Linguistics - Syntax

Refactored from Linguistics Notes Meta

• The syntax sets rules for how words relate to each other in a sentence
• Sentences are made of smaller pieces called constituents, which are made of words
• The combination of morphology and syntax is called morphosyntax
• Ways to do syntax
  • Word order as long as they can be consistent throughout the language, such as
    • subject verb object as in English
    • subject object verb in Hindi
    • verb subject object as in Irish
  • Adding a morpheme. As in Latin and Ancient Greek
  • Or a combination of them, like
    • The employer hired the employee rather than * the employee hired the employer
    • I see them rather than * Me see they
• Grammaticality refers to whether a sentence follows a language’s grammar but not the following:
  • Whether or not the sentence make sense
    • For example, Colourless green ideas sleep furiously is grammatically correct but doesn’t make any sense
    • The ungrammatical sentence for that example would be * Furiously sleep ideas green colourless
  • Getting approval from others
• The substitution test is when we replace a group of words with something else and see if it still means the same thing. If it does, the group of words that we replace can act as a single unit
• There are other sentence structures that change the order or words while retaining its meaning
  • For example, in English there’s the cleft construction ‘It’s object that subject verb
  • The cleft test switches sentence from its normal structure to the cleft construction is used to determine what parts should move together
  • Note that there are different tests for different languages
  • Example:
    • Taylor sees the rabbit works
    • But * It’s rabbit that Taylor sees the doesn’t
    • Neither does * It’s sees that Taylor the rabbit or things like that
    • It’s see the rabbit that Taylor does works
• The predicate is the verb and object grouped together because it turns out that they group together more closely according to the cleft test
• Notation
  • These are the ways to denote the word groupings like syntax and bracket highlighting in code
  • Linguists usually use a tree diagram to do this
  • A sentence breaks down into its constituents, which can be further broken down into constituents or words
  • Draw triangles for branches that are not important
  • There are also other methods as well
• Determiners are words that give detail about the noun
  • Like: a, the, this, every, etc
  • Some theory argues that determiner + noun = determiner phrase
• Recursion is a property found in grammar in most languages.
  • Basically, a phrase can be nested in another phrase of the same kind.
  • Example: f(x + f(2f(y)))

References