. Most of the verbs that allow the dative alternation are verbs that have a meaning that’s related to giving.

Send is another example:

She sent a letter to her grandmother. // She sent her grandmother a letter.

Or to hand someone something:

She handed a coffee to her friend. // She handed her friend a coffee.

Some verbs take complements that are entire sentences. Each of these verbs, hope, doubt, wonder, ask, etc., has a complement that could stand alone as a sentence:

Ann hopes that the Leafs will win.

Bev doubts that the Leafs can win.

Carla wondered if she should cancel her season’s tickets.

Divya asked whether Eva liked hockey.

Each of these sentences, or clauses, is embedded inside the larger sentence. And each one is introduced by a word from the category of complementizers. The words that, if, and whether are called complementizers because they introduce complement clauses.

While the complement in each of these cases could be a sentence in its own right, in this case, it’s embedded inside a larger sentence — it’s the complement to the verb hopes.

Adjectives

Adjectives appear in a couple of predictable positions. One is between the word the and a noun:

the red car

the clever students

the unusual song

the delicious meal

The other is following any of the forms of the verb be:

That car is red.

The students are clever.

The song is unusual.

The meal was delicious.

Many adjectives can be intensified with the words very or more:

very clever

more unusual

very delicious

And some adjectives (but not all) have comparative and superlative forms:

red – redder – reddest

smart – smarter – smartest

tall – taller – tallest

tasty – tastier – tastiest

Adverbs

The behavior of adverbs is a little more difficult to observe. Unlike adjectives, adverbs don’t have comparative or superlative forms, but, like adjectives, they can be intensified with very or more:

very quickly

very cleverly

more importantly

The above examples illustrate that many adverbs are derived by affixing -ly to an adjective. However, there are also many adverbs that are not derived this way, and there are also some common English words that have the -ly affix that aren’t adverbs, but adjectives, like friendly, lonely, lovely, so the affix is not a reliable clue. The syntactic distribution of adverbs is also a little slippery. Adverbs can precede or follow verbs to provide information about the verb:

The children sang beautifully.

The students complained loudly about the pop quiz.

They had just arrived when the fire alarm rang.

Samira tripped and nearly broke her wrist.

The visitors will arrive tomorrow.

And adverbs can precede adjectives or other adverbs to provide information about the adjective/adverb:

This meal is surprisingly tasty.

An extremely expensive car drove by.

The children finished their homework remarkably quickly.

Because their behavior is more variable than that of words in the other open-class categories, adverbs can be a challenge to identify. They are often confused with adjectives. Asking a few key questions can help you determine if a word is an adjective or an adverb.

Adjective or Adverb?

Ask the following questions about the word in question:

How? When? Where? If the word answers one of these questions, it’s an adverb.
What kind? Which one? How many? If the word answers one of these questions, it’s an adjective.

A Note on Compound Words

In our chapter on Morphology, we discussed the creation of new words. One common way to create a new word is through compounding. A compound word doesn’t really have a base or root that determines the meaning of the word. Instead, both pieces of a compound make a sizeable contribution to the meaning. For example, yoga pants are pants that you wear to do yoga, and emerald green is the particular color of green that emeralds are. So it doesn’t make sense to say that compounds have a root.

On the other hand, there is one part of a compound that has a special role, which we can see if we think about the categories of the words that make up a compound.

dry clean
stir fry
outrun
power wash

Each of the compound words above is made up of a different category of the word on the left plus a verb on the right. But in each case, the compound word is a verb. Even if both parts of a compound contribute to the meaning of the compound, it’s the head of a compound that determines its category. We say that English is a head-final language because in English the second part of the compound determines the category of the compound. Other languages are head-initial, with the head as the first element in a compound.

