INTRODUCTION TO SYNTAX

By Prof. Chaabani
 WHAT IS SYNTAX ?

Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies the structure,

arrangement, and order of words within sentences,
phrases, and clauses to convey meaning.
It focuses on the rules and principles governing the
formation of grammatically correct sentences in a
language.
Syntax examines how words are combined to form larger
units of meaning, such as phrases and sentences, and how
these units relate to each other to create coherent
communication.
 The word « syntax » originates in ‘Greek’ language;
‘syntaxis’ which means ‘setting together’ or ‘arrangement’.

Syntax is the study of sentence structure.

Syntactic analysis deals with the external study of words

as opposed to the internal study which is the main concern of
morphology.
Sentences are not composed directly out of words but of
constituents that may contain more than one word, called
“phrases”.
 Word Order:
Syntax analyzes the sequence in which words appear in a
sentence.
Different languages have different word orders, and each
language imposes specific limitations on its sentences word
order such as :Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), Verb-Subject-
Object (VSO), or Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), OVS, OSV,
VOS...
English and French have Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word-
order:
The man left the market
L’homme a quitté le marché
Arabic and Berber have Verb-Subject –Object (VSO) word
order:
ʔakala lwaladu tuha:hatan
(The boy ate the apple)
 Grammaticality
The order of words in sentences is essentially rule-governed or patterned.
The basic word order is very important to understand the syntactic
organization of sentences.
Once we change the sentence basic word order, the meaning will
change.
Ali kicked Youssef
Youssef kicked Ali
When the proper word order of words is violated, the sentence would
seem strange and meaningless:
*girl is the road the crossing little
*cat on the mat slept
Although these sentences are somehow interpretable, they are
considered as ungrammatical or syntactically deviant and we place
an asterisk ‘*’ in front of the sentence to indicate that it’s
ungrammatical.
 Syntactic well-formed-ness
Syntactic well-formed-ness should be distinguished from meaningfulness.
Noam Chomsky, the founder of Generative Grammar, invented a
famous sentence to illustrate this phenomenon.
Colorless green ideas sleep furioursly.
This sentence respects the sentence word-order of English language,
but does not have meaning as it contains semantic contradictions; ideas
do not have colors and do not sleep, and sleeping is not an act that we
do in a furious manner.
Thus ‘grammatical’ is not the same thing as ‘makes sense’.
The following sentences give more examples about sentences that can
be grammatical but are not interpretable:
*Bananas like dogs.
*Apples eat parents.
*I will see her last year.
*is parents coming to the meeting?
*He go to school.
 Syntactic analysis

There are three types of syntactic analysis :

Traditional Generative
Grammar Grammar
Immediate Phrase Structure
Constituent Grammar
Analysis
PSG
ICA

Transformational
Generative
Grammar
TGG
Immediate Constituent Analysis
(ICA)

(ICA) was introduced by the American

linguist L. Bloomfield in 1933, and is
considered as a substitute for Traditional
Grammar.
This grammatical analysis divides sentences
into successive layers or constituents until it
reaches the final layer where each
constituent contains only one word or a
meaningful part.
 Immediate Constituent Analysis
Immediate constituents:
The sentence is divided into two parts
(Morocco) and (is a wonderful country).

Intermediate constituents:
The sentence is further segmented into (Morocco)
(is) (a wonderful country)

Ultimate constituents:
The sentence is divided into (Morocco)(is)(a)
(wonderful) (country)
which are the smallest units of a linguistic form.
Tree Diagram
 ICA
Immediate • (Morocco) and
constituents • (is a wonderful country)

• (Morocco)
Intermediate • (is)
constituents. • (a wonderful country)
• (Morocco)
• (is)
Ultimate • (a )
constituents • (wonderful)
• (country)
 Bracketing
There are two ways of representing sentences in ICA: Bracketing and
tree branching (tree diagrams):
Bracketing :
[Morocco][is a wonderful country] Immediate
[Morocco] [is] [ a wonderful country] intermediate
[[[Morocco]]] [[[is] ] [[ a] [wonderful] [country]]] Ultimate
Tree diagrams are the preferred technique of representation since
they give a detailed analysis of the form of the sentence, and they
clearly show the hierarchical form of sentence structure.
 Bracketed sentences

 Examples :
 Structural Ambiguity

Sometimes the arrangement of words in sentences may

evoke structural ambiguities i-e. the sentence allows two different
interpretations that can be detected in the deep structure of the
sentence.
Every sentence has two levels of structure:
The surface structure is clear on the surface.
The deep structure consists of all the elements necessary to
interpret the meaning of the sentence.
Deep and Surface Structure

Sentence

Deep
Surface
structure structure
 Ambiguity and the tree diagram

Consider the example below :

The policeman killed the robber with a gun

This sentence has two underlying interpretations which would be

represented differently by tree branching:
 In (1) the policeman killed the robber who was holding a gun.

 In (2) The policeman killed the robber by ( using) a gun.

