Febuary 27, 2023
Ling 1010 Notes: Syntax exams latest update 2024-
2025
● Categories
○ The rules of syntax are not about the distribution of individual words. While
there are different estimates of the exact number, there are hundreds of thousands
of words in English. It would be very difficult for children to learn separate rules
for each one.
○ Instead, the rules abstract away from the identity of individual words and make
reference to classes of expressions that share certain features. The classes that are
relevant to syntactic rules will be at least partially familiar to you. They include
categories such as Noun, Verb, Adjective and Preposition.
○ You might be familiar with definitions of these categories from English classes
that look like this:
■ Nouns refer to people, places, or things (and ideas, maybe).
■ Verbs refer to events or actions.
○ •Linguists don’t find these definitions to be very reliable. Consider the word
‘destruction’. We recognize it as a noun, but does it refer to a person, place or
thing? Or is it more like an action or an event?
○ Instead, linguists identify the categories of words by their distribution. In other
words, two words belong to the same category if they show up in the same places
in a sentence.
○ For example, the following sentence frame can help to identify:
■ NOUN: The ____ frightened me.
■ VERB: The doctor will ____ .
■ ADJECTIVE: The students are very ____ .
○ In addition to the categories you are familiar with there are other categories
linguists recognize for words that perform specific grammatical functions. These
are called functional categories:
■ Auxiliary Verb: Jesse ____ read the textbook.
● might, must, will, can
■ Complementizer: They know ____ it happened.
● that, whether, if
■ Determiner: ___ student read the textbook.
● every, no, some, this, that, a(n), one
● Phase Structure Rules
○ •Above we discussed, the word order of English in terms of Subjects, Objects and
Verbs. But Subject and Object are not categories.
○ •The phrases that occur in subject and objects positions are nouns or phrase built
around nouns.
○
, Febuary 27, 2023
● Proform Substatution
○ •To understand the structure of Noun Phrases we can look at the patterns of
categories in these subjects and objects.
○ •We see that every Noun Phrase contains a N. Determiner may occur at the
beginning of an NP. Prepositions may follow the N. Etc.
○
○ Now we can write a series of rules that will allow us to generate all of these noun
phrases.
○ First we need to give the lexical rules that specify the members of each category.
○ Lexical Rules:
■ Nà man | woman | student |doctor | Gabriel | he …
■ A à tall | smart | famous | young…
■ D à every | no | some | that …
■ P à from | at | in | on …
○ Now we state the rules that give us all possible structures for Noun Phrases.
■ NP à N (Gabriel, she, women…)
■ NP à D N (that boy, a girl, every speaker…)
■ NP à D A N (this tall doctor, no young speaker…)
■ NP à D N P N (a girl from CT, some cat on Maryam…)
■ NP à N P N (boys in school, dogs with spots…)
■ NP à D A N P N (each tall teacher without friends..)
○ We read these rules like the compounding rule. For example:
○ NP à D N
○ “A Noun Phrase may be composed of a determiner followed by a noun.”
○ Linguists typically collapse such sets of rules into a single rule using the
convention of putting parenthesis around each element that is optional.
■ NP à N (Gabriel, she, women…)
■ NP à D N (that boy, a girl, every speaker…)
■ NP à D A N (this tall doctor, no young speaker…)
■ NP à D N P NP (a girl from CT, some cat on Maryam…)
■ NP à N P NP (boys in school, dogs with spots…)
■ NP à D A N P NP (each tall teacher without a friend..)
○ NP à (D) (A) N (P NP)
○ •Now we can put together our observations about subjects, verbs and objects and
about noun phrases to give a simple set of Phrase Structure Rules for English
sentences.
○ •We can say that a sentence is composed of a subject Noun Phrase followed by
another constituent. We will call that constituent a Verb Phrase.
■ S à NP VP
■ VP à V (NP) (P NP)
■ NP à (D) (A) N (P NP)
■ VP Rules
● VP à V dances
Ling 1010 Notes: Syntax exams latest update 2024-
2025
● Categories
○ The rules of syntax are not about the distribution of individual words. While
there are different estimates of the exact number, there are hundreds of thousands
of words in English. It would be very difficult for children to learn separate rules
for each one.
○ Instead, the rules abstract away from the identity of individual words and make
reference to classes of expressions that share certain features. The classes that are
relevant to syntactic rules will be at least partially familiar to you. They include
categories such as Noun, Verb, Adjective and Preposition.
○ You might be familiar with definitions of these categories from English classes
that look like this:
■ Nouns refer to people, places, or things (and ideas, maybe).
■ Verbs refer to events or actions.
○ •Linguists don’t find these definitions to be very reliable. Consider the word
‘destruction’. We recognize it as a noun, but does it refer to a person, place or
thing? Or is it more like an action or an event?
○ Instead, linguists identify the categories of words by their distribution. In other
words, two words belong to the same category if they show up in the same places
in a sentence.
○ For example, the following sentence frame can help to identify:
■ NOUN: The ____ frightened me.
■ VERB: The doctor will ____ .
■ ADJECTIVE: The students are very ____ .
○ In addition to the categories you are familiar with there are other categories
linguists recognize for words that perform specific grammatical functions. These
are called functional categories:
■ Auxiliary Verb: Jesse ____ read the textbook.
● might, must, will, can
■ Complementizer: They know ____ it happened.
● that, whether, if
■ Determiner: ___ student read the textbook.
● every, no, some, this, that, a(n), one
● Phase Structure Rules
○ •Above we discussed, the word order of English in terms of Subjects, Objects and
Verbs. But Subject and Object are not categories.
○ •The phrases that occur in subject and objects positions are nouns or phrase built
around nouns.
○
, Febuary 27, 2023
● Proform Substatution
○ •To understand the structure of Noun Phrases we can look at the patterns of
categories in these subjects and objects.
○ •We see that every Noun Phrase contains a N. Determiner may occur at the
beginning of an NP. Prepositions may follow the N. Etc.
○
○ Now we can write a series of rules that will allow us to generate all of these noun
phrases.
○ First we need to give the lexical rules that specify the members of each category.
○ Lexical Rules:
■ Nà man | woman | student |doctor | Gabriel | he …
■ A à tall | smart | famous | young…
■ D à every | no | some | that …
■ P à from | at | in | on …
○ Now we state the rules that give us all possible structures for Noun Phrases.
■ NP à N (Gabriel, she, women…)
■ NP à D N (that boy, a girl, every speaker…)
■ NP à D A N (this tall doctor, no young speaker…)
■ NP à D N P N (a girl from CT, some cat on Maryam…)
■ NP à N P N (boys in school, dogs with spots…)
■ NP à D A N P N (each tall teacher without friends..)
○ We read these rules like the compounding rule. For example:
○ NP à D N
○ “A Noun Phrase may be composed of a determiner followed by a noun.”
○ Linguists typically collapse such sets of rules into a single rule using the
convention of putting parenthesis around each element that is optional.
■ NP à N (Gabriel, she, women…)
■ NP à D N (that boy, a girl, every speaker…)
■ NP à D A N (this tall doctor, no young speaker…)
■ NP à D N P NP (a girl from CT, some cat on Maryam…)
■ NP à N P NP (boys in school, dogs with spots…)
■ NP à D A N P NP (each tall teacher without a friend..)
○ NP à (D) (A) N (P NP)
○ •Now we can put together our observations about subjects, verbs and objects and
about noun phrases to give a simple set of Phrase Structure Rules for English
sentences.
○ •We can say that a sentence is composed of a subject Noun Phrase followed by
another constituent. We will call that constituent a Verb Phrase.
■ S à NP VP
■ VP à V (NP) (P NP)
■ NP à (D) (A) N (P NP)
■ VP Rules
● VP à V dances