In many compounds, the head determines the category and also constrains the meaning of the compound. So dog food is a kind of food, not a kind of dog, and yoga pants are a kind of pants, not a variety of yoga. Compounds like this, where the meaning relationship between the head and the whole compound is obvious, are called endocentric. But in some compounds, the meaning relationship is not so transparent. For example, a redhead is a person, not a kind of head; a nest egg is money that you’ve saved, not a kind of egg; a workout is not a particular kind of out; and Facebook is not a book at all! Compounds where the meaning of the head does not predict the meaning of the compound are said to be exocentric.

Closed-Class Categories

Content words convey a lot of the meaning of a sentence. But not many sentences would be complete if they contained only nouns, verbs, or adjectives. There are also several smaller categories of words called closed-class categories because the language does not usually add new words to these categories. These categories don’t have many members, maybe only a few dozen, in contrast with the many thousands of words in the open-class categories. They’re the function words or non-lexical categories that do a lot of grammatical work in a sentence but don’t necessarily have obvious semantic content.

Determiners

The category of determiners doesn’t have many members but its members occur very frequently in English. The two little words the and a are the most recognizable members. Determiners most often appear before a noun, as in:

a student

an orange

the snake

the ideas

Any word that can appear in the same position as the counts as a determiner, like demonstratives:

those students

these oranges

that snake

this idea

Quantifiers and numerals also behave like determiners:

many students

twelve oranges

most snakes

several ideas

And the words that you might have encountered as “possessive adjectives” or “possessive pronouns” behave like determiners as well:

my sister

your idea

their car

Prepositions

The category of prepositions seems to have slightly more obvious semantic content than most other closed classes. Prepositions often represent relationships in space and time. They also have consistent syntactic distribution, usually appearing with a noun phrase immediately following them:

on the table

in the basket

around the block

through the centuries

near campus

after class

Conjunctions

A very small category of words that does an important job are the conjunctions. There are only seven conjunctions, and, or, nor, for, so, but, and yet. The job that conjunctions do is to join two words or phrases that belong to the same category:

oranges and lemons

brushed her teeth and went to bed

strong and fast

soup or salad

singing or dancing

hated her roommate but loved her roommate’s sister

small but mighty

Complementizers (Part II)

You might have learned that words like because and although are a type of conjunction, but they don’t behave like and, or, but. Their behavior is more similar to a category of words we label as complementizers. Complementizers are function words that introduce a clause, which is a sentence embedded inside a larger sentence:

Sam told us that she loved baseball.

She hoped that the Blue Jays would win the World Series.

Leilani wondered whether it would rain that afternoon.

She asked her roommate if she had heard the forecast.

The roommate checked the forecast because she wanted to go for a run.

She decided to go running although a storm was forecast.

Mel washed the dishes while the cupcakes were in the oven.

Auxilaries

Auxiliaries are what you might have called “helping verbs” when you first learned about grammar: they help a lexical verb by providing grammatical information about a verb’s tense or aspect, or other subtle elements of meaning.

Modal Auxiliaries

There are nine modal auxiliaries, which never change their form because they are never inflected: can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, and must.

Kieran can sing really well.

Laura could climb that rock wall.

We shall decide by drawing straws.

You should take a nap.

The guests will arrive soon.

Malik would like to read that book.

You may leave after you’ve finished the test.

The road might be slippery.

Drivers must obey all traffic laws.

Non-Modal Auxiliaries

The verbs have, be, and do sometimes behave like auxiliaries and sometimes like ordinary lexical verbs. Unlike the modal auxiliaries, have, be and do get inflected (had, has, having, am, is, are, was, were, been, being, did, done, doing), so, even when they are auxiliaries, they are non-modal. Their inflection is not a clue to whether they are auxiliaries or not, so we have to look at their behavior in the context of a sentence. If a sentence includes a lexical verb or main verb, then have, be or do in that sentence is likely to be an auxiliary, helping the lexical verb. In the following examples, the auxiliary verbs are underlined and the lexical verbs (also known as main verbs) are bolded:

Arlene is writing a novel.

Beulah has arrived in Saskatoon.

Carmen is planning her vacation.

Doris did not buy any vegetables.

Evlien has been thinking about switching programs.

In addition to their auxiliary functions, have, be and do also have some lexical meaning of their own. If there’s no other verb in the clause, then have, be, or do is probably the main verb of a clause. In these examples the lexical verbs are bolded:

Foster is proud of his sister.

Green vegetables are important for good health.

Harold has an idea for an app.

Ira did his homework before supper.

Javier had a big party.

If have, be or do serves as the lexical verb, then it might also have some auxiliaries helping out:

Foster has been proud of his sister.

Green vegetables might be important for good health.

Harold did have an idea for an app.

Ira could have been doing his homework before supper.

Javier is having a big party.

Notice that not every sentence has an auxiliary, but every sentence does have a lexical verb.

Category Differences in the Brain

Exercise

In the following paragraph, identify all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives:

“The main door of the school is on the side away from the town. The drive leading to it is long, cutting straight across between the tennis courts after it leaves the big wooden gates, then curving round the extreme edge of the gardens until, after a long, straight stretch up the slope, it ends in the courtyard by the front door. It takes about five minutes’ fast walking to get from the gates to the grateful seclusion of the court during which you become thoroughly self-conscious as you notice the eyes watching you from the windows. Once you reach the corner of the house you are safe.”

So far, you’ve learned how to categorize words according to their behavior, which categories are open to new members, and which categories are not. You’ve also learned that compounding is a very productive means of deriving new words in English by combining two words. While most compounds are endocentric and have a head that determines the meaning and category of the word, for exocentric compounds, the meaning of the compound drifts over time, leaving the compound without a head.

Phrases

Phrases are syntactic units that consists of one or more words. They are intermediate constituents between words and clauses/sentences.

Word: dog

Phrase: off the dog (Words are connected together. Phrase could have a subject or a verb, but not both.)

Clause: when she washes off the dog (A clause contains a subject and a verb, but is not a complete sentence.)

Sentence: She washes off the dog. (Contains a subject and a verb and forms a complete sentence.)

The words of a phrase cohere together to form a single syntactic unit, which can be moved around and substituted by another word or phrase:

The boys ran down the hill.
Down the hill, the boys ran. (movement)
They ran there. (substitution)

Phrases are formed out of the main lexical word classes: adjective, adverb, noun, preposition, and verb. The major phrase types thus include:

Adjectival Phrase (AP), e.g. very [premodifier = intensifier] proud [head = adjective] of you [postmodifier = prepositional phrase]
Adverbial Phrase (AdvP), e.g. too [premodifier = intensifier] carefully [head = adverb] for us [postmodifier = prepositional phrase]
Noun Phrase (NP), e.g. the [premodifier = determiner] book [head = noun] on the table [postmodifier = prepositional phrase]
Prepositional Phrase (PP), e.g. just [premodifier = adverb] over [head = preposition] the bridge [postmodifier = noun phrase]
Verb Phrase (VP), e.g. furiously [premodifier = adverb] hammered [head = verb] the door [postmodifier = noun phrase] (VP), e.g. furiously [premodifier = adverb] hammered [head = verb] the door [postmodifier = noun phrase]

Phrases consist of heads and modifiers. The head is the central obligatory element (often a word) which determines the type of the phrase. Note that in the examples above, the head is surrounded by the premodifier and the postmodifier. However, a phrase doesn’t have to have both a pre- and a postmodifier.

X-Bar Theory

Within each sentence, our mental grammar groups words together into phrases and phrases into sentences.

One theory of syntax is called X-bar theory. X-bar theory makes the claim that every single phrase in every single sentence in the mental grammar of every single human language has the same core organization. According to x-bar theory, every phrase has a head. The head is the terminal node of the phrase. Whatever category the head is determines the category of the phrase. So if the head is a Noun, then our phrase is a Noun Phrase, abbreviated NP. If the head is a verb (V) then the phrase is a verb phrase (VP). And likewise, if the head is a preposition (P), then the phrase is a preposition phrase (PP), and Adjective Phrases (AP) have Adjectives as their heads.

So the bottom-most level of this structure is called the head level, and the top level is called the phrase level. What about the middle level of the structure? Syntacticians love to give funny names to parts of the mental grammar, and this middle level of a phrase structure is called the bar level; that’s where the theory gets its name: X-bar theory.

So if every phrase in every sentence in every language has this structure, then it must be the case that every phrase has a head. But you’ll notice two pieces, the specifier and the compliment, or modifier. They’re optional — they might not necessarily be in every phrase. If they’re optional, that means that it should be possible to have a phrase that consists of just a single head — and if we observe some grammaticality judgments, we can think of phrases and even whole sentences that seem to contain a head and nothing else. We could have a noun phrase that consists of a single noun — Coffee? or Spiderman! We could have verb phrase that has nothing in it but a verb, like Stop! or Run! Or an adjective phrase might consist of only a single adjective, like Nice… or Excellent!

But X-bar theory proposes that phrases can have more in them than just a head. A phrase might optionally have another phrase inside it. If there’s a phrase in that position, it’s called the complement. The most common kinds of head-complement relationship we see are a verb taking an object or a preposition taking an object. Let’s look at some examples.

Verb + Direct object: drank the coffee Preposition + Object of the Preposition: on campus

The other common place we see a head-complement relationship is between a determiner and a noun. In phrases like my sister, those shoes, and the weather, the determiner is a head that takes an NP complement.

The Sentence

The model of the mental grammar that we propose is quite simple: Words and features are stored in the mental lexicon, and the operation MERGE combines these words and features into organized, but simple structures, called sentences. In its simplest form, a sentence has a subject, a verb, and it makes complete sense on its own.

In this section, we learn how to observe the behavior of sentences to draw conclusions about how these structures are organized in our minds, and how to use the notation called tree diagrams to illustrate that organization.

Tree Diagrams

We’re about to start looking into how sentences are organized in our mental grammar. Before we do that, we need to be familiar with a particular kind of notation called a tree diagram. We’ll see that, within each sentence, words are grouped into phrases. Phrases can be grouped together to form other phrases and to form sentences. We use tree diagrams to depict this organization. They’re called tree diagrams because they have lots of branches; each of these little lines that join things in the diagram is a branch. Within a tree diagram, we can talk about the relationships between different parts of the tree.

Every place where branches join together is called a node. Each node corresponds to a set of words that act together as a unit called a constituent.

Each branch connects one node to another. The higher node is called the parent and the lower one is the child. A parent can have more than one child, but each child has only one parent. And, as you might expect, if two child nodes have the same parent, then we say that they’re siblings to each other. Most linguistics textbooks call these nodes “mother, daughter, and sister” nodes.

If a node has no children, we call it a terminal node.

Having this vocabulary for tree diagrams will allow us to talk about the syntactic relationships between the parts of sentences in our mental grammar.

Constituents

We’ve started to use tree diagrams to represent how phrases are organized in our mental grammar. And we’re using the tree diagram notation to represent every single phrase as having X-bar structure. This unit shows some of the linguistic evidence that phrases have some reality in the mental grammar.

When we draw a tree diagram, we’re making a claim about how a sentence or phrase is organized in our mind. Every time we draw two or more branches coming together at a node, we’re making the claim that the node corresponds to a unit. In other words, all the daughters of that node behave together as a unit. Some of these nodes are at the phrase level, and some of them are at the bar-level. The more generic term for a group of words that act together to form a unit is a constituent.

So what’s our evidence that constituents exist in our minds? Within a given sentence, how can we tell if a given string of words acts as a unit? Here again is where we rely on observing our grammaticality judgments, using a few simple tools.