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Semantic significance of CS

 

Structure related ambiguities:

 

i) [the brother of [the girl [with a red shirt]]] – the girl has a red shirt

[the brother [of the girl] [ with a red shirt ]] – the brother has a trd shirt

ii) John [hit [the man with a club]] – The man who was hit had a club

John [hit [the man] [ with a club]] – John used a club to hit the man

These examples show the relationship between constituent structure and meaning. Usually if some phrase (consisting of one or more words) denotes some property which is attributed to some entity denoted by some other word, the phrase is the modifier and the word is the head in the same phrase.

7. PS rules

 

The grammar is a theory of linguistic competence of a speaker of a language. An adequate grammar should specify what is and what is not a grammatical sentence (thus accounting for the intuitions that speakers have)) and assign to each grammatical sentence a correct structure.

 

One can imagine different ways in which this requirement could be fulfilled.

For example a grammar could consist of a set of all and only well formed sentences with their structures (Phrase markers ) - a kind of sentence lexicon

 

This would not only be very uneconomical but outright impossible.

The reason for this is that the grammar has to be finite (the competence is finite as our minds/brains in which it is represented are finite) but the number of grammatical sentences in any natural language is infinite

It is infinite because some sentences can be indefinitely expanded, e.g. by inserting one clause within another with no grammatical limit on the number of such insertions, as in:

 

I know[ that Mary believes[ that John thinks [that I know …………….

S S S

 

 

The grammarians had thus to come up with ways to specify infinite number of PMs with a finite set of grammatical rules..

The most widely applied type of rules used for this purpose are called Phrase Structure (PS) rules – a set of such rules – a Phrase Structure (PS) grammar

Each PS rule specifies what the immediate constituents of some syntactic unit are.

 

Examples:

 

i) X Y + a (X may consists of two immediate constituents - Y followed by a)

 

the rule i) specifies/generates the structure: [ Y + a ] = X

X

Y a

ii) Y → b + c (Y consists of b + c)

the rule ii) generates the structure: [ b + c ] = Y

Y

b c

 

 

i) and ii) together generate: [ [ b + c ] a ] = X

X Y

Y a


b c

 

 

The process of applying several rules to generate a complex syntactic structure is called syntactic derivation

 

 

Notation used to conflate PS rules - ( ) – parentheses = optionality ,

{ }– curly brackets or / (slash) = choice

 

 

The four rules below can be conflated to one

 

X Y + a or X { }

X Y + b

X Y

X c

Consider the syntactic structure:



S

 
 


NP VP

       
   


Det N V PP

               
     
   
 


 

P NP

       
   
 


Det N

       
   


this tall boy talked to that girl

To account for it the grammar of English would have to include the following PS rules

S→ NP + VP

NP → Det + N

VP → V + PP

PP → P + NP

Of course, the full PS grammar for English will have to be much more complex . For example the rules for NP and VP should be more like the ones below to account for the full range of potential modifiers of the head and for the fact that they are all optional.

NP → (Det) (AdjP)* N (PP) (S)

VP → (AdvP) V (NP) (PP) (PP) (S)

 

Note that these two rules make it possible to insert a sentence into another sentence. Such rules can be reapplied indefinite number of times in a single derivation expanding the sentence infinitely as in:

The man who knows the girl who likes the boy who knows the man …......

The syntactic derivation will continue as long as the optional S in the rule for NP is chosen.

A system of PS rules which allows such infinite reaplication of same rules in a single derivation is called a recursive system(has a property ofrecursion)

 

The recursion is a very important property of human linguistic competence. It contributes to the enormous flexibility/creativity of natural languages which can be used to express infinite number of complex meanings.

 

V. SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE ( 2 )


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 907


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