Ambiguity and tree branching
Phrase Structure Grammar
(PSG)
PSG was founded by the American linguist Noam Chomsky.
In 1957, the linguist published his book Syntactic Structures
where he introduced this grammatical analysis.

PSG is a theory of linguistic structure based on ICA way of

parsing sentences into various components, but differs in the fact of
assigning these components to syntactic categories, such as noun,
verb, adverb and so on.
 Syntactic categories

Two types of syntactic categories are recognized within PSG :

Minor syntactic categories which include words only as nouns (Ns), verbs

(Vs), adjectives (As), and adverbs (Advs).

Major syntactic categories which involve phrases like noun phrases ( NPs),

verb phrases (VPs), prepositional phrases (PPs), adjective phrases (APs),

adverbial phrases (Adv Ps).

 Syntactic Categories
Syntactic
Categories

Major Minor
(Phrases) (Words)

N,V, Pro, Prep, Adv,

(NP),(VP) Art Adj
(S)
Syntactic Categories

The common symbols is summarized in the following list :

S :sentence PN: proper noun Prep: preposition
N: noun Adv: adverb VP: verb phrase
V: verb Adj: adjective NP: noun phrase
Art: article Pro : pronoun PP: prepositional phrase
Aux: auxiliaries
* ungrammatical sentence
consists of
( ) optional constituent
{ } one and only one of these constituents must be selected.
PSG and the principle of dominance.

Phrase Structure Rules operate by drawing a tree diagram for

sentences.
The tree is held together by the principle of dominance.
Each point of intersection in it is called a “node”, and each
node dominates those below it.
S node is the initial symbol or the biggest syntactic unit which
dominates all the items below NP node and VP node.
Similarly, VP dominates everything below it, but immediately
dominates the verb and NP and so on .
Phrase Markers
The difference between ICA
and PSG

ICA and PSG use the same syntactic analysis since PSG is a
development of ICA .

They differ only in the fact that in PSG the constituents are
labeled, and the latter belongs to Generative grammar and not to
structural linguistics.
Transformational Generative Grammar
(TGG)

The Transformational approach is based on the

constituency approach, and is an improvement of PSG; it

consists of generative and productive rules used to describe

sentences.

Both TGG and PSG were founded by N. Chomsky in

1957 in his book Syntactic Structure and referred to later in

Aspects ofthe Theory of Syntax in 1965.
 Transformational rules

Once the basic word order of a language is established, we may need

to change it by turning it into a question, a passive, a negative, or an
imperative form.

In Passivation or passive T, we have two NPs separated by an

auxiliary and a verb.

To form the Passive T, we replace NP1 by NP2, then we follow NP2 by

the verb + the passive of to be + the participle and the preposition
‘by’.

This operation constitutes the syntactic link between active sentence

and passive one
 Passive T
Ali was kicked by Youssef
Transformations Ts consist of two parts:
The structural description (SD) : The input of the rule

the structural change (SC) :The output or resulting structure

Structural description; SD Ali past kick Youssef.

Structural change; SC Youssef past to be + kick + by Ali.
These sentences have the same deep structure as they have the
same meaning.

NP1 V NP2 / NP2 be V-ed by NP1

Passive T and tree
diagramming
 Question T
For Questions, the highest auxiliary in the tree is moved to the front
sentence :

Ali is preparing for the exam

Is Ali preparing for the exam?
 Imperative T
Imperative T involves the deletion of the second person subject
YOU.

You do your homework

Do your homework !
Apart from Passive T, Question T, We have also
imperative T and negative T and other transformations.
Here some examples using these transformations :
Positive • He is preparing for the exam

Question T •Is he preparing for the exam?

Negative T He is not preparing for the exam

Negative Q. T Isn’t he preparing for the exam?

Passive T The exam was prepared by him.

 Generative Grammar and Recursion

Generative grammar allows the generation of an infinite number of

sentences out of a finite set of sentences, and speakers of a language are
able to produce sentences never heard or used before.

This may be achieved by inserting sentences into sentences or phrases into

phrases.
This is the book.
This is the book that the man read.
This is the book that the man read in the library.
John said Cathy thought George helped.
The house in the wood, by the mountain, near the river.
The cat is sleeping on the mat, near the door, beside the window.
Recursive rules are powerful because they are productive.
Exercises
1. Use two tree diagrams to represent the underlying
structures of the following ambiguous sentence:

The design has big squares and circles

2 . Using information from the Phrase Structure Rules
(PSG), use tree diagrams for the following sentences:
The puppy played in the garden
My brother bought an expensive car
3.Give three transformations that the following sentence
may undergo.

The girl sent a letter

4. State the difference between :
a. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

AND

b. late got he morning up this.

Answers

1.
2.
3.Give three transformations that the following sentence
may undergo.
The girl sent a letter
The girl didn’t send a letter.
Did The girl send a letter?
a letter was sent by the girl.
4. State the difference between :
a. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

The sentence is grammatical but meaningless.

AND

b. late got he morning up this.

The sentence is ungrammatical (syntactically deviant